capable of intense, rapid, sustained thought. The great trouble with many of us is we were not taught as children to concentrate the mind. Too great emphasis in school and college has been placed upon remembering things, absorbing knowledge, instead of focusing the faculties in originating, in inventing things which call out resourcefulness and ingenuity. This is what develops the mental faculties. It is not enough to educate each faculty separately; we must know how to combine their forces, to focus them with power upon one thing, continuously. If the young people of today were only taught the art of focusing their minds, of concentrating their ability with intensity, continuity, and power, society would soon be revolutionized.

Without this power to focus vigorously, and with tenacity, a man will never win out, because this is the only mental force that can achieve.

Some men can accomplish more in an hour of intense mental concentration than others of phlegmatic temperament, whose mental processes are slow and deliberate, can achieve in a whole day's effort. There are some men in New York who do not spend over two or three hours a day in their offices, yet who put through more business, who accomplish more than many other men who work overtime, because they know the secret of intense, sustained concentration.

If you look about

you in any

walk of life, you

will find that a man with a powerful, executive brain, a man who works with intensity, who drives. at the very heart of things, can accomplish more by a few decisive acts than others who potter around all day long, just as some artists will make a better portrait with a few bold strokes than others who would spend weeks working in minute, fussy detail.

One reason why so many people accomplish so little, is because they do not concentrate and fling their very lives into their work; they are only half there. Part of them is somewhere else, dreaming, castle-building; their minds are miles away from the thing at hand, like a person playing the piano mechanically, and thinking of something else.

How many of us scatter our fire, scatter our forces! Those people actually fail through scatteration, lack of vigorous concentration upon one thing, than almost any other cause. It is concentration that always counts and nothing else avails without it. It is the mental planning, the persistent mental imaging of the thing we are trying to do, the visualizing of it, that finally materializes it, brings it into being.

It is a great thing mentally to live our achievement beforehand, mentally to picture conditions we would like to realize. Think of your desired achievement as a reality, for in concentrating upon it and carrying ourselves with great dignity and forcefulness as though we were actually already

bearing the responsibility we crave, we bring it definitely nearer to realization.

If you wish to be a person of force, form the habit of flinging yourself into everything you undertake with all your might. In doing this you will not waste energy, but, on the contrary, will actually conserve it. If you do one thing at a time and bring all of yourself to the doing, cutting off everything else, all worry, all anxiety, all fear, all thought of the past or of the future, you will soon have the reputation of being a man or woman of force; and that sort of an individual is wanted. everywhere.

"Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." In other words, concentrate. Be all there.

There is power enough in the sunbeams which fall upon a very small surface to melt a diamond, the hardest of all known substances, if only they were focused; but unfocused, they cannot injure the most delicate blossom—they have no power to harm the most combustible and most susceptible material.

So it is with many who are failures, or who attain only very mediocre success. They have worked hard enough to achieve splendid results if only their efforts had been concentrated in a single line. Instead, they have worked a little at this and a little at that; they have been something of a manufacturer, something of a merchant, have

done some trading, have dabbled in real estate, have been director in this and director in that, and so have split themselves up into such small pieces that they have not been really effective in any one thing.

It is lack of concentration that causes so many men of real ability to achieve only a litle picayune success. They are trying to carry along several different kinds of businesses which are constantly scattering their attention and diverting their energy from the main issue. Many a man has been ruined by his "side lines," by trying to "make a little money on the side," because he does not know the tremendous force in concentrating upon a single

aim.

"To be great concentrate."

There is a trinity of factors in every great success self-reliance, persistence, concentration—but the greatest of these is—concentration.

MAKE TO-DAY A RED

LETTER DAY

"To-day is the Day."

"Don't brood over the past or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour."

"This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin."

W

HEN some one asked the great sculptor Ward the name of his best work, his masterpiece, he said, "My next." The only way to make life a masterpiece is to make every day the best; to make each one an advance upon the previous day.

The great masters who made their reputations by their wonderful mosaics and stained glass were extremely careful in the selection of the individual bits of marble or of glass which went into the particular thing they were fashioning. Every one had to be perfect, and no labor was too great to make it so. Suppose they had not taken infinite pains, and merely picked up pieces of material wherever they could find them, with little regard to their fitness, their shape or coloring, without any special effort to make them harmonize with their