This increase in muscular strength and bodily volume due to pleasure has a very decided effect upon the mind. The increase of muscular strength gives us a feeling of power and assurance, the increase in volume gives us a feeling of expansion and importance. These conditions produced by increase of muscular strength and bodily volume contribute to the general suggestible condition described above.
If I am in a suggestible condition and if I
also feel an unusual degree of assurance in my own powers and importance, I shall have such confidence in the wisdom of my intended acts that there will seem to be no ground for delay. Furthermore the increased action of the heart, due to the effect of pleasure, gives me a feeling of buoyancy and invigoration which adds appreciably to the tendency to action.
We thus see why pleasure renders us more suggestible and hence makes us more apt to purchase proffered merchandise or to respond to the suggestions of our foreman or our executive. We also see why it is that a man may increase his efficiency by pleasing those with whom he has to work, whether they be customers or employees.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LOVE OF THE GAME
AS A MEANS OF INCREASING HUMAN EFFICIENCY
THE motives discussed in previous chapters are fairly adequate for developing efficiency in all except the owner or chief executive. The employee may imitate and compete with his equals and his superiors; he may work for his wage, and he may be loyal to the house. To increase the industry and enthusiasm of the head is a task of supreme importance. Interest and enthusiasm must be kindled at the top that the spark may be passed down to the lower levels. It can never travel in the opposite direction.
How, then, is the president to light his fires and transmit his enthusiasm to his managers and other subordinates? Not by working for
money alone, nor through imitation, competition, or loyalty to the works of his own hands. All these may be essential, may be powerful subordinate incentives to action, but singly or collectively they are not adequate. In any organization, the head who attains the maximum of success must depend for his enthusiasm upon an instinctive love of the game.
The subordinate possessing such love of the game and independent of others for his enthusiasm is sure to rise. The subject is, therefore, of vital importance both to the executive and to the ambitious employee. Every employer feels the need of such an attitude towards work, both in himself and in his men.
An attempt will be made in this chapter to comprehend this instinctive love of the game, to discuss to what extent it is inherited and to what extent subject to cultivation, and to analyze the conditions most favorable for its development in respect to one's own work as well as that of his employees.
The love of the game is in part instinctive,
and its nature is made clear by consideration of certain of the instincts of animals.
The young lion spends much time in pretended stalking of game and in harmless struggles with his mates. He takes great delight in the exercise of his cunning and in his strength of limb and jaw. Fortunately for the young lion this is the sort of activity best adapted to develop his strength of muscle and his cunning in capturing prey. However, it is not for the sake of the training that the young lion performs these particular acts. He does them simply because he loves to. In like manner the young greyhound chasing his mates and the young squirrel gathering and storing nuts have no thought beyond the instinctive pleasure they find in performing these functions. To each there is no other form of activity so satisfactory.
Man possesses more instincts than any of the lower animals. One pronounced instinct in all normal males is the hunting instinct. Grover Cleveland went fishing because he loved the sport, not because of the value of
the fish caught. Theodore Roosevelt did not hunt big game in Africa because he was in need of luscious steaks or tawny hides.