We hear people constantly deploring the fact that they lack concentration, memory, definiteness, and other qualities of excellence, but those same people don’t make the slightest effort to cultivate them.

Few persons are born with really great gifts; most of the truly great have achieved greatness.

Napoleon ascribed his greatest victories to his ability to concentrate his forces on a single point in the enemy. Gladstone was remarkable for this same power. When the great statesman died, Lord Eosebery said: “My lords, there are two features of Mr. Gladstone’s intellect which I can not help noting on this occasion, for they were so signal, so salient, and distinguished him so much from all other minds that I have come in contact with, that it would be wanting to this occasion if they were not noted. The first was his enormous power of concentration!”

“There never was a man, I feel, in this world, who, at any given moment, on any given subject, could so devote every resource and power of his intellect, without the restriction of a single nerve within him, to the immediate purpose of that subject.”

The story is told of an English statesman whose powers of concentration were so great that after a great debate in Parliament, they hurried from the House bareheaded, passed his coach at the door, and walked all the way home in a pouring rain. In the highest form of public speaking men become so absorbed in their subject that they lose for the time being all consideration and thought of everything else.

This power is really indispensable to the highest form of extempore address. The great pulpit orators of the world possessed this faculty in preeminent degree. Whitefield, Mirabeau, Wilberforce, Parker, Spurgeon, Beecher, Phillips Brooks, all were men of tremendous earnestness and concentration. John Bright was so completely absorbed in the subject of a forthcoming speech that they brooded over it day and night, talked it over with his friends, and when no one else was available discussed it with his gardener.

But along with a person’s concentration there must be actual performance. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler says that “Indefinite absorption without production is fatal both to character and to the highest intellectual power. Do something and be able to do it well; express what you know in some helpful and substantial form; produce, and do not everlastingly feel only and revel in feelings–these are counsels which make for a real education and against that sham form of it which is easily recognized as well-informed incapacity.”

The power of concentration is to be developed so as to enable a person to do better work, to produce the best of which they is capable. It does not mean brooding and meditating, with no thought of action and production. It is to encourage work, not restrain it.

It’s a mistake to think that concentration means a straining of the mind. On the contrary, it is power in repose. It’s not a nervous habit of doing your work under pressure, but the ease of self-control. Every person should have one great ideal in life toward which they direct their best powers.

By constantly keeping that aim before you, by bending your energies to it, you can hope eventually to attain to your highest goals. When a successful financier was asked the secret of his great success, he said that as a young man they made a strong mental picture of what some day he would become. Day and night he concentrated his powers upon that one goal.

There was no feverish haste, no nervous overreaching, and no squandering of mental and physical power, but a strong, reposeful, never-wavering determination to make that picture of his youth a living reality.

Such is the power of concentration; such is the secret of success.

Tags: concentration, conscious, development, goal, improvement, mind, power, set, setting, sself, subconscious