How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 14

cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income. This must be his
attitude. And his attitude is all important. His success in life (much more
important than the amount of estate upon what his executors will have to
pay estate duty) depends on it.

What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the
value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly
increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which
my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a
continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they
want is change--not rest, except in sleep.

I shall now examine the typical man's current method of employing the
sixteen hours that are entirely his, beginning with his uprising. I will
merely indicate things which he does and which I think he ought not to
do, postponing my suggestions for "planting" the times which I shall
have cleared--as a settler clears spaces in a forest.

In justice to him I must say that he wastes very little time before he
leaves the house in the morning at 9.10. In too many houses he gets
up at nine, breakfasts between 9.7 and 9.9 1/2, and then bolts. But
immediately he bangs the front door his mental faculties, which are
tireless, become idle. He walks to the station in a condition of mental
coma. Arrived there, he usually has to wait for the train. On hundreds
of suburban stations every morning you see men calmly strolling up
and down platforms while railway companies unblushingly rob them
of time, which is more than money. Hundreds of thousands of hours
are thus lost every day simply because my typical man thinks so little
of time that it has never occurred to him to take quite easy precautions
against the risk of its loss.

He has a solid coin of time to spend every day--call it a sovereign. He
must get change for it, and in getting change he is content to lose heavily.

Supposing that in selling him a ticket the company said, "We will change
you a sovereign, but we shall charge you three halfpence for doing so,"