First. Get people first to recognize with regard to new brain tracks, the fact that they do not want them.
Second. Get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem to be able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, the things they want. People go to Alexander and ask him for new brain tracks. Something corresponding to this has to be got from people before offering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book.
Third. Pick out the people next to the people the proposed new brain tracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people best calculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosen up ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that something can be put in.
The fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts against ourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let us have them.
VIII
HELPING A NATION UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
The Air Line League is a national organization of millions of American men and women belonging to all classes and all social and industrial groups, who become members of the League for the express purpose of asking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrial relations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by their subconscious and automatic selves.
Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another.
The best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them. The people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way.