You have a vast amount of potential energy over and above what you actually use. You have formed the habit of giving up trying a thing as soon as you have spent the usual amount of effort on it, and this without regard to whether or not you have accomplished anything.
While we all have the power of sustained mental activity, not one in ten thousand of us holds to the top pace.
Worse still, even such mental energy as we do consume is dispersed and scattered over a multitude of trivial interests instead of being focused upon some one possessing aim.
We intend to show you how you can lose yourself in your work with an absorbing passion and how you can at any time make special requisition upon your hidden stores of potential energy and draw new supplies of power that will sweep you on to your goal.
Genius and the Master Man
More than anything else, it is the ability to do this that lifts the great men of the race above the common run of mortals.
It is this that distinguishes genius from mediocrity. The master man transforms his vast stores of reserve or potential energy into circulating or kinetic energy. His work glows with living fire.
Yet, for every such man there are a multitude of others, equally gifted in some respect, but wanting that mysterious "Open Sesame" which would discover their hidden mental riches, arouse them from their accustomed inferiority to their best selves, and transform potentiality into accomplishment. So it comes about that most of us are gems that shine but to illumine the "dark unfathomed caves of ocean," flowers born to "blush unseen."