Wake Up and Live - Introduction by Dorothea Brande

(Excerpt from The Strangest Secret Library – available on
Amazon.)
Audio Available: http://livesensical.com/go/wual-01/

Wake Up and Live - 1
Introduction
TWO YEARS ago I came across a formula for success which
has revolutionized my life. It was so simple, and so obvious
once I had seen it, that I could hardly believe it was
responsible for the magical results which followed my
putting it into practice.
The first thing to confess is that two years ago I was a
failure. Oh, nobody knew it except me and those who knew
me well enough to see that I was not doing a tenth of what
could be expected of me. I held an interesting position, lived
not too dull a life - yet there was no doubt in my own mind,
at least, that I had failed. What I was doing was a substitute
activity for what I had planned to do; and no matter how
ingenious and neat the theories were which I presented to
myself to account for my lack of success, I knew very well
that there was more work that I should be doing, and better
work, and work more demonstrably my own.
Of course I was always looking for a way out of my impasse.
But when I actually had the good fortune to find it, I hardly
believed in my own luck. At first I did not try to analyze or
explain it. For one thing, the effects of using the formula
were so remarkable that I was almost on the verge of being
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superstitious about the matter; it seemed like magic, and it
doesn't do to inquire too closely into the reasons for a spell
or incantation! More realistic than that, there was - at that
time - still a trace of wariness about my attitude. I had tried
to get out of my difficulties many times before, had often
seemed to be about to do so, and then had found them
closing in around me again as relentlessly as ever. But the
main reason for my taking so little time to analyze or
explain the effects of the formula after I once began to use it
consistently was that I was much too busy and having far
too much fun.
It was enough to revel in the ease with which I did work
hitherto impossible for me, to see barriers I had thought
impenetrable melt away, to feel the inertia and timidity
which had bound me for years dropping off like unlocked
fetters.
For I had been years in my deadlock; I had known what I
wanted to do, had equipped myself for my profession - and
got nowhere. Yet I had chosen my life work, which was
writing, early, and had started out with high hopes. Most of
the work I had finished had met a friendly reception. But
then when I tried to take the next step and go onto a more
Report excerpted from The Strangest Secret Library

mature phase it was as though I had been turned to stone. I
felt as if I could not start.
Of course it goes without saying that I was unhappy. Not
miserably and painfully unhappy, but just nagged at and
depressed by my own ineffectuality. I busied myself at
editing, since I seemed doomed to fail at the more creative
side of literature; and I never ceased harrying myself,
consulting teachers and analysts and psychologists and
physicians for advice as to how to get out of my pit. I read
and inquired and thought and worried; I tried every
suggestion for relief. Nothing worked more than
temporarily. For a while I might engage in feverish activity,
but never for more than a week or two. Then the period of
action would suddenly end, leaving me as far from my goal
as ever, and each time more deeply discouraged.
Then, between one minute and the next, I found the idea
which set me free. This time I was not consciously looking
for it; I was engaged on a piece of research in quite another
field. But I came across a sentence in the book I was
reading. HUMAN PERSONALITY, by F. W. H. Myers,
which was so illuminating that I put the book aside to
consider all the ideas suggested in that one penetrating

hypothesis. When I picked up the book again I was a
different person.
Every aspect, attitude, relation of my life was altered. At
first, as I say, I did not realize that. I only knew, with
increasing certainty from day to day, that at last I had found
a talisman for counteracting failure and inertia and
discouragement and that it worked. That was quite enough
for me! My hands and my days were so full that there was
no time for introspection. I did sometimes drop off to sleep,
after doing in a short while what once would have seemed to
me a gigantic task, thinking, like the old lady of the nursery
rhyme, "This is none of I!" But "I" was reaping the rewards,
beyond doubt: the books I had wanted to write for so long
and had so agonizingly failed to write were flowing, now, as
fast as the words would go on paper, and so far from feeling
drained by the activity, I was continually finding new ideas
which had been hidden, as it were, behind the work that
had "backed up" in my mind and made a barrier.
Here is the total amount of writing I was able to do in the
twenty years before I found my formula - the little writing
which I was painfully, laboriously, protestingly able to do.
For safety's sake I have over-estimated the items in each

classification, so a generous estimate of it comes to this:
Seventeen short stories, twenty book-reviews, half a dozen
newspaper items, one attempt at a novel, abandoned less
than a third of the way through. An average of less than two
completed pieces of work per year! For the two years after
my moment of illumination, this is the record: Three books
(the first two in just two weeks less than the first year, and
both successful in their different fields), twenty-four
articles, four short stories, seventy-two lectures, the
scaffolding of three more books; and innumerable letters of
consultation and professional advice sent to all parts of the
country.
Nor are those by any means the only results of applying my
formula. As soon as I discovered how it worked in the one
matter of releasing my energy for writing, I began to be
curious as to what else it might do for me, and to try acting
upon it in other fields where I had had trouble. The
tentativeness and timidity which had crippled me in almost
every aspect of my life dropped away. Interviews, lectures,
engagements which I had driven myself to giving against
the grain every minute, became pleasurable experiences. On
the other hand, a dozen stupid little exploitations of myself
which I had allowed - almost in a penitential spirit - so long

as I was in my deadlock were ended then and there. I was
on good terms with myself at last, no longer punishing and
exhorting and ruthlessly driving myself, and so no longer
allowing myself to be unnecessarily bored and tired.
Although my formula had worked with such striking
consequences for me, I told very few of my friends about it.
In the almost fatuous egotism which I seem to share with
ninety-nine percent of my fellows, I thought my case was
unique: that no one had ever got into quite such a state of
ineffectiveness before, nor would be able to apply the
formula I used so successfully on their own difficulties.
From time to time, now that I was no longer living in such a
state of siege as made me blind to all outside happenings, I
did see indications here and there that another was wasting
their life in much the same way that I had wasted mine; but
I had had the good fortune to emerge and so, I thought,
would they, in good time. Except for chance I would never
have thought of publicly offering the simple program which
had helped me so; I might, indeed, never have realized that
to a greater or less extent most adults are living inadequate
lives and suffering in consequence.

But some months ago I was asked to lecture to a group of
booksellers, and the subject which was tentatively given me
was "The Difficulties of Becoming a Writer." Now in my
first book I had gone into those difficulties pretty
thoroughly; I had no desire to read a chapter from an
already published book to an audience the members of
which were in a little better way to have read the chapter
than almost any other group would have been. Beginning to
prepare the lecture I could think of nothing further to add
to the subject than to say frankly that the most difficult of
all tasks for a writer was learning to counteract their own
inertia and cowardice. So, fearing at first that my talk would
have somewhat the sound of "testifying to grace" in an old-
fashioned prayer-meeting, I began to consider the subject
and prepare my speech.
The conclusions I came are in this book: that we are
victims to a Will to Fail; that unless we see this in time and
take action against it we die without accomplishing our
intentions; that there is a way of counteracting that Will
which gives results that seem like magic. I gave my lecture.
What was really startling to me was to see how it was
received. Until the notes, the letters, the telephone-calls
began to come in, I had thought the report of how one

person overcame a dilemma might interest many of the
audience mildly and help two or three hearers who found
themselves in somewhat the same plight.
But it seemed that my audience, almost to a man, was in the
state I had described, that they all were looking for help to
get out of it. I gave the lecture twice more; the results were
the same. I was flooded with messages, questions, and
requests for interviews.
Best of all were three reports which came to me within two
weeks.
Three of my hearers had not waited for a fuller exposition,
or taken it for granted that the formula would not work for
them, but had put it into immediate practice. One had
written and sold a story which had haunted her for years,
but which had seemed too extraordinary to be likely to sell.
A man had gone home and quietly ended the exploitation of
himself by a temperamental sister, and had made
arrangements to resume evening work in a line that he had
abandoned at his sister's insistence; to his astonishment, his
sister, once she thoroughly understood that he refused to be
handicapped longer, had seemed to wake from a long
period of peevish hypochondria and was happier than she

had been in years. The third case was too long and too
personal to recount here, but in many ways it was the best
of them all. Well, there were three persons, at least, who
found the formula efficacious; and, like me, each of them
found something rather awe-inspiring about the results.
We all live so far below the possible level for our lives that
when we are set free from the things which hamper us so
that we merely approach the potentialities in ourselves, we
seem to have been entirely transfigured. It is in comparison
with the halting, tentative, hesitant lives we let ourselves
live that the full, normal life that is ours by right seems to
partake of the definitely super-normal. When that is seen, it
is easy to discover that all men and women of effective lives,
whether statesmen, philosophers, artists or men of
business, use, sometimes entirely unconsciously, the same
mental attitude in which to do their work that their less
fortunate fellows must either find for themselves or die
without discovering.
Occasionally, as the reading of biographies and
autobiographies shows, enlightenment comes through
religion, philosophy, or wholehearted admiration for
another; and the individual, although often feeling still

weak in himself, is sustained by his devotion, is often
capable of feats of endurance, effectiveness or genius which
cause us to marvel at him. But those who are not born with
this knowledge of the way to induce the state in which
successful work is done, who do not learn it so early that
they cannot remember a time when they did not know it, or
who for some reason cannot find in religion or philosophy
the strength that they need to counteract their own
ineffectiveness, can still teach themselves by conscious
effort to get the best from their lives. As they do so, many
other things which have puzzled them become clear.
But this book is not the history of the growth of an idea. It is
intended to be a practical handbook for those who would
like to escape from futility and begin to live happily and
well.

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Wake Up and Live - Introduction by Dorothea Brande

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Wake Up and Live - Introduction by Dorothea Brande