The Science of Being Great

Wattles opens without warming up. There is, he says, a Principle of Power in every person, and by using it deliberately a person can grow in whatever direction she chooses. Nobody has yet found the limit.

His evidence is a strange kind of arithmetic. No one has ever become so great in any faculty that someone else could not become greater. Whatever the finest mind of an age achieved, it was never the ceiling, only the highest mark so far.

He also pulls apart two things we tend to blur. Talent can be a single faculty grown out of proportion to the rest. Genius is the person connected to a reserve of power larger than herself, which is why the great are always larger than their deeds.

Next comes a claim about purpose. The purpose of a tree's life is growth, and so is the purpose of yours. The difference is in how.

A tree grows automatically, along fixed lines. An oak cannot decide to become a different kind of oak this year. Animals can be trained, but only by someone else. A human being is the one creature who can train and develop herself, and Wattles puts it plainly: man can grow as he will.

He does not treat this as an optional hobby. Growth, he says, is essential to happiness, and a life that stops advancing becomes unendurable. If you have ever felt a restlessness that no amount of comfort could settle, this is his account of it: the growing thing in you refusing to stand still.

What does Wattles say sets human growth apart from the growth of a tree?

• A person grows faster because her mind is stronger
• A person grows only as others train and shape her
• A person can choose the direction she grows in✓Correct answer
• A person grows without effort, just as a tree does

Trees grow automatically along fixed lines; the human difference is conscious, self-directed growth. Being trained by someone else is exactly what Wattles assigns to animals, while a person can train herself.

Here the claim takes a turn that is easy to miss. Wattles says there is no possibility in any person that is not in every person. And yet, left to grow naturally, no two people turn into the same thing.

His picture is a gardener who throws all his bulbs into one basket. To a casual eye they look alike. Growth reveals the difference: one becomes a rose that brightens a dark corner, one a lily, one a climbing vine that covers a bare rock, one an oak where birds nest and flocks rest in the shade at noon.

Each person arrives with a predisposition to grow along certain lines, and growth comes easiest there. The rose is not a failed oak. Every one of them, he insists, turns out rare and worth while in its own way.

From the basket of bulbs Wattles draws a blunt conclusion: in any large sense, there are no common people.

He points to what happens when a nation is in danger. The loafer who sits on a cracker box at the corner store, the village drunkard, men nobody expected anything from, become heroes and statesmen when the moment calls it out of them. Nothing new was added to them. Something already there was woken up.

Notice what this does to the way you look at the people around you, and at yourself. The person you have quietly filed as ordinary is, on Wattles' account, carrying a genius that simply has not been called on yet. So are you.

Wattles holds that every possibility found in any one person is also present in every other person.

True✓Correct answer

True, and he means it flatly: no possibility is in any man that is not in every man. What differs is the natural line each person grows along, so the rose and the oak share a basket, not a shape.