Book Rating: 10/10
This is a fascinating and strange book to read. It’s from the church of scientology, which is obviously a load of crap. But a lot of the books and courses from scientology are incredibly insightful.
When reading this book, I tried to focus on practical concepts and not get sucked into weird terms like thetans.
Here are the notes I took for this book:
WORK
• A man who cannot work is a sick and unhappy man. The next step is the crossing over into insanity.
• What kind of a job would you like to have? How well would you like to do it?
• Work is the major role of our existence whether we like it or not. If we don’t like it we don’t like life.
• Work, security, then, is important. But security itself is an understanding. Insecurity is UNKNOWNNESS. When one is Insecure, he simply doesn’t know. He is not sure. Men who KNOW are secure.
• What then is Intelligence? Ability to handle confusion
• So long as one is being confused by confusions, all he can think about are destructive things-whan he wants to do most is to destroy the confusion.
• To make anyone confused, all you have to do is locate their stable data and invalidate them. By criticism or proof it is only necessary to shake these few stable data to get all a person’s confusions back into action.
• Instead of saying “I can always get another job.” A far, far better stable datum would be, “I understand about life and jobs. Therefore I can get, hold and improve them.”
• An understanding of life is necessary to the living of it.
• To be denied the right to work is to be denied any part of the society in which we live. When we look over the background of a criminal we look at “in-ability to work”.
• Why is retirement so popular? When we can see for ourselves that the end of work is the end of life in most cases?
• Man more dearly needs the Right to Work than he does an endless number of pretended freedoms.
• When we work we either do a job created by ourselves or by another.
• Did you know that a mad person could be made well simply by getting him convinced that he has some purpose in life? A good purpose, a bad purpose, it does not matter, so long as a purpose exists
• Men who detest one job or another detest it because they can’t see where it is going or can’t believe they are doing any important thing.
• When we grow timid in the face of circumstances it is because our Purposes, our Stable Data, have been invalidated.
• Having drunk of confusion too deeply, having too few Stable Data, a person can begin to dramatize confusion, to spread it, to consciously try to make everything and everybody confused.
• One either controls something or he does not
• Control consists entirely of starting, changing and stopping.
There are no other factors in positive control. If one can start something, change its position in space or existence in time and stop it, all at will, he can be said to control it whatever it may be.
• When one finally loses the ability to stop something, that thing has to some degree become his master.
• A worker who is easily confused is a worker who cannot control things.
• In a plant or in an office it is then necessary for an executive,.
no matter how good he may be, to be supported by subordinates.
who themselves are not unwilling to be started, changed and’ stopped by him, but who can themselves start, change and stop· the activities or personnel in their own immediate .environments.
in the plant.
• The less capable people are of start-ing, changing and stopping the people or objects under their immediate control, the more supervision they require.
• An insane man has difficulty in even the sanest and most orderly surroundings.
• Insanity is contagious. Confusion is contagious.
• One must have individualities which oppose the purpose or activities of one, and if one lacks these things it is certain that he will invent them.
• It sounds very strange to say that uncontrol must also be under control but this is in essence, true. One must be willing to leave certain parts of the world uncontrolled.
• The basic difficulty with all juvenile delinquency is the one-time apparently humane program of forbidding children to labor in any way.
• One does not become exhausted simply because one has worked too long or too hard. One becomes exhausted when he has worked sufficiently long to restimulate some old injury.
• Key to Success: An ability to confront work with joy and not horror; a wish to do work for its own sake, not because one has to have a paycheck”. One must be able to work without driving oneself or experiencing deep depths of exhaustion. If one experiences these things there is something wrong with him. There is some element in his environment that he should be controlling that he isn’t controlling or his accumulated injuries are such as to make him shy away from all people and masses with whom he should be in intimate contact.
• A man who cannot work is as good as dead and usually prefers death and works to achieve it.