How to Be Extraordinary: William James on the Psychology of the Second Wind and How to Release Our Untapped Human Potential
by Maria Popova
“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake… We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in contemplating what it really means to be awake, adding: “Only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life.”Those rare individuals are the ones who lift themselves out of ordinary life’s mediocrity and, through the sheer force of their creative and intellectual wakefulness, rise to the level of the extraordinary. They are the people we come to celebrate as luminaries, those whose ideas endure for centuries. But what is this mysterious force that jolts a human being into such wakeful aliveness from which greatness blossoms?
That’s what legendary philosopher and founding father of modern psychologyWilliam James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) addressed half a century after Thoreau’s famous words, in a superb speech he delivered before the American Philosophical Association at Columbia University in December of 1906. It was published in the January 1907 issue of the journal Philosophical Review under the title “The Energies of Men” and was eventually included in the out-of-print 1967 compendium The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition (public library), which remains the finest record of James’s mind to date.
James begins with the curious psychological phenomenon of the “second wind,” familiar to everyone from athletes to artists to entrepreneurs — a perplexity that had captivated his imagination for years:
Everyone knows what it is to start a piece of work, either intellectual or muscular, feeling stale… And everybody knows what it is to “warm up” to his job. The process of warming up gets particularly striking in the phenomenon known as “second wind.” On usual occasions we make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer (so to call it) of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked “enough,” so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed… In exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own — sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.
James reflects on his longtime quest to find a psychological theory of the second wind and examines what carries us over this initial plateau of fatigue, toward ever-greater heights of productivity and excellence:
It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, but that may be called upon: deeper and deeper strata of combustible or explosible material, discontinuously arranged, but ready for use by anyone who probes so deep, and repairing themselves by rest as well as do the superficial strata. Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.
St. Anthony this week
Monday, June 22
report cards back to teachers
work on the second mural continues all this week. Murals to be put up at the end of the month
mass songs practice in gym 9:20
Paul – meeting 2:00PM at school regarding music program for next year
Hip Hop practice
Tuesday, June 23
Table Tennis after school
Wednesday, June 24
last weeding Wednesday session – need to get enough hose to make it to the Paul Dewar Tree
Grade 6 Leaving Ceremony (AM) – gym
report cards going home
Thursday, June 25
Recycling Day – (black and blue bins open please)
awards ceremony and final slide show
last day of school
Friday 26
PD Day
The depaving of St. Anthony Catholic
Today we starting on a great journey that will change the face of St. Anthony School. A group of dedicated volunteers from Ecology Ottawa, teachers, parents and one student worked up to seven hours to cut into tones of pavement and gravel. We filled an entire dumpster and created a huge pile of gravel too – all of this will be recycled by our contractor whose main job so far has been to cut into the old asphalt so we could pry it up and remove it from the yard.
The project was funded by Green Communities Canada who received funding from RBC . Evergreen Canada did the design work and Ecology Ottawa administered the entire project. What a great group of partners. I am so grateful that there are foundations and corporations that really want to get to work with schools like ours to make a better environment for our kids. This is how we must do things, look for great community partners who will continue to work with our school to fund depaving, the arts, recreation programming – anything that will make the educational experience richer for our students.
We have worked with so many wonderful groups this year – Opera Lyra, Little Horn Theatre, Table Tennis Canada, Evergreen Canada, Young Rembrandts, Learn to Play, Fun 2 Run, MASC, Organic Growers of Ottawa, Big Kid Entertainment, Christie Lake Kids, the YMCA, Social Rec Connect and Somerset West Community Health Center, and all our political representatives- all these groups and individuals have worked hard to provide a richer environment for our students. What a great privilege to work in such a wonderful community!
I want to thank all the groups who are working hard to give our kids something special as part of their educational experience. We really appreciate all you have done and all the time and resources you have poured into our school. You are part of our community and you are all doing wonderful work.
With help from our partners and new ones to come, we will continue our depaving work at St. Anthony and will continue to dig up the rotting asphalt that retains stormwater and winer melt, creates hazards for our kids and actually contributes to Global Warming.
A great day for our school – thank-you to all the volunteers and foundations that made this possible!
You can read more about what we accomplished together as a community here in this Ottawa Citizen article