© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Human Action Table of Contents
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The right reasons for your goals and actions will always involve something uplifting, expanding and civilizing. And there are ways for you to increase your understanding of what these concepts mean. Through learning. Now before you say “yuk,” let me stress that we're talking about your own brain, your own human heart, not satisfying some syllabus in a school. Most schools, universities, what have you, are organized around static principles. Academic subjects are categorized, processed, run through the ringer. Earn enough points (and pay enough tuition) and you are hereby educated. You can learn and expand at any school, but it's hardly automatic.

Great art and great music can expand your mind. Travel broadens. Contact with other cultures can enrich you.

But the most compact form of human enrichment and the most cost effective is a thing called a “book.” I refer to a real book, a great book, not your average best-seller, but Dickens, Tolstoy, or Flaubert. For the price of an average hard-cover best-seller, you can go to a thrift shop and pick up a whole library of phenomenal literature. Remember, this is not a boring school class run by a bureaucrat. There's a reason people of worth keep reading these books.

Yes, a book written a hundred years ago may require a little work to get started. Your brain might be called upon to stretch a bit. Gratification and plot twists may not be up to Hollywood standards. But the work is worth it. You carry a great book with you for the rest of your life after you make it your own. No one can take its enrichment away from you. By reading and coming to know the great book, you gain admittance to the “great conversation,” that stream of thought that has come down to us through the ages and that you are certainly welcome to join. We'll be going into great detail on artistic and linguistic expression in the chapters entitled “Shock” and “Words” later on in this book, but it's key to remember here that creativity of the highest order is an important component of true liberating human civilization.

Great words and great works do the work of Michelangelo's chisel. They give you more and they make you into more. It doesn't matter what field you are in, what your background is, or what you think your plans are. Words that make you think and dream about one thing will give you the power to think and dream creatively about nearly anything. This is similar to what happens when you lift barbells at the gym: you get better at moving furniture around the house.

But if a great world novel is civilization concentrated between two covers, poetry is even more of a gift. Reading poetry, even memorizing and reciting poetry, will not turn you into a useless aesthete. That's just another prejudicial box created by small minds that are intimidated by larger ones. Poetry is so concentrated that we can even afford the ink to print some right here and now. Surely you can bear with us for a few simple lines of Lord Byron:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

I've chosen literature and poetry here as examples of activities that can broaden you, make you more, put you in better touch with your human insides, but of course there are many other alternatives. Anything constructive that breaks your thinking habits and your doing habits holds promise for expansion. Timeless works of art are simply highly concentrated helpmates, and so they can be particularly effective. But physical exercise, taking a course, even taking a different route to work, all help to break the routine and give you better immunity against harmful and limiting conceptual habits.

Exercise: Poetry in Motion

Find a short poem that means something to you. Study the poem so that every word and line comes to have special significance to you. Try to learn about the poet and his or her life, passions and secrets. Read the poem aloud to yourself on a regular basis, finally committing the poem to memory and making it a part of your inner core. After you've memorized the poem, use the poem to center yourself in moments of difficulty, when you need to focus your mind, or even when you need to get away from it all (the poem being a good deal cheaper than a cruise for this purpose).