SECRET 24

Rebel at Stagnation

I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for?

—THE SIGN OF FOUR

 

 

 

 

 

Restlessness, the desire to constantly tackle new challenges, an inability to give in to laziness . . . these are all qualities found in exceptional individuals, from Michael Jordan and Donald Trump to (you guessed it) Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Winners always seek tougher challenges and hunger for new opportunities.

Take Conan Doyle, for instance. In 1890, at the age of thirty-one and with a wife and new baby daughter to support—and having already found success with his first few Sherlock Holmes stories—he gave up a comfortable career in general medicine and plunged headlong into something he found to be an even bigger challenge: the then-new field of eye surgery and ophthalmology. He moved his family from England to Vienna and, later, Paris to study, then moved back to London and opened up a new practice. All the while he continued to write at a furious rate. While buried deep in his optometry studies, he managed to knock out a thirty-thousand-word short novel, The Doings of Raffles Haw, along with the first draft of a much longer historical novel and numerous short stories.

Like all geniuses, Conan Doyle’s intellectual restlessness never abated. In addition to medicine and detective writing, his other passions included spiritualism and contacting the dead; at one point he even investigated the possible existence of fairies. Shortly after the first Holmes stories were published, he decided to spend the next two years meticulously researching life in fourteenth-century England under the reign of Edward III in preparation for a novel, because he believed the time period had never been adequately covered by a writer. When asked in 1892 why he undertook such a massive task, he replied simply, “I determined to test my own powers to the utmost.”

Small wonder, then, that Sherlock Holmes was also a restless spirit (to say the least). For Holmes, boredom equaled death. You might even go so far as to call him an adrenaline junkie. In The Sign of Four, Holmes tells Watson:

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.... But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”

That last sentence is important. Holmes’s need for intellectual stimulation was so great that when it couldn’t be satisfied through regular means—getting a nine-to-five job, for instance, and living a mainstream life—he had to take matters into his own hands. He created his own reality.

Years later, in “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” Watson and Holmes are eating lunch one afternoon during a lull between cases, when Holmes says:

“My dear Watson, you know how bored I have been since we locked up Colonel Carruthers. My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is common-place; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?”

The lesson is clear: If you want to achieve something remarkable, you must align your mind with “the work for which it was built.” As we’ve seen over and over again, Holmes knew exactly what made him happy and what gave his life purpose; armed with that knowledge, he was able to direct all of his energies in pursuit of those goals.

If you already know what you were born to do, then pursue it with the same energy as Holmes pursued his cases—but be prepared to do double-duty and put in long hours, as Conan Doyle did; chances are you won’t be able to quit your day job right away.

But what if you have no earthly clue about what you should do with your life? Simple: Keep looking until you find something that ignites in you the same fire and passion that Holmes had for detection. Conduct a personal inventory of your skills and talents and then try to match them to a complementary career. Just because you weren’t born with a passion doesn’t mean you can’t find one. But whatever you do, keep moving forward. Remember Holmes’s words: Rebel at stagnation. Don’t allow your inner engine to stall out. When you find yourself starting to obsess over a particular career path or field of study, when you begin daydreaming about the possibilities and turn off the TV to read more about it, then you’ll know that you’ve tapped into your inner Holmes.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Holmes is how closely his words and actions track with the techniques advocated by the leading self-improvement thinkers of the day. The similarities are so striking, in fact, that one can’t help but wonder if Conan Doyle was familiar with their works. Take Orison Swett Marden, for instance. Marden was a popular speaker and author around the turn of the twentieth century who encouraged his audiences to break out of their narrow confines and strive for greatness. In 1894 he wrote a book titled Pushing to the Front. As you read the following quotations from the book, ask yourself if they remind you of a certain British detective:

You have not found your place until all your faculties are roused, and your whole nature consents and approves of the work you are doing; not until you are so enthusiastic in it that you take it to bed with you.

 

As love is the only excuse for marriage, and the only thing which will carry one safely through the troubles and vexations of married life, so love for an occupation is the only thing which will carry one safely and surely through the troubles which overwhelm ninety-five out of every one hundred who choose the life of a merchant, and very many in every other career.

Follow your bent. You cannot long fight successfully against your aspirations. Parents, friends, or misfortune may stifle and suppress the longings of the heart, by compelling you to perform unwelcome tasks; but, like a volcano, the inner fire will burst the crusts which confine it and pour forth its pent-up genius in eloquence, in song, in art, or in some favorite industry.

Fired up yet? One final caveat: Success won’t necessarily come easily or quickly. Conan Doyle toiled for many years as both a doctor and a writer—“medicine in the day, sometimes a little writing at night,” he recalled—before he was able to quit medicine and devote all of his time to his stories and novels. He wrote dozens of stories before creating the character of Holmes, and many of them were sold to magazines for just a few dollars . . . but he persisted.