"The great thing in all education," he continues, "is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. We must make automatic and habitual as many useful actions as we can, and guard against growing into ways that are likely to be a disadvantage to us. The more the details of our daily life we can shorten owing to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”
He lays down four principles that are vitally important:
"First: In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving-off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
"Second: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is rooted in your life.
"Third: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of habits you aspire to gain."
Shorthand is a habit-forming study. Each step in your work, therefore, should be considered very carefully so that correct habits may be acquired at the start, for it is next to impossible to overcome habits that have once become fixed—transferred to the automatic process. The object to be sought in studying the art of shorthand writing is to build up a set of automatic actions as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Every detail leading to this end must be studied and practiced. There is hardly any other practical art in which the study of economical habits of movement and of efficiency methods yields such large returns as in the technique of shorthand writing. Such mechanical details as the kind of materials you use—pen, pencil, notebook, etc.—become of very great importance.
