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Skill and Success - The Careers of Nellie Bly and F. Matthias Alexander

© Robert Rickover

"Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything" - Nellie Bly

"In the present state of the world, it is evident that the control we have gained of physical energies, heat, light, electricity, etc., without having first secured control of our use of ourselves is a perilous affair. Without the control of our use of ourselves, our use of other things is blind; it may lead to anything.

"If there can be developed a technique which will enable individuals really to secure the right use of themselves, then the factor upon which depends the final use of all other forms of energy will be brought under control. Mr. Alexander has evolved this technique." - Professor John Dewey

Nellie Bly was a remarkable woman. "The best reporter in America," wrote the New York Evening Standard when she died in 1922. She was a pioneer in investigative journalism. She feigned insanity and got herself committed to a lunatic asylum to expose its horrors in print. She circled the globe faster than any live or fictional character. She designed, manufactured and marketed the first successful steel barrel produced in the United States. And the was the first woman to report from the eastern front during World War I.

With no help from anyone, and with only a few months' previous experience working for a newspaper in Pittsburgh, she managed to break into journalism in New York in 1887, at a time when there were very few women reporters and a strong belief among newspaper people that women should only be assigned stories about cooking, society and the like. Within a year of arriving in New York, she became one of the best-known journalists in the city.

How did she accomplish this?

She did it by "applying and directing" her energies skillfully. She knew that she wanted a career in journalism and she proceded in a skillful and systematic way to accomplish this.

She began by tricking an editor into granting her an initial job interview - quite an achievement in itself. She then made a career of creative self-invention, in the best sense of the phrase. She had a strong instinct for a scoop and knew exactly how to handle herself in tricky situations where, at times, her life was in danger. She also had a keen sense of what would sell, and so made a speciality of jailhouse confessions of accused murderers.

At around the same time that Bly was achieving success in the world of journalism, half way around the globe another talented individual was learning how to "rightly apply and direct" energy within himself in order to overcome a serious obstacle he was facing.

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