This principle of “warming up our reactivity,” as Donald and Eleanor Laird describe it, can be applied to all situations that demand mental awareness. In their book Techniques for Efficient Remembering, the Lairds point to President Theodore Roosevelt as a man who “breezed through life with a bounce, vigor, dash, and enthusiasm which became his trademark. He was absorbingly interested, or effectively pretended he was, in everything he tackled.” Teddy Roosevelt was a living exponent of the philosophy of William James: “Act in earnest and you will become naturally earnest in all you do.”
