Cus'd Amato made Mike Tyson read this book. Cus was always very into psychology. And when you hear Mike Tyson talk, a lot of it is about motivation, controlling fear etc.
A lot of these great quotes, i found out, come directly from this book.
It's a great read and i never seen it pop up on any ''self help'' books. Which is odd because the mental state of a person is extremely important to one's success.
Some parts are solely for the military which can be skipped, but the psychological parts are really interesting.
This book was written by a whole punch of PhD holders, MD's and scientists from all the top universities in the USA, harvard, princeton etc.

Psychology of the Fighting Man is about the American Soldier. However many lessons from it can be applied to every regular person as well.
This book can be read completely for free online:https://archive.org/details/psycholo...e-fighting-man
But i always save the cliffs and quotes of every book i read so i will provide the good parts below.



Morale

When the primitive needs are no longer -enough, it is the social incentives which help a fighting man to do his utmost. There are many social needs, and here are some of them:
(1) Desire for social approval, admiration, recog­nition, appreciation.
(2) Desire for security, safety, escape from danger and disapproval; fears of all kinds.
(3) Desire for power, mastery, domination, su­periority, self-assertion.
(4) Desire for adventure, new experience, free­dom, escape from futility, humdrum.
(5) Desire for personal response, companionship, friendship, love.
(6) Desire to help and protect others (especially the weak and helpless, such as children).
(7) Desire for successful achievement, complete­ness, effectiveness; the desire to do a "good job."
(8) Desire to destroy interference with other de-
sires; aggression, rage.

Morale is the capacity to stay on the job-especially a long, hard job-with determination and zest. It is the opposite of apathy.
Morale needs good health-physical and mental.
Unless the body is well and vigorous, it is pretty hard to endure hardship and keep up enthusiasm. Fatigue and illness sap mental vigor and moral strength. The body does influence the mind. Yet there is more to morale than that. Men can carry on with strong de­ termination, sometimes even with zest, through in­ jury, disease, and physical privation. What makes them do it?
For that sort of morale a man needs self-confidence and conviction. He needs to feel sure of himself and emotionally secure.

It helps to have grown up in a home where there was no quarreling or jealousy. It helps to have friends, and to be working or fighting in a group. It is essential for the job to seem important, for it to be related to some of the incentives to human action. A thoughtful man may need to see the job in its
larger relations, to fit it into ·a philosophy of life, to make it a means of satisfying his own code of what is good and desirable. He may need to take a long­ range view that extends even beyond his own life­ time and perhaps into another world. All the incen­tives to human action are potential morale builders.
There is a back-and-forth relation between work and morale. Not only does morale make soldiers work and.fight. Working and fighting keep up their morale. Especially in times of emotional stress; as in battle, does a man need to be doing things. As for work alone, men are not naturally lazy. People like to work. Enforced idleness is a cruel punishment.

Zest is the fabric from which morale is made.
Zest. Vigor of spirit. Love of life coupled with a willingness, an eagerness to risk life itself in a good undertaking. A spirit of high adventure that rums a difficult mission into a rare chance to show the stuff of which men are made.

Zest depends first upon physical fitness. It demands a sharp appetite that will make a soldier eat plenti­fully and digest his food. It requires physical exer­cise that brings plenty of oxygen into the lungs and plenty of red blood circulating to brain and back and hands and legs. If a man is to meet the sunrise
' with any sort of spirit for the new day, he must have sleep at night, sound and undisturbed by anxious
dreams within him or by vermin in his bed.

Much has been discovered since the last war about vitamins. 8£ particular concern to the Army is the "morale vitamin" known as B-1 or thiamin.

A man can pull himself out of the lowest depths of fright by a sudden powerful realization that he is adequately equipped with weapons and training.


Fear ally of enemy

As the soldier becomes used to gunfire, to explosions, to the sight and odor
of death, he gradually acquires the power to meet these things more stoically. He does not actually lose his fear, but he learns to ignore it sufficiently to keep his attention mainly on the business of combat. And if, he has in his trained hands a good weapon which he knows will put the enemy out of action, this gives him a feeling of confidence-a sense of power-that in large measure outweighs his fear. He knows it will soon be the other fellow's turn to be scared.

Fear, when it is experienced, is intensely uncom­fortable and seems often to be incapacitating. If the period of fright is prolonged, a man may feel that his nerves are "all shot" by it. For fear is dis­integrating, demoralizing. It shatters morale. The soldier may be rooted to the spot, paralyzed or im­mobilized by fear.

Nevertheless such awful moments before an at­ tack, when each second seems an hour, may actually be useful to any soldier. They may really add to his efficiency.
For fear is the body's preparation for action. The heart pounds faster, pumping blood more rapidly to the arms and legs and brain, where its oxygen
is needed. The lungs do their part by quickened breathing. Blood pressure goes up. Adrenalin, which is nature's own "shot in the arm," is poured liber­ally into the blood stream. Sugar is released into the blood to act as fuel for the human fighting
machine.
Subtle changes in body chemistry, automatically
effected by powerful emotion, serve to protect the soldier in action in ways he would never think of, if he had to plan them himself. His blood clots more
readily. He loses temporarily the sense of fatigue even though he may have been dog tired.

It is sometimes difficult for a tense, frightened sol­dier to get started into combat-to begin the action that will relieve his fear. That part is taken care of by Army training and discipline.


The fact that any action is so drilled in that it is mechanical helps when you are scared. No matter how distracted your mind may be by unfamiliar kind of terrifying sights and smells and sounds, you act, from sheer force of habit. In fact, it is habits which
take care of a man if he is too frightened to think clearly, like the habit of diving for cover when bombs come down.

Then, presently, you are in action. You are fight­ing! You are at last using force against the foe! No more are you a cowering, abject soul. Fear is forgot­ten, provided you are well trained.

It helps to work hard.
It helps to get as much fun as possible. Companionship and varied social activities life keep a soldier from lonely brooding and day-dreaming.
So does the intensive physical activity of campaign and battle. For those who enjoy them, athletic sports-boxing matches or
ball games-are diverting and healthful.

Mental health

The marks of a man with healthy mind or per­sonality are:
(1) He uses his abilities with enthusiasm and satis­ faction, although not always with happiness.
(2) He wants to do something worth while, to pull his load and not be carried by others.
(3) He gets along with other persons, including his superiors and those with -whom he has a differeoce .
(4) When he is disappointed, or meets .with de- privation or strain, he faces the situation with constructive ideas and a fighting spirit, not with fear, rage, hopelessness or suspicion. So then he does not suffer from indigestion, headache or pain, which, though not at all voluntary, may be produced by mental troubles.
(5) He perseveres in the effort to solve a problem or complete a task in spite of difficulty and disappointment.
(6) He likes to give as well as to take.

A man. so often wants to do two opposite things at. the :same time. And he. wants desperately to do both. ·He wants ·to -dominate other men and yet be liked by them: He wants to give vent to his anger, but he doesn't want to get into hot water. He wants to gain promotion, yet he doesn't want to do hard work.

For a few, however, this struggle ends in a stale- mate-a compromise. That is what a war neurosis · is-a compromise in this internal conflict. If a man goes on being torn by his conflicting desires-if he , cannot bring himself to go forward, yet is too con­scientiou, to give up-he will suffer from the type of neurosis characterized by anxiety. He finds he can no longer concentrate. He becomes confused. The expression on his face, his pulse rate, his rapid breathing betray the fierce battle going on within him. He himself may not be fully aware of the cause
of the terrible sense of fear and horror that seems to hang over him. Yet he is, in· a way, solving his problem. He is making himself too inefficient to continue in the fight, yet giving himself so much suffering that his conscience cannot accuse him of
' taking the easy way out. Yet, even so, he does not know that he is doing all this. His nervous system does it for him.


The average soldier has conflicts, but he settles them himself with no one else the wiser. So he finds himself free to fight with his whole strength. On
. him-the average, free soldier-victory depends.

Fortunately, the first contact with the enemy is the hardest. In seasoned troops internal conflict di­minishes. They have faced the worst and know it is not intolerable. Even soldiers who have to etreat are not defeated, if they have learned to conquer their own fears. They will advance another time, having once won the fight with the inner man, and having faced the reality of battle, finding in it less terror and more opportunity for success than the green recruit could ever have believed possible.

How To FIGHT FEAR

(1) Action dispels fear-do something. In ·the time of suspense when men are all ready for action but are waiting the signal to start, fear is at its height. If the period of waiting is to be prolonged -perhaps a delay until the weather changes-the time should be occupied with preparation for action. Fight fear with work-when expecting combat, when waiting on a raft for rescue, when waiting for enemy bombers to return.

(2) Knowledge is power over fear. Surprise is the most important element in battle. Thus men should be kept constantly informed of the dangers they may meet, of the weapons that may be used against them, of the tactics which the enemy uses.
Every moment of leisure should be used by the men to find out what they can about what battle will be like, what the enemy is like. The known is never so fearful as the unknown.

(3) Control of action helps. To be afraid does not mean that a man must act afraid. Fear is con­tagious when it is expressed in action. It is each man’s responsibility to control the signs of his own fear if he can, so as to spare the others. And if he can manage to act as though he were calm, he may actually become more calm. At
any rate the opposite is true: giving in to fear tends to increase it.

Prolonged fear is horribly fatiguing. Long periods of anxiety are dam­ aging in the extreme. But fear within limits increases strength and endurance.
And fear is an ally in other respects. It is of value to the army as well as to the individual soldier, for it serves the same purpose as the red signal light on a railroad-to give warning of danger and to promote caution.

True courage is the ability to act as you believe you should in the face of recognized danger-to act in spite of fear.

Courage and fear are not opposites; they may fill the same breast at the same time. But armed with courage, no soldier need worry about his own fright. The coward, who must run when he is scared, is the one to dread terror.
- None but the brave can afford to fear.

—

How men meet defeat

When a man is faced with a very difficult problem or a series of them, with any sort oof obstacle or frustrtion, when things become too difficult, there re just. Three sort off things that he can do.
1. He can work at it harder, attacking the problem from new angles and with increased vigor.
2. He can get mad and attempt to destroy the obstacle or himself or something else.
3. He can give up in despair and sit in apathy or run away.


A soldier who is determined to defeat the.enemy will do anything that he feels contributes to wiping out the foe, whether it is changing the tires on a
truck or unloading shells from a packing case or policing barracks in his training camp. He will fight at his job. He will do that job well, and will use his own initiative to volunteer for extra duty or to think up ways of doing his job more quickly or more efficiently.


What sort of equipment do the men of an army need? Planes, tanks, guns, and jeeps. Mortars, gren­ades, rifles, and bayonets. Camouflage and mess-kits. Above all food and water. Everything that the Ord­ nance and the Q.M. can supply. But that is not all. No, the men need morale. They need courage. They must have confidence in each other and the be­lief in ultimate victory.

There is also the basic efficiencv of the individual man, his strength and health, his resistance to hardship ·and fatigue, his alertness even when fatigued and despite freezing cold or exhausting heat. Toughness of body
is a weapon indispensable to victory.
The enemy and our own men are born with just about the same equipment in sense organs. But the victory will probably go to those who know how to make use of them best.
The training is still going on in combat until finally the men are seasoned troops, have learned how to· meet the unexpected emergencies of war, have acquired. that competence and confidence that is the basis of their courage.

But Americans can stand a long, hard pull. They look forward, not back. They are slow to accept war, will not go all out· for one until they are at­ tacked or are sure their ideals are ·in grave danger. But once they have started, they do not stop or .spare themselves until the goal of victory seems to them to be secure.

Nor will they stop now. They are not demoralized by temporary adversity or single defeats.
They fight for freedom. Free­dom to think and speak as they please, freedom from want and pov­erty, freedom from fear.

You've got to fight if you are going to have the kind of life you want.

Each individual must know how to get the most out of his talents.

The primitive ·fact of combat is that man pushes when he encounters an obstacle to the achievement of his desire, pushes more if blocked, gets angry if still thwarted, and then fights. But to this fighting he eventually brings all of the knowledge and skill that has made him supreme among the animals. He fights by learning how to use his eyes at night and learning how to arrange a system that will let nim hear inside an airplane. He fights by selecting good leaders and good truck drivers. He fights by understanding human nature in order to build up good morale that will overcome fear. He fights by saying the right thing in the right
way to the right people at the right time, and some­ times that is propaganda. He uses every resource of science and intelligence, including psychology. He has to, for this is total war.

When errors are made, however, it is important that they be corrected as soon as possible.

Every man has interests, likes and dislikes. These determine in part what he will do well and how fast he will improve.
A man's interests, for- instance, usually determine what he will do with what he learns. Mere exposure to training never made a skilled soldier.
It is the interested man who remembers and profits by his training and is ready to apply it to new situations.

Abilities. Aptitudes. Interests.

The right soldier can't be put into the right job unless you know both the soldier and the job, so that you can match them up. ·

It takes more than brains to make a good soldier; it takes guts. It. takes endurance. It takes a willingness to do hard work. It takes a keen interest in doing the job well.
Habit formation is a further stage of learning. It depends on practice, experience, and repetition. No action ever becomes automatic by learning in words how to perform it but without actually practicing it
But by repetition the operation of a machine or a rifle gets itself reduced to habit so that it becomes 1lmost or entirely mechanical.
Like walking. You do not have to think about putting your left foot forward after planting your right foot ahead. That is because you have walked so.much. You could not get that way merely from listening to lectures on
how to walk.
Having a good morale means being headed mentally for success in combat-the eventual success which follows ali the minor successes in training which precede it.

There must be tension, mental and physical. Slumping in a chair or standing at ease encourages the mind to relax too.
·And relaxation often means wool-gathering,- not learning. Standing at attention or sitting in an alert ready position usually puts the mind at attention also.

Success itself is a reward to the soldier. It makes him proud.

The basic rule of all learning is : Do it right from the beginning. Because, if you form wrong habits, you must unlearn them before you can learn what is right.

If it is convenient, a definite time in the day should be assigned for study. The mind can be trained to be ready for work at a certain hour so that this hap­ pens in much the same way you begin thinking about
food at some other set time. For the same reason it might be desirable to have a certain place set aside
for study even if it is just your bunk in a noisy bar­ racks or tent. Then the act of sitting down in that place will immediately from habit put you in the proper frame of mind for mental work. If you are lucky enough to have a desk or corner for your study, don't spoil its value by using it for relaxation or loafing.

Having set the stage as· well as possible for most effective study, the next important preparation is to develop an absorbing interest in the material to be
mastered. It is_ not necessary to resort to self-deliv­ ered mental pep-talks. Enthusiasm grows naturally out of the realization that a study is important in reaching a desirable goal, that it will satisfy your curiosity or tha_t it will give you a chance to exercise
some special talent.

For the man who feels himself completely lacking in other motives and aspirations, it is always possible to make things interesting by laying a private bet with some other student on who will find the correct solution to a group of tough problms in the shortest time. Or sometimes a man is stimulated
merely by making a bet with himself.

The two basic principles of learning anything are interest and participation. It is not true that repeti­tion alone is the basis of learning something. A man who repeats an act again and again with his mind only half on what he is doing, may indeed learn it, but he will learn it neither quickly nor well. Fortunately doing a thing and practicing it usually reinforce a man's interest, so that there is really only one important principle-interest-at the bottom of learning.
Active participation is secured by practice

The best morale is found in the busy soldier-the man who has his mind as well as his hands full of his job all day long.

Sounds interesting. I'll check it out

Discipline

What men do invariably and repeatedly is finally drilled into them-becomes £or them second nature.
(They learn to perform acts or maneuvers in response to command or order because the command or order has always been accompanied by the act and the act by the command.)

Mere lecturing never trains men in action. Learn­ing something new, in other words, requires participation. You don't learn to swim by taking a cor­respondence course.

So attention is the first requisite of command, and practice is the second. The leader must see to it that his men get the right kind of practice. He must never give conflicting orders. He must give only directions that can be executed and then he must see to it that they are executed. Otherwise he loses his own power of command, and discipline is broken down among
his men.

A good leader does not depend solely on the authority that discipline gives him as an officer or noncom, for good leadership goes far beyond disci­pline. A good, experienced leader inspires respect.
confidence, and loyalty in his subordinates, all of which enable him to get from his men performance far above what a new leader could command.

In this the leader can rely on the generous co­ operation of his· men, for men have a natural longing to respect and have affection for their leaders.

What a soldier does in response to a leader's command depends not only on the words spoken by the leader but also upon the way in which they are said, it depends upon everything the soldier sees and hears.
The leader's facial expression, his movements, his posture and the firmness or quaver in his voice all have their effects. And these effects may completely nullify the effect of the spoken command.


leadership

it is not possible for any leader to handle men. It is himself that he handles. Then the men react to his deportment.
Remember that men learn to do by doing. Lectures are only the embroidery on training. It is actual performance that does the work.

LEADERSHIP CAN BE LEARNED
There are no born leaders. All leadership is based on learning how to deal with men.

Consider the qualities which enlisted men believe important in leaders. The first is competence and ability. Competence is based on learning. The good leader has learned his job thoroughly. His men can trust him to know what he is doing. The rule is a simple one: know your stuff.

Second to competence is the officers' interest in the soldier as a man, a demonstrated interest that gives the soldier confidence that, when he stands hardship or is in trouble, the hardship is a necessary part of the job and his troubles give his officer concern. Every man can by practice improve his skill in hu­ man understanding and increase his repertoire of ac­tions that demonstrate interest in others. The rule here is less simple. It is :-know your men and show it. Know their names, their history, their weaknesses, their good points, their morale. Begin by studying their qualification cards.


Decisiveness can with attention be cultivated. When you have a hard choice, remember you do not usually have to make a snap judgment. Careful consideration­ weighing the merits of alternate courses-is not in­ decision. Your men will respect your judgment even more if you reserve decision until you are in posses­ sion of all the facts necessary for a wise choice. Do not set up a "council of war" to pass on things by
vote; you are the leader. But seek advice when you need it, and do not hesitate to call on your subordi­ nates for counsel if they are qualified to give it. But
their qualification cards.

A leader then, to be worthy in the eyes of his men would do well to.follow these commands:
1. Be competent.
2. Be loyal to your men as well as to your country · and Army.
3. Know your men, understand them, love them, be proud of them.
4. Accept responsibility and give clear, decisive orders.
5. Teach your men by putting them through the
necessary action.
6. Give only necessary orders, but- 7. Get things done.
8. Be fair.
9. Work hard.
10. Remember that a leader is a symbol. Men need to respect and trust you-don't let them down.

Panic

Insecurity, whether actual or only in the mind, sets the stage for panic. An enemy threat, real or imag­ined, to the flank of a unit or to its communications and supply, will do this unless men are thoroughly trained to know these things may happen and do not necessarily mean defeat.
Ignorance of the position of the enemy. All these may cause it.

How To STOP A PANIC

Once panic has begun, the only way to halt it is to capture attention and then provide positive, clear commands. Leaders must act with decision, firmness and courage.
What they need-clear confident direction.

But the best way to stop a panic is never to have it at all. Train all men thoroughly so that they have confidence-in themselves, their leaders, their weap­ ons. Train their leaders and select the best of them. Let good leaders build up good morale. Avoid hun­ ger, thirst, fatigue, and boredom as much as it is pos­ sible to do in war, and all the conditions that lead to nervous tension and complaint. .If you cannot avoid them-and no war is a bed of roses-fight them with morale. Fight the feeling of insecurity. Tell the men all they need to know. Let them know all possible information about the enemy-where he is, what he is like, how he attacks, what weapons he is using.
Last, but not least, build up faith. Be sure the men know why they are fighting, why it is a good cause. Let them be sure that their officers are with them all the way. Faith in an ideal, plus faith in your lead­ ers, plus faith in the other fellows in your unit, can win a victory against superior forces.

the important thing is that grown men change their habits of thought and action only with great diffi­culty, although they can if the need is great.

What makes a man fight is the hope of success. The soldier without hope is like a tank without gas.

I forgot the misc doesn't read. Carry on.