No one will argue the fact that having full mental faculties is one hallmark of a successful person. Working on heightening and improving mental faculties greatly improves the chances of success in life, career, or any other endeavor one may pursue. When working on improving the mental faculties, the first obstacle is in defining what, exactly, these mental faculties are and how they work.

As with any complex structure (the mind being about as complex as it gets), it is best tackled by breaking it down into smaller components. Human mental faculty can be categorized into six major components: imagination, intuition, perception, memory, will, and reason. Defining and exploring these six components will lead to understanding how they improve our chances of achieving success.

For the last few centuries, the United States economy has been dependent upon a few different things. One of those is innovation, for without it, no growth would be possible. One of the things that has always pushed the American system forward is a spirit that promoted and demanded innovation at the same time.

People used their creative juices to create things that would benefit society and from there, we have grown to a point where new innovations are almost elementary. The abstract definition of innovation has to do with simply taking what we currently have and improving it to better benefit society. There are quite a few examples of this where gifted individuals have taken steps to empowering an entire industry.

A few years ago, I heard a wonderful story, which I’m very fond of telling. An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did.

For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.”

The girl said, “They will in a minute.”

Mary squirmed in her chair as she continued, “I just don’t know what is wrong with me. Why can’t I just do it? I feel stressed all the time when I’m not writing. ‘I should be writing’, I say to myself, but I don’t. I think, if I just get the laundry done, then I’ll be free to sit down and write the next chapter. But then I don’t. Maybe I need to exercise first, and I go for a run.

I get back home, fully intending to sit down at the computer. But I don’t. And all the while I’m feeling bad and stressed about not writing. What is wrong with me? Maybe I’m just lazy. Or maybe unconsciously I don’t really want to write. Or maybe it just means that I’m not really cut out to be a writer. ‘Writers write’, I tell myself.