this point was reached he called his sight to the aid of his feeling, and
glued his eyes to the lower while he buttoned the upper, unbuttoning many
meantime, to assure himself that he had buttoned them. This young man said
he would sometimes stop on his way to the store in doubt whether he was
on the right street, a doubt not quieted either by reading the sign or by
asking a stranger, because the doubt would obtrude itself whether he could
trust his sight and his hearing, indeed, whether he was really there or
dreaming. Even this victim of extreme doubting folly conducted his business
successfully so long as I knew him, and so comported himself in general as
to attract no further comment than that he was "fussy."

These doubts lead to chronic indecision. How often, in deciding which of
two tasks to take up, we waste the time which would have sufficed for the
accomplishment of one, if not both.

The doubt and the indecision result directly from over-conscientiousness.
It is because of an undue anxiety to do the right thing, even in trivial
matters, that the doubter ponders indefinitely over the proper sequence of
two equally important (or unimportant) tasks. In the majority of instances
it is the right thing for _him_ to pounce upon _either_. If he pounces
upon the wrong one, and completes it without misgiving, he has at least
accomplished something in the way of mental training. The chances are,
moreover, that the harm done by doing the wrong thing first was not to be
compared to the harm of giving way to his doubt, and either drifting into
a state of ineffective revery or fretting himself into a frenzy of anxious
uncertainty.

A gentleman once told me that after mailing a letter he would often linger
about the box until the postman arrived, and ask permission to inspect
his letter, ostensibly to see if he had put on the stamp, but in fact to