I have just finished Henry Hazlitt’s The Way to Will-Power, which I categorize as “success literature”. It is an excellent book; indispensible to the man committed to continual improvement. In chapter 15, he mentions the peril to which the ideological radical can succumb:

An ideal…will exhalt a man, and give part of the strength needed for its own realization. But it carries with it a great danger. This is the danger that the ideal, instead of finding its outlet in action, may evaporate into day-dreams and gorgeous intentions whose date for fulfillment is always set at some vague time in the future.

Hazlitt quotes Goethe on the fact that starting an activity right away will heat the mind and will tend to get you to complete it. And then:

What Goethe saw so powerfully, William James saw later, and elaborated the idea in a theory which goes beyond even this. That theory appeared in an essay…In all English and American literature there is nothing of its short length — a mere thirty-five pages — so calculated to inspire a man with a passion for work. [...] By all means, read it. Read it, if you can, before your next meal. If it does not inspire you with passion to go out immediately and do something large and glorious, you are probably not normal.

Wow, what an endorsement! Here’s the essay he’s talking about. From it, consider this:

The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us in the phenomenon of ’second wind.’ Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked ‘enough,’ and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth ‘wind’ may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical

[...]

The excitements that carry us over the usually effective dam are most often the classic emotional ones, love, anger, crowd-contagion, or despair.

And now consider this:

When [Murray Rothbard was] asked what was the source of his prodigious scholarly and popular output, he would reply: “Hatred is my muse.” He would read something, say by a Marxist, Keynesian, or Chicagoite, become infused with disgust, and swear a mighty oath that this particular bit of idiocy would no longer stand, at least without a reaction from him. [from here]