Entries from July 2009 ↓

Every successful concern is the consequence of a one-person ability. Cooperation, technically, is an iridescent dream things cooperate because the man makes them. He cements them by his will.
But find this Person, and get his confidence, and his weary eyes will look into yours and the cry of his heart shall sound reflection in your ears. “O, for some one to help me bear this burden!”
And then he will tell you of his endless search for Ability, and of his continual disappointments and thwartings in trying to get some one to help himself by helping him.

Ability is the one crying need of the hour. The banks are bulging with money, and everywhere are men looking for work. The harvest is ripe. But the Ability to captain the unemployed and utilize the capital, is lacking sadly lacking. Your man of Ability has a place already. Yes, Ability is a rare article.

But there is something that is much scarcer, something finer far, something rarer than this quality of Ability.

It is the ability to recognize Ability.

The sternest comment that ever can be made against employers as a class, lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing their worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and encouragement.

If you know the lives of men of Ability, you know that they discovered their power, almost without exception, thru chance or accident. Had the accident not occurred that made the opportunity, the man would have remained unknown and practically lost to the world. The experience of Tom Potter, telegraph operator at an obscure little way station, is truth painted large. That fearful night, when most of the wires were down and a passenger train went through the bridge, gave Tom Potter the opportunity of discovering himself. He took charge of the dead, cared for the wounded, settled fifty claims drawing drafts on the company burned the last vestige of the wreck, sunk the waste iron in the river and repaired the bridge before the arrival of the Superintendent on the spot.

“Who gave you the authority to do all this?” demanded the Superintendent.

“Nobody,” replied Tom, “I assumed the authority.”

The next month Tom Potter’s salary was enhanced, and in three years he was making ten times this, simply because he could get other men to do things.

Why wait for an accident to discover Tom Potter? Let us set traps for Tom Potter, and lie in wait for him. Perhaps Tom Potter is just around the corner, across the street, in the next room, or at our elbow. Myriads of embryonic Tom Potters await discovery and development if we but look for them.

I know a man who roamed the woods and fields for thirty years and never found an Indian arrow. One day he began to think “arrow,” and stepping out of his doorway he picked one up. Since then he has collected a bushel of them.

Suppose we cease wailing about incompetence, sleepy indifference and slipshod “help” that watches the clock. These things exist let us dispose of the subject by admitting it, and then emphasize the fact that freckled farmer boys come out of the West and East and often go to the front and do things in a masterly way. There is one name that stands out in history like a beacon light after all these twenty-five hundred years have passed, just because the man had the sublime genius of discovering Ability. That man is Pericles. Pericles made Athens.

And today the very dust of the streets of Athens is being sifted and searched for relics and remnants of the things made by people who were captained by men of Ability who were discovered by Pericles.

There is very little competition in this line of discovering Ability. We sit down and wail because Ability does not come our way. Let us think “Ability,” and possibly we can jostle Pericles there on his pedestal, where he has stood for over a score of centuries the man with a supreme genius for recognizing Ability.

Success is in the blood. There are men whom fate can never keep down they march forward in a jaunty manner, and take by divine right the best of everything that the earth affords. But their success is not attained by means of the Samuel Smiles-Connecticut policy. They do not lie in wait, nor scheme, nor fawn, nor seek to adapt their sails to catch the breeze of popular favor. Still, they are ever alert and alive to any good that may come their way, and when it comes they simply appropriate it, and tarrying not, move steadily on.

Good health! Whenever you go out of doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every hand-clasp.

Do not fear being misunderstood; and never waste a moment thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your own mind what you would like to do, and then without violence of direction you will move straight to the goal.

Fear is the rock on which we split, and hate the shoal on which many a barque is stranded. When we become fearful, the judgment is as unreliable as the compass of a ship whose hold is full of iron ore; when we hate, we have unshipped the rudder; and if ever we stop to meditate on what the gossips say, we have allowed a hawser to foul the screw.

Keep your mind on the great and splendid thing you would like to do; and then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the elements that it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought that you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual you so admire.

Thought is supreme, and to think is often better than to do.

Preserve a right mental attitude the attitude of courage, frankness and good cheer.

Darwin and Spencer have told us that this is the method of Creation. Each animal has evolved the parts it needed and desired. The horse is fleet because he wishes to be; the bird flies because it desires to; the duck has a web foot because it wants to swim. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed.

Many people know this, but they do not know it thoroughly enough so that it shapes their lives. We want friends, so we scheme and chase ‘cross lots after strong people, and lie in wait for good folks or alleged good folks hoping to be able to attach ourselves to them. The only way to secure friends is to be one. And before you are fit for friendship you must be able to do without it. That is to say, you must have sufficient self-reliance to take care of yourself, and then out of the surplus of your energy you can do for others.

The individual who craves friendship, and yet desires a self-centered spirit more, will never lack for friends.

If you would have friends, cultivate solitude instead of society. Drink in the ozone; bathe in the sunshine; and out in the silent night, under the stars, say to yourself again and yet again, “I am a part of all my eyes behold!” And the feeling then will come to you that you are no mere interloper between earth and heaven; but you are a necessary part of the whole. No harm can come to you that does not come to all, and if you shall go down it can only be amid a wreck of worlds.

Like old Job, that which we fear will surely come upon us. By a wrong mental attitude we have set in motion a train of events that ends in disaster. People who die in middle life from disease, almost without exception, are those who have been preparing for death. The acute tragic condition is simply the result of a chronic state of mind a culmination of a series of events.

Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we spend our time. It is what we think and what we do that make us what we are.

By laying hold on the forces of the universe, you are strong with them. And when you realize this, all else is easy, for in your arteries will course red corpuscles, and in your heart the determined resolution is born to do and to be. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis.

No woman is worthy to be a wife who on the day of her marriage is not lost absolutely and entirely in an atmosphere of love and perfect trust; the supreme sacredness of the relation is the only thing which, at the time, should possess her soul.

Women should not “obey” men anymore than men should obey women. There are six requisites in every happy marriage; the first is Faith, and the remaining five are Confidence. Nothing so compliments a man as for a woman to believe in him nothing so pleases a woman as for a man to place confidence in her.

Obey? God help me! Yes, if I loved a woman, my whole heart’s desire would be to obey her slightest wish. And how could I love her unless I had perfect confidence that she would only aspire to what was beautiful, true and right? And to enable her to realize this ideal, her wish would be to me a sacred command; and her attitude of mind toward me I know would be the same. And the only rivalry between us would be as to who could love the most; and the desire to obey would be the one controlling impulse of our lives.

We gain freedom by giving it, and he who bestows faith gets it back with interest. To bargain and stipulate in love is to lose.

Perfect faith implies perfect love; and perfect love casteth out fear. It is always the fear of imposition, and a lurking intent to rule, that causes the woman to haggle over a word it is absence of love, a limitation, an incapacity. The price of a perfect love is an absolute and complete surrender.

To give a man something for nothing tends to make the individual dissatisfied with himself.

Your enemies are the ones you have helped.

And when an individual is dissatisfied with himself he is dissatisfied with the whole world and with you.

A man’s quarrel with the world is only a quarrel with himself. But so strong is this inclination to lay blame elsewhere and take credit to ourselves, that when we are unhappy we say it is the fault of this woman or that man. Especially do women attribute their misery to That Man.

And often the trouble is he has given her too much for nothing.

This truth is a reversible, back-action one, well lubricated by use, working both ways as the case may be.

That form of affection which drives sharp bargains and makes demands, gets a check on the bank in which there is no balance.

There is nothing so costly as something you get for nothing.

FIRST LAW: Discovery of endowment. The limits of magnetic endowment latent in every normal person emerge only through prolonged effort in the culture of magnetism.

SECOND LAW: Difficult environment. Magnetism develops in direct proportion to the difficulty of environment.

THIRD LAW: Magnetic intention. Magnetism evolves solely through multiplication of endowment into environment by the persistent magnetic intention.

FOURTH LAW: Free adjustment. The culture of magnetism imperatively demands that central adjustment of the self to all powers which realizes in absolute psychic freedom.

FIFTH LAW: Concentration. The magnetic multiplication of endowment into environment is only possible to intense, persistent and unified concentration to the methods of Success-Magnetism.

SIXTH LAW: Purpose-ideals. Growth of noblest magnetism depends, in the larger sense, upon general adherence to a single, preeminent, ideal life-purpose, and, in the particular sense, upon specialization of the individual in studied magnetic conduct related to that end.

SEVENTH LAW: Receptivity. The highest magnetism realizes through magnetic laws in proportion as the inner self maintains alert receptivity to the Universal Forces.

EIGHTH LAW: Demand. The silent, persistent demand of the self upon the Universal Magnetism makes it a center toward which the Forces naturally gravitate.

NINTH LAW: Affirmation. Continuous, intense affirmation of actual possessed magnetic power stimulates the success-elements, maintains receptivity, emphasizes demand, harmonizes and intensifies inner etheric vibrations, and induces a positive movement of the universal ether and its forces inward toward the central self.

TENTH LAW: Psychic energy. All personal magnetism involves psychic energy developed and directed by magnetic intention.

ELEVENTH LAW: Self-control. Magnetic energy concentrates through psychic control of its tendencies.

TWELFTH LAW: Magnetic quality. The inner psychic attitude the character of magnetic intention determines the quality and effectiveness of the effort to multiply endowment into environment, and, therefore, the kind and degree of magnetism attained.

THIRTEENTH LAW: Self-valuation. Other things being equal, magnetism unfolds as gratifying, but unostentatious, self- valuation develops.

FOURTEENTH LAW: Use of self. Under conformity to other magnetic laws, the highest magnetism issues only from the constant best use of self at its best to the best advantage.

FIFTEENTH LAW: Magnetic heroism. Self-pity, complaint, and all kindred states, confuse, weaken and waste every variety of magnetic power, while heroic acceptance of conditions for their betterment, and courageous assertion of self as master, conserve and enormously develop the noblest magnetism in proportion to the sway of the magnetic intention.

SIXTEENTH LAW: Action and reaction. Highest magnetism involves not only studied cultivation, but, as well, the magnetic utilization of stimulating reactions induced by intelligent employment.

SEVENTEENTH LAW: Recovery. Whoever, on occasion of any psychic (magnetic) failure or defeat, dedicates the whole of aroused desperation to recovery of ground, infallibly induces a stress in the etheric life around him which ultimately draws to his aid, with the onsweep of worlds, the Universal Forces.

EIGHTEENTH LAW: Reproduction. “Everything is transmitted, everything is transformed, everything is reproduced” (Ochorowicz); in physical and psychic health alone, therefore, are the Universal Forces transmitted through perfect etheric vibrations, transformed through effective etheric conduction, and reproduced in magnetism by adequate and harmonious psychic control of etheric capabilities.

NINETEENTH LAW: Superiority of culture. The crude values of natural magnetism, the automatic functions of unconscious magnetism, demonstrate at their best solely as they climax in full conscious magnetic culture.