There is more practical information available today on how to achieve success in any field than there has ever been at any time. Yet, only 5 percent of the population are financially independent at the end of their working lives. Fully 80 percent of people working today would rather be doing something else, and 84 percent of them, by their own admission, feel that they are working below, even far below, their potential. Only 5 percent feel that they are producing at their full capacity in their jobs.
More people are sick, overweight, unfit and unhealthy than ever before. The United States spends more of its gross national product on health care than any other nation, and the costs are increasing. Today, we know that an enormous amount of illness and disease is caused by negative mental attitudes and unhappiness of various kinds. People actually make themselves sick and poison their relationships with their own thinking.
America is a free society. All choices are open to the individual. People can do anything, be anything, go anywhere, change any part of their lives for the better, whenever they want. Why is it then that so many people persist in their negativity and pessimism when they are free to think anything they want? Why is it that so few people are living up to their potential?
When I was growing up, it never occurred to me that if you wanted to be good at something, you had to study it thoroughly and practice it diligently. I had the idea that things just happen. Health, happiness, peace, prosperity and high achievement just occur in the course of human destiny if you happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Living with this idea, as the great majority do, puts a person under the Law of Accident. This law, which becomes a law to the degree to which it is accepted by default, is the governing principle for most people. In its simplest terms, it says that failing to plan is planning to fail.
If you want to be a doctor, you study and practice medicine. If you want to be a good cook, you study cooking by getting cookbooks and using proven recipes. If you want to live a life full of joy, happiness and self-fulfillment, you study the happiest and most successful people you can find and then do what they do until you get the same results in your own life.
This was an amazing thought to me. It seemed so simple! Surely it couldn’t be as easy as that. And of course, it’s not. Nothing really worthwhile is easy. It’s an erroneous belief that, if a thing is right, it should be easy, like a relationship. If you have to really work at it, some people say, then there’s probably something wrong with it. This kind of thinking is fatal to happiness.
As I began my quest for the holy grail of the good life, I formulated three basic operating principles that helped me immeasurably.
First, life is hard. It always has been and it always will be. It’s never been any different for you or me or anyone else. The good thing is that if you accept this basic truth, life somehow becomes a little easier because you don’t suffer so much from feelings of frustration and injustice.
Second, everything you are or ever will be is up to you. You are where you are today because that is where you have chosen to be. You are always free to choose your actions, or inactions, and your life today is the sum total of your choices, good and bad. If you want your future to be different, you have to make better choices.
Third, and perhaps most important, you can learn anything you need to learn to become anyone you want to become, to achieve anything you want to achieve. There are very few limitations and most of them are on the inside, not on the outside.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then pain seems to be the father of learning. We seem to need the prod of frustration and distress before we open ourselves up to new ideas and ways of doing things. This was certainly true for me in my early twenties.
To move ahead, you have to both learn and unlearn a few things. You are locked in place at your current level of knowledge and skill. You can go no further with what you now know. Your future largely depends on what you learn and practice from this moment onward.
I began to study success, happiness and achievement based on the preceding principles. They became the foundation upon which I built the superstructure of the system I’ll be sharing with you as we go along. Each part of this book complements each other part of this book, very much as a magnificent building goes up, piece by piece, until the structure is complete in all its glory.
Thought by thought, action by action, you will learn how to make your life a masterpiece. You will learn how to create something truly beautiful out of your efforts. You will learn how to take complete control of your destiny. You will learn how to accomplish more than you might have ever dreamed possible. Just don’t expect it to be easy.
When I began to study the psychology and science of human achievement, I used myself and my own situation as the test of what was true or not. You must do the same. Listen to your inner voice. Irrespective of anything else you may have learned, or chosen to believe, simply ask, “Is this true for me?”
As you’ll more fully understand in Chapter Six, superior men and women trust themselves at a deep level. They are very sensitive to whether something feels right. You should be the same. You should find that everything in this book has a good feel to it, but if it doesn’t, put it aside for the time being and come back to it later when it makes more sense.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.” That’s what I did. When I began asking why some people were more successful than others, I plunged in. Even though I had been a poor student, I was a voracious reader, and I wasn’t afraid of hard work. While other people around me were dating and dancing, I was studying, making up for lost time.
One thing I learned was that if all it took to live a wonderful life was books and ideas, then we’d all be rich and happy. There are more and better books, tapes, videos and courses on how to be successful in every area of life today than there ever have been in all of human history. And I’ve never read or seen or listened to one that didn’t have something valuable to offer. But all of them together is not enough.
You have to have a system. Without a system you can use to integrate the ideas you learn, you are like a person trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without a picture. And almost any system is better than no system at all. But you’ve got to learn the system and then discipline yourself to stay at it until you get the results you want.
No one would seriously try to master any complex subject without learning everything possible from those who had gone before and demonstrated mastery in that area. This is true in law, medicine, engineering and business. It is equally true in human relations, happiness, health, wealth and peace of mind. Virtually anything you could ever want to be, have or do is amenable to learning and hard work. But you have to have a system, and you have to work the system.
The main reason for so much underachievement and frustration is simply that people do not know how to get the most out of themselves. They don’t know how to apply themselves for maximum performance and happiness. They don’t know their basic operating principles and as a result, they waste many hours, even years, functioning far below their potential.
For example, imagine that someone gave you an expensive, sophisticated personal computer. It was delivered to your home, and when you took all the parts out of the boxes, you found that there was only one thing missing: the instruction manual. Now imagine that you had no training at all in computers or in computer language. Then imagine that you now had to figure out how the computer worked, how to set it up, how to operate it, how to program it and how to get it to produce something of value. How long do you think it would take you, working without help or guidance, to figure out how to use a personal computer on this basis?
The answer is that, even if you were highly motivated and determined, it would probably take you years to figure out how to operate a computer on your own. And it’s a certainty that long before that, you would have turned your mind to other things and gone back to doing your work in the same old, slow fashion.
Now, let’s imagine instead that you received the same computer, but this time it came complete with an instruction manual that was user-friendly and, in addition, a computer expert came along and showed you, step by step, how to set up the computer, how to operate it, how to program it and how to run it at maximum efficiency.
With the instruction manual and expert training, you could have the computer up and running in an afternoon. From then on, you would get better and better at using it, and the quality and quantity of what you produced would increase rapidly.
The point is this: You come into this world with no instruction manual. You are born with an amazing brain, the complexities and possibilities of which are so vast that we cannot yet comprehend them. This marvelous, three-pound organ of yours contains as many as 100 billion cells and processes 100 million bits of information per hour. It maintains a perfect chemical balance in every one of your body’s billions of cells through your autonomic nervous system. Properly used, your incredible brain can take you from rags to riches, from loneliness to popularity, from sickness to radiant health, and from depression to happiness and joy—if you learn how to use it properly.
This entire book can be viewed as an instruction manual designed to help you get the most out of yourself. It will show you how to harness the amazing power of your mind to bring you anything you really want in life.
Your mind is like a central processing unit in a large computer network. It is accessed, influenced and programmed by several operators, or sources. All data inputs affect and influence other data. All incoming information is immediately available to influence data being processed by any of the individual users. New information, whether true or false, can immediately alter operations in every other area.
Your subconscious mind is your central processing unit. Your main job in achieving any goal is to reprogram this unit so that what you think, feel and believe becomes the mental equivalent of exactly what you want to experience and enjoy.
The access ports to your subconscious are both internal and external. Internally, you are affected by your thoughts, your mental pictures or imagination and your feelings. Externally, you are influenced by your suggestive environment, by everything that registers on your conscious mind. You are affected by what you do, say, hear, see, read, watch, listen to and, especially, by the people you associate with and the conversations you participate in. Each of these influences can trigger or stimulate one or more of the other influences. All of them in combination have created, and are creating, the person you are today, and every aspect of your life.
When you think a thought, for any reason, it often triggers another thought, or even a stream of consciousness that takes you far away from the original thought. Your mind rushes on, like a torrent, carrying you toward your goals or away, depending on the amount of mental control you choose to exert.
Your thoughts trigger images or pictures consistent with them, and these images can lead from one to another and away from the thought that triggered them in the first place, or back toward it.
Thoughts or images trigger emotions of all kinds. Your feelings themselves trigger thoughts and images, which can then trigger additional feelings, and so on.
The thoughts you think, the images you hold, the feelings you experience trigger words and actions consistent with them. If you are thinking about your goals, if you can see your goals as already realized, and if this thought makes you feel positive and enthusiastic, you will speak positively and act effectively as you go through your day.
What you read can affect your thoughts, images, feelings, words and actions, and these can in turn influence what you read next. The people around you, your conversations, will influence how you speak, walk, talk and behave.
The tapes you listen to in your car, the shows you watch on television, the seminars you attend and the things you do each day will all affect the person you become and they will, in turn, affect, multiply, diminish, increase and alter other influences and other stored information.
In addition to all of these factors, your past experiences, your reinforcement history, good or bad, colors your attitudes and perceptions toward everything that happens to you, and around you.
If this sounds a little complicated, it is. Your mind and your life are like a room full of musicians, all playing different instruments and different tunes, and all trying to get your attention. Amidst all this confusion, is it any wonder that the great majority feel that they are not in control of their lives? Is it any wonder that most people would rather be doing something else, somewhere else, and in many cases, with someone else? Is it any wonder that most people feel that they could be doing much better than they are, but they feel helpless to make a change? This situation is both the great challenge and the great opportunity of your life.
Your main job, in taking control of your life and your future, is to become the conductor of your own orchestra. You must take control of the internal and external aspects of your life and get them all playing in harmony around a central theme of your own choosing. Your job is to play beautiful music with your life, to make your life a great performance.
You may already know that there are two types of laws in the universe: man-made laws and natural laws. You can violate man-made laws, like traffic laws, and you may or may not get caught. But if you attempt to violate natural laws, you get caught every single time, without exception.
Natural laws, in turn, can be divided into two categories: physical laws and mental laws. The operation of physical laws, like those governing electricity or mechanics, can be proven in controlled experiments and practical activities.
Mental laws, however, can only be proven by experience and intuition, and by seeing them work in your own life.
Some mental laws were written about as far back as 2000 B.C., or four thousand years ago. In the ancient world, these laws or principles were taught in what were called the “mystery schools.” Students would enter these schools and undergo long periods of training, taking many years, during which they would be gradually introduced, one at a time, to these principles.
In those days, such principles were never meant to be shared with the general public. The heads of these ancient schools felt that the average person would misunderstand and misuse these laws, and at that time, they were probably right.
Today, most of these laws are discussed and written about quite openly, although only a tiny fraction of the population is even aware of them. In studying the lives and stories of successful men and women, I found that almost all of them used these laws, consciously or unconsciously, and as a result they were often able to accomplish more in two or three years than the average person accomplishes in a lifetime. In fact, all real and lasting success comes from organizing your life in harmony with these general principles.
Here’s an important point: Mental laws are like physical laws in that they are in force 100 percent of the time. The Law of Gravity, for instance, works everywhere on planet Earth twenty-four hours per day. If you jump from a ten-story building, you will fall to the sidewalk with equal force whether you are in downtown New York or downtown Tokyo.
It doesn’t matter whether you know about gravity, or whether you agree with gravity, or whether anyone ever told you about gravity when you were growing up. The law is neutral. It works for you everywhere, regardless of whether you know about it or whether it is particularly convenient for you at that moment.
Mental laws, although their physical effects cannot be seen quite so easily, also work 100 percent of the time. Whenever your life is going well, it means that your thoughts and activities are aligned and in harmony with these invisible mental laws. Whenever you are having problems of any kind, it is almost invariably because you are violating one or more of these laws, whether you know about them or not. Because they are central to your happiness, it is essential that you become familiar with them and integrate them into everything you do.
The Law of Control says that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life, and you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel that you are not in control, or that you are controlled by some external force, person or influence.
This law or principle is widely recognized in psychology. It is called “locus of control” theory. It is generally agreed that most stress, anxiety, tension and psychosomatic illness comes about as a result of the person feeling out of control, or not in control of some important part of his life.
For example, if you feel that your life is controlled by your debts, or your boss, or your ill health, or a bad relationship, or the behavior of others, you will suffer stress. This stress will manifest itself in irritation, anger, and resentment. If not dealt with, it can progress to insomnia, depression or illness of various kinds.
You can have either an internal or an external locus of control. That is, you can feel that you are in charge of your own life, happy, positive and confident, or you can feel controlled by others, helpless, trapped, very much like a victim.
In every case, control over your life begins with your thoughts, the only thing over which you do have complete control. How you think about any situation determines how you feel, and your feelings determine your behavior.
Self-discipline, self-mastery, self-control all begin with you taking control of your thinking. No person or situation can make you feel anything—it is only the way you think about a situation that makes you feel the way you do. And you can control the way you think. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
There are basically two ways you can get control of any situation that is causing you stress or unhappiness. First, you can take action. You can move forward and do something to change it. You can assert yourself in the situation and make it different somehow. And second, you can simply walk away. You can often regain control by letting go of a person or situation and getting busy doing something else.
Sometimes the very best thing to do in a situation if you feel out of control is just to leave. If you have ever ended an unhappy relationship or quit an unpleasant job, you will remember how much better you felt when you stopped struggling. By deciding not to resist anymore, you took back your sense of control.
The law of control explains why it is so important for you to be decisive. It explains why it is so important for you to know exactly what you want. The self-confidence that comes with feeling in control is why a person with a clear purpose and a plan always has an edge over someone who is vague or unsure.
Examine the various areas of your life with a mental checklist and decide where you feel positive and in control, and where you don’t. Then begin thinking of the specific things you could do to get control in those parts of your life causing you stress. Think also of the situations you might be better off walking away from.
One of your major responsibilities is to get and keep your life under control. This sense of control becomes your foundation for building greater happiness and success in the future. Make sure it’s rock solid.
The Law of Cause and Effect says that for every effect in your life there is a specific cause. It is so important it has been called the “Iron Law of the Universe.” It says that everything happens for a reason, whether or not you know what it is. There are no accidents. We live in an orderly universe governed strictly by law, and this understanding is central to every other law or principle.
The Law of Cause and Effect says that there are specific causes of success and there are specific causes of failure. There are specific causes for health and for illness. There are specific causes for happiness and for unhappiness. If there is an effect in your life that you want more of, you merely need to trace it back to the causes and repeat the causes. If there is an effect in your life that you do not enjoy, you need to trace it back to the causes and get rid of them.
This law is so simple that it is baffling to most people. They continue doing, or not doing, things that are causing them unhappiness and frustration, and they then blame everyone else, or society, for their problems.
Insanity has been defined as “doing the same things in the same way and expecting to get different results.” To some degree, we’re all guilty of this. We need to face this tendency squarely and deal with it honestly.
There is a Scottish proverb that says, “It is better to light one wee candle than to curse the darkness.” It is better by far to sit down and carefully analyze the reasons for your difficulties than to get upset and angry about them.
In the book of Proverbs, it says, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.” This version of the Law of Cause and Effect is called the Law of Sowing and Reaping. It says that whatever you sow, you will reap. It also says that whatever you are reaping today is the result of what you have sown in the past. If you wish to reap a different harvest in any area of your life in the future, you need to plant different seeds today, and of course, this refers primarily to mental seeds.
The most important application of the Law of Cause and Effect, or sowing and reaping, is this: “Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects.”
Your thoughts are the primary causes of the conditions of your life. Everything in your experience has begun with a thought of some kind, yours or someone else’s.
Everything you are or ever will be, will be as a result of the way you think. If you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life. The change in your outer experience will follow the change in your inner experience. You will reap what you sow. You are doing it right now.
The beauty of this immutable law is that by accepting it, you take full control over your thinking, your feelings and your results. By applying the Law of Cause and Effect, you bring yourself into harmony with the Law of Control. You immediately feel better and happier about yourself.
Every aspect of business success or failure can be explained by this basic law. If you sow the right causes, you reap the desired effects. If you produce quality products or services that customers want and need and are willing to pay for, and then promote them vigorously, you’ll be successful in selling them. If you don’t, you won’t.
If you do high-quality work and achieve the results that your company needs to grow and prosper, you’ll be successful and happy in your career. If you treat others well, they’ll treat you well. You’ll always get out of life what you put in—and you control what you put in.
The Law of Belief says that whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. The more intensely that you believe something to be true, the more likely it is that it will be true for you. If you really believe something, you cannot imagine it to be otherwise. Your beliefs give you a form of tunnel vision. They edit out or cause you to ignore incoming information that is inconsistent with what you have decided to believe.
William James of Harvard said, “Belief creates the actual fact.” In the Bible, it says, “According to your faith [belief] it is done unto you.” To put it another way, you do not necessarily believe what you see but you see what you believe.
For example, if you absolutely believe that you are meant to be a great success in life, then no matter what happens, you will continue to press forward toward your goals. Nothing will stop you.
On the other hand, if you believe that success is a matter of luck or accident, then you will easily become discouraged and disappointed whenever things don’t work out for you. Your beliefs set you up for either success or failure.
People generally have one of two ways of looking at the world. The first is what is called a benevolent world view. If you have a benevolent world view, you generally believe that the world is a pretty good place in which to live. You have a tendency to see the good in people and situations and to believe that there is plenty of opportunity around you and that you can take advantage of it. You believe that although you may not be perfect, you are a pretty good person overall. You believe in the future, for yourself and others. You are primarily optimistic.
The second way of looking at the world is with a malevolent world view. A person with a malevolent world view has a generally negative and pessimistic attitude toward himself or herself and toward life. He or she generally believes that “You can’t fight City Hall,” that “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” and that no matter how hard you work, you can’t get ahead anyway because the deck is stacked against you.
This type of person sees injustice, oppression and misfortune everywhere. When things go wrong for them, as they usually do, they blame it on bad luck or bad people. They feel like victims. Because of this attitude, they don’t really like or respect themselves very much.
Needless to say, people with optimistic beliefs tend to be the movers and shakers, the builders and the creators of the future. They tend to be positive and cheerful, and they see the world as a good and bright place in which to live. They have upbeat mental attitudes that enable them to respond positively and constructively to the inevitable ups and downs of day-to-day life. A key part of your journey toward success is the development and maintenance of this benevolent or positive world view.
Perhaps the biggest mental roadblocks that you will ever have to overcome are those contained in your self-limiting beliefs. These are beliefs you have that limit you in some way. They hold you back by stopping you from even trying. They often cause you to see things that simply aren’t true.
You may feel that you are limited in intelligence because you got average or mediocre grades in school. You may believe you are limited in creative capacity, or in your ability to learn and remember. Perhaps you feel that you are not very outgoing, or very smart about money. Some people feel that they cannot lose weight, quit smoking or be attractive to members of the opposite sex.
But whatever your belief, if you believe it strongly enough, it becomes your reality. You walk, talk, behave and interact with others in a manner consistent with your beliefs. Even if your beliefs are totally false, if you believe them, they will be true for you.
I held myself back and sold myself short for years, as many people do, because I didn’t graduate from high school. I looked on university graduates with awe and respect. I unconsciously assumed that my future was limited. Because of this belief, I set only limited goals for myself, and I wasn’t surprised if I didn’t achieve them. After all, I did poorly in school—what could you expect?
One day, I read a true story about a young man from a small town who graduated from high school with straight A’s. He then applied to the state university for admission. As part of the admissions procedure, he had to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, like all the applicants to universities nationwide. A few weeks later, he received a letter from the admissions department informing him that he had scored in the 99th percentile on the test and he was accepted for the fall semester.
He was happy to be accepted but there was one problem. He didn’t know about percentiles and he concluded mistakenly that the 99th percentile was his IQ score. He knew that the average IQ is 100 and he felt he could never do university-level work with his “limited” intelligence.
For the entire fall semester he failed or nearly failed every course. Finally, his counselor called him in and asked him why he was doing so poorly.
“Well,” he said, “you can’t blame me. I’ve only got a 99 IQ.” The counselor had the student’s file in front of him. “Why do you say that?” he asked.
“That’s what it said in my letter of admission to the university,” he replied.
When the counselor realized what had happened he explained the difference between an IQ and a percentile.
“A 99th percentile means that you scored equal to or higher than 99 percent of all the students in America who wrote this test. You’re one of the brightest kids on this campus.”
When the young man realized his error and changed his belief about his intelligence, he became a different person.
He went back into his classes and went to work with a new sense of competence and confidence. By the end of the semester he was on the honor roll and he eventually graduated in the top ten of his class.
This story holds a valuable lesson for you, as it did for me. We too easily accept that we are limited in some way. Then we ignore or reject any evidence that contradicts what we’ve already decided to believe.
A teacher asked a young boy, “Can you play a musical instrument?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I haven’t tried yet.”
In a way, you’re like that young boy. You don’t know either what you can really do. Don’t be so quick to sell yourself short. Refuse to accept limitations on your potential. You can probably do far more than you’ve ever done before.
Most of your self-limiting beliefs are not true at all. They are based on negative information that you have taken in and accepted as true. Once you have accepted it as true, your belief makes it a fact for you. As Henry Ford said, “If you believe that you can do a thing, or if you believe you cannot, in either case, you are right.”
In Chapter Three, you will learn how to build a strong, confident belief system, one that is completely consistent with what you want to achieve with your life. In the meantime, you should begin to identify any self-limiting beliefs that might be holding you back. Often, your spouse or a trusted friend can help you recognize and identify self-limiting ideas and beliefs that you are unaware of. Remember, they do just as much harm if you don’t know about them as if you do.
The Law of Expectations says that whatever you expect with confidence becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy. To put it another way, what you get is not necessarily what you want in life, but what you expect. Your expectations exert a powerful, invisible influence that causes people to behave and situations to work out as you anticipated.
In a way, you are always acting as a fortune-teller in your own life by the way you talk about how you think things are going to turn out. Successful men and women have an attitude of confident, positive self-expectancy. They expect to be successful, they expect to be liked. They expect to be happy, and they are seldom disappointed.
Unsuccessful people have an attitude of negative expectations, of cynicism and pessimism that somehow causes situations to work out exactly as they expected.
In his book Pygmalion in the Classroom, Dr. Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University describes how the expectations of teachers have an enormous impact on the performance of their students. He also found that if students felt that they were expected to do well, they did much better than they would have in the absence of those expectations.
In a famous experiment conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area by Dr. Rosenthal in the late 1960s, at the beginning of a school year, three teachers were called into the principal’s office. The principal told them, in effect, “We have been observing your teaching styles and we have concluded that you are the three best teachers in this school. As a special reward for teaching excellence, we are going to give you each one classroom of the brightest children in this school. These children have been selected on the basis of recent IQ tests, and we expect them to make jumps of 20 to 30 percent in academic achievement over the course of the coming year. But, because we don’t want to be accused of discrimination, we want you to keep this confidential. We won’t tell the parents, and you are not to tell the students that they have been specially selected for this advanced class.”
The teachers were delighted. A teacher’s dream is to have an entire classroom full of gifted children to teach. They went back to their classes with renewed enthusiasm.
For the entire school year, the classes were monitored, and the teachers were observed. The teachers seemed to teach with greater commitment. They seemed to be more patient with students who did not catch on to a new subject right away. They spent more time after school tutoring students. When a child was having difficulty grasping something, the teacher assumed that the problem was in the teaching, not the student.
At the end of the school year, the three classes led not only the school but the entire school district in grades on standardized tests. They had achieved a leap of 20 to 30 percent in academic achievement over the previous year, just as had been predicted.
When the results of the tests were in, the principal brought the teachers back into his office and sat them down. He congratulated them on having had such a wonderful year with their students. The teachers were unanimous in thanking the principal for giving them so many gifted young people to teach. They said that the teaching was easy when you had such fine students, and that they had enjoyed teaching that year more than in any other.
The principal then explained to them that it had all been an experiment. The students were not exceptional at all. Their names had been chosen by lottery out of the school population at large. They had been assigned randomly to the classes of the three teachers. In fact, they were just average students.
Needless to say, the teachers were surprised. How could the students have done so well, just as had been predicted? Then it occurred to them that the reason was that they were such excellent teachers. It was their expertise as teachers that was responsible for the results.
The principal then explained to them that they also had been chosen at random. At the beginning of the school year, the names of all the teachers in the school had been put into a hat and they were the first three that were drawn.
This is what is called a double-blind experiment. The experimenters held constant for everything except expectations. The expectations the principal had of the teachers were clear and explicit. He said, “You are excellent teachers and we expect you to get excellent results from these classes of superior students.”
The expectations the teachers had of the students were implicit and unspoken. They simply treated the children as though they were highly intelligent and expected them to perform in a way consistent with the information they had been given.
In both cases, the expectations were based on false information. However, in both cases, the expectations, because they were created by a believable source, became self-fulfilling prophecies.
This is very important. Your expectations are shaped in direct proportion to your respect for the validity of the source. The more you look up to another person, the greater influence he or she will have on your expectations of yourself.
The teachers taught in an excellent fashion and the students learned at a higher rate than they had ever done before. One of the students in the experiment went from an IQ of 90 to an IQ of 115, a jump of 25 IQ points, by test, in one year under the influence of a teacher who had positive expectations. In experiment after experiment, it has been demonstrated that when teachers expect their students to perform well, the students work hard and live up to their teachers’ expectations.
Many parents who have been through our seminars have transformed their children’s academic lives by asking their children’s teachers to start treating their children as if they were especially intelligent. They have found that the teachers have been, in most cases, more than willing to go along with this idea. The parents have then done the same thing at home.
The results have been astonishing. Children who were getting C’s and D’s have jumped to A’s and B’s in as little as two months. Children who were unmotivated and bored with school because they were doing so poorly have become enthusiastic and excited about learning under the influence of parents and teachers who confidently, positively expected them to do well.
There are four sources of expectations that have an impact on your life. The first is the expectations of your parents. We are all unconsciously programmed to try to live up to, or down to, the expectations that our parents expressed of us when we were growing up. The need for the approval of our parents goes on even after our parents are no longer with us. If your parents expected you to do well, and confidently, positively encouraged you to do your best and be your best, this will have had an enormous influence on the person you have become. If, as happens in many cases, your parents expressed negative expectations of you, or no expectations at all, you may still be unconsciously saddled with the burden of trying not to disappoint your parents.
In one study, 90 percent of prisoners interviewed by psychologists reported that they had been told over and over again by their parents when they were growing up that “Someday, you’re going to end up in jail.”
The second source of expectations that affects your behavior is the expectations that your boss has of your performance. People who work under bosses who have positive expectations are always happier, perform better, and get more done than those who work under bosses who are negative or critical. Because you are inordinately influenced by the expectations of people you are dependent upon for your income, it’s not likely that you will ever be happy or successful working for or with people with negative attitudes and behavior.
The third source is the expectations that you have of your children, your spouse and your employees or staff. You have an enormous impact on the personality, the behavior and the performance of the people who look up to you for guidance and feedback. The more important you are in the life of someone else, the more powerfully will your expectations affect their performance. Perhaps the most consistently effective and predictable motivational behavior you can use is to confidently and constantly expect the best from others. People will always try not to disappoint you.
I always tell my children, “You’re the best in the West; you’re the best little boy (or girl) in the world.” I tell them that I love them and that I think they are wonderful children and they are going to do great things with their lives.
Does this have an impact on their personalities? You’d better believe it! Try it yourself and see. Many successful people attribute much of their advance in life to the influence of someone they respected who constantly expressed confidence in their ability to be more than they were. Perhaps the kindest thing that you can do for another person is to say, “I believe in you. I know you can do it.”
The fourth source is the expectations that you have of yourself. The wonderful thing about expectations is that you can manufacture your own. You can create your own mental set, your own way of approaching the world, confidently, expecting the very best of yourself in every situation. Your expectations of yourself are in themselves powerful enough to override any negative expectations that anyone else may have about you. You can create a force field of positive mental energy around you by confidently expecting to gain something from every situation.
W. Clement Stone, the multimillionaire, is famous for being an “inverse paranoid.” This is someone who believes that the universe is conspiring to do him good. An inverse paranoid sees every situation as being heaven-sent either to confer some benefit or teach some valuable lesson to help make him successful. This form of inverse paranoia is the foundation of a positive mental attitude. This is the most outwardly identifiable quality of a high-performing man or woman.
One of our seminar graduates, who was unemployed at the time, told me that he began saying to himself every morning, “I believe something wonderful is going to happen to me today.”
He repeated this over and over until he developed an expectant attitude that caused him to look forward to every event of the day. The amazing thing was that a series of wonderful things began to happen to him. After being unemployed for six months, he received two job offers within the first week after beginning this exercise. His financial problems and legal difficulties seemed to clear themselves up miraculously. Wonderful things began to happen to him at every turn.
Just imagine if you went around all day believing that some thing wonderful was about to happen to you. Think how much more positive, optimistic and cheerful you would be if you were absolutely convinced that everything was conspiring to make you happy and successful.
I can promise you this: If you try this exercise for just three days, at the end of the third day, so many wonderful things will have happened to you that you will not be able to recount them all.
You can never rise any higher than your expectations of yourself. Since they are completely under your control, be sure that your expectations are consistent with what you want to see happen. Always expect the best of yourself.
When you start consciously working with this mental law, you will have a power for good that is virtually unlimited. The power of positive expectations alone can change your whole personality, and your life as well.
Many books have been written about this law, and many people feel that it is central to understanding the human condition. The Law of Attraction says that you are a living magnet. You invariably attract into your life people and situations in harmony with your dominant thoughts. Like attracts like. Birds of a feather flock together. Everything in your life you have attracted to yourself because of the person you are, and especially because of your thoughts.
Your friends, your family, your relationships, your job, your problems and your opportunities have all been attracted to you because of your habitual way of thinking in each area.
There is an example of this in music, called the principle of sympathetic resonance. If you have two pianos in a large room and you strike the note C on one piano and then walk across the room to the other piano, you will find that the string of C on the other piano is vibrating at the same rate of vibration as the C string on the first piano. By the same principle, you will tend to meet and become involved with people and situations that are vibrating in harmony with your own dominant thoughts and emotions.
As you look around you at every aspect of your life, positive or negative, you will see that your entire world is of your own making. And the more emotion you attach to a thought, the greater will be the rate of vibration and the more rapidly you will attract people and situations in harmony with that thought into your life.
You see this law in action all around you. You think of a friend and just then, the phone rings with him or her on the other end. You will decide to do something and immediately afterward you start getting ideas and assistance. You become like a magnet attracting iron filings.
Many people hold themselves back because they don’t know how to get from where they are to where they want to go. But because of the Law of Attraction, it’s not necessary for you to have all the answers before you begin. As long as you’re clear about what you want and the kind of people you want to be associated with, you’ll draw them into your life.
Your thoughts are a form of energy that vibrates at a speed determined by the level of emotional intensity accompanying the thought. The more excited, or scared, you are, the more rapidly your thoughts radiate out from you and attract similar people and situations back into your life.
Happy people seem to attract other happy, pleasant people. A person with a prosperity consciousness seems to attract money-making ideas and opportunities. Optimistic, enthusiastic salespeople attract bigger and better customers. Positive businesspeople attract the resources, customers, suppliers and bankers they need to build successful businesses. The Law of Attraction works everywhere all the time.
Like the other mental laws, the law of attraction is neutral. It can help you or hurt you. Actually this law could be considered a variation of the Law of Cause and Effect, or sowing and reaping. That is why the philosopher says:
Sow a thought and you reap an act;
Sow an act and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit and you reap a character;
Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
You can have more and be more and do more because you can change the person you are. You can change your dominant thoughts by exercising rigorous mental mastery. You can discipline yourself by keeping your thoughts on what you want and refusing to think about what you don’t want.
People who use the Law of Attraction in a positive way are often called lucky. This is just another way of attempting to explain why so many good things and helpful people are drawn into the lives of those who are clear about their goals and consistently optimistic about achieving them.
The Law of Correspondence is one of the most important laws of all, and is in many ways a summary law that explains many others. It says, “As within, so without.” It says that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. This law declares that you can tell what is going on inside you by looking at what is going on around you.
In the Bible, this principle is explained in the words, “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” Everything in your life is from the inner to the outer. Your external world of manifestation corresponds with your internal world of thought and emotion.
Your outer world of relationships will correspond to the person you really are inside, your true inner personality. Your outer world of health will correspond to your inner attitudes of mind. Your outer world of income and financial achievement will correspond to your inner world of thought and preparation. The way people respond and react to you will reflect your attitude and your behavior toward them.
The car you drive and the condition that you keep it in will correspond to your state of mind at any given time. When you are feeling positive and confident and in control of your life, your home, your car and your workplace will tend to be well-organized and efficient. When you feel overwhelmed with work, or frustrated and unhappy, your car, your workplace, your home, even your closets will tend to reflect this state of disarray and confusion. You can see the effects of this Law of Correspondence everywhere.
Everything is from the inner to the outer. My big mistake when I was younger was concentrating on doing rather than on being. I felt that I could get the things I wanted by practicing certain methods and techniques. I eventually learned that proper practice was necessary but not sufficient.
The German philosopher Goethe said, “One must be something to be able to do something.” You must change yourself. You must become a different person on the inside before you see different results on the outside. And you can’t fake it for very long, if at all.
Most people try to improve or change aspects of their lives by trying to get other people to change. They don’t like what they see reflecting back to them in the mirror of their lives so they work at polishing the mirror instead of going to the source of reflection.
Emerson wrote, “What you are shouts at me so loudly, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” You always come across to others as you really are. You seldom fool anyone. And the only way you can permanently change the outer things is to change the inner things.
William James wrote, “The greatest revolution of my life is the discovery that individuals can change the outer aspects of their lives by changing the inner attitudes of their minds.”
One of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, “What kind of a person do I have to be to earn the respect of the people I care about and live the kind of life I want to live?”
The Law of Mental Equivalency is also called the Law of Mind and could actually be considered a restatement of the previous laws. Essentially, it says that thoughts objectify themselves. Your thoughts, vividly imagined and repeated, charged with emotion, become your reality. Almost everything that you have in your life has been created by your own thinking, for better or for worse.
Put another way, thoughts are things. They take on a life of their own. First you have them, then they have you. You act in a manner consistent with what you are thinking most of the time. You eventually become what you think about. And if you change your thinking, you change your life.
Everything that happens in your life first begins and takes place in the form of thought. This is why thoughtfulness is a key quality of successful men and women. Becoming a skilled thinker in your own life means using your mental powers in such a way that they serve your best interests all of the time.
When you begin thinking in a positive, confident way about the main aspects of your life, you take control over what is happening to you. You bring your life into harmony with cause and effect. You sow positive causes and reap positive effects. You begin to believe more intensely in yourself and your possibilities. You expect more positive outcomes. You attract positive people and situations, and soon your outer life of results will begin to correspond to your inner world of constructive thinking.
This entire transformation begins with your thoughts. Change your thinking and you will, you must, change your life. The one thing you must do is to create the mental equivalent of what you want to experience in your reality. Everything else will follow from that.
In Chapter One, you began the transforming exercise of painting a mental masterpiece by defining your ideal goals and aspirations in each major area of your life. Now, take some time, based on the action of these mental laws, to think about how your habitual modes of thought have created every aspect of your life today.
First, your relationships. What is it in your attitudes, beliefs, expectations and behaviors that is causing your problems with other people?
Second, your health. What are your ideas and beliefs about your weight, level of fitness, personal appearance, diet and rest? How do these beliefs help or hinder you?
Third, your career. How do your thoughts affect your position, your progress, the quality of your work and the amount of satisfaction you get from what you do?
Fourth, your level of financial achievement. What would you like to increase or improve? What are your beliefs and expectations concerning your material well-being? How much would you like to earn, and why?
Fifth, the quality of your inner life—your thoughts, feelings, peace of mind and happiness. What beliefs, attitudes and expectations are creating your world today? Which of them do you need to change?
If you are honest with yourself, you will find that you have self-limiting ways of thinking in one or more of these areas. This is quite normal. Honestly facing the facts about yourself is the starting point of rapid self-improvement.