The Driving Force
The Ninth Step to Riches
PERSISTENCE creates FAITH.
From FAITH comes POWER.
And POWER is essential for success in the accumulation of money.
PLANS alone are inert and useless, without sufficient POWER to translate them into ACTION. This chapter will describe the method by which an individual may attain and apply POWER.
POWER may be defined as “organized and intelligently directed KNOWLEDGE.” Power, as the term is here used, refers to ORGANIZED effort, sufficient to enable an individual to transmute DESIRE into its monetary equivalent. ORGANIZED effort is produced through the coordination of effort of two or more people who work toward a DEFINITE end, in a spirit of harmony.
POWER IS REQUIRED FOR THE ACCUMULATION OF MONEY! POWER IS NECESSARY FOR THE RETENTION OF MONEY AFTER IT HAS BEEN ACCUMULATED!
Let us ascertain how power may be acquired. If power is “organized knowledge,” let us examine:
Knowledge may be acquired from any of the foregoing sources. It may be converted into POWER by organizing it into definite PLANS and by expressing those plans in terms of ACTION.
Examination of the Three Major Sources of Knowledge will readily disclose the difficulty you would have if you depended upon your own efforts alone in assembling knowledge and expressing it through definite plans in terms of ACTION. If your plans are comprehensive and if they require vast sums of information, you must generally induce others to cooperate with you before you can inject into them the necessary element of POWER.
The Master Mind may be defined as: “Coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.”1
No individual can have great power without availing himself or herself of the Master Mind Principle. In Chapter 1 instructions were given for the creation of PLANS for the purpose of translating DESIRE into its monetary equivalent. If you carry out these instructions with PERSISTENCE and intelligence, and use discrimination in the selection of your Master Mind Group, your objective will have been halfway reached even before you begin to recognize it.
So you may better understand the intangible potentialities of power available to you through a properly chosen Master Mind Group, I will here explain the two characteristics of the Master Mind Principle, one of which is economic in nature and the other psychic. The economic feature is obvious. Economic advantages may be created by any person who surrounds himself or herself with the advice, counsel, and personal cooperation of a group of people who are willing to lend wholehearted aid, in a spirit of PERFECT HARMONY. This form of cooperative alliance has been the basis of nearly every great fortune. Your understanding of this great truth may definitely determine your financial status.
The psychic phase of the Master Mind Principle is much more abstract, much more difficult to comprehend, because it has reference to the spiritual forces with which the human race, as a whole, is not well acquainted. You may catch a significant suggestion from this statement: “No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened a third mind.”
Keep in mind the fact that there are only two known substances in the whole universe—energy and matter. It is a well-known fact that matter may be broken down into units of molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, and electrons. There are units of matter which may be isolated, separated, and analyzed.
Likewise, there are units of energy.
The human mind is a form of “energy,” a part of it being spiritual in nature. When the minds of two people are coordinated in a SPIRIT OF HARMONY, the spiritual units of energy of each mind form an “affinity,” which constitutes the psychic phase of the Master Mind.
The Master Mind Principle—or rather, the “economic” feature of it—was first called to my attention by Andrew Carnegie back during the earliest years of my research. Discovery of this part of the principle was responsible for the choice of my life’s work.
Mr. Carnegie’s Master Mind Group consisted of a staff of approximately 50 individuals with whom he surrounded himself for the DEFINITE PURPOSE of manufacturing and marketing steel. He attributed his entire fortune to the POWER he accumulated through this Master Mind.
Analyze the record of anyone who has accumulated a great fortune and many who have accumulated modest fortunes and you will find that they have either consciously or unconsciously employed the Master Mind Principle.
GREAT POWER CAN BE ACCUMULATED THROUGH NO OTHER PRINCIPLE!
ENERGY is Nature’s universal set of building blocks, out of which she constructs every material thing in the universe, including human beings and every form of animal and vegetable life. Through a process which only Nature completely understands, she translates energy into matter.
Nature’s building blocks are available to humanity in the energy involved in THINKING! The human brain may be compared to an electric battery. It absorbs energy from what may be called “The Mysterious Unifying Force of the Universe,” which permeates every atom of matter—including the atoms that compose the human brain—and fills the entire universe.2
It is a well-known fact that a group of electric batteries will provide more energy than a single battery. It is also a well-known fact that an individual battery will provide energy in proportion to the number and capacity of the cells it contains.
The brain functions in a similar fashion. This accounts for the fact that some brains are more efficient than others, and leads to this significant statement: A group of brains coordinated (or connected) in a spirit of harmony will provide more thought-energy than a single brain, just as a group of electric batteries will provide more energy than a single battery.
Through this metaphor it becomes immediately obvious that the Master Mind Principle holds the secret of the POWER wielded by people who surround themselves with the minds of other capable individuals.
There follows now another statement which will lead still nearer to an understanding of the psychic phase of the Master Mind Principle: When a group of individual brains are coordinated and function in harmony, the increased energy created through that alliance becomes available to every individual brain in the group.
Henry Ford began his business career under the handicap of poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance. Within the inconceivably short period of ten years Mr. Ford mastered these three handicaps, and within 25 years he made himself one of the richest people in America. Connect with those facts the additional knowledge that Mr. Ford’s most rapid strides became noticeable from the time he became a personal friend of Thomas A. Edison, and you will begin to understand what the influence of one mind upon another can accomplish. Go a step further and consider the fact that Mr. Ford’s most outstanding achievements began from the time that he formed the acquaintances of Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, and Luther Burbank (each an individual of great intellectual capacity), and you will have further evidence that POWER may be produced through a friendly alliance of minds.3
There is little, if any, doubt that Henry Ford was one of the best informed leaders of the business and industrial world of his time. The question of his wealth needs no discussion. Analyze Mr. Ford’s intimate personal friends, some of whom have already been mentioned, and you will be prepared to understand the following statement: “Individuals take on the nature and the habits and the POWER OF THOUGHT of those with whom they associate in a spirit of sympathy and harmony.”
Henry Ford whipped poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance by allying himself with great minds, whose “vibrations of thought” he absorbed into his own mind. Through his association with Edison, Burbank, Burroughs, and Firestone, Mr. Ford added to his own brain power the sum and substance of the intelligence, experience, knowledge, and spiritual forces of these four individuals. Moreover, he appropriated and made use of the Master Mind Principle through the methods of procedure described in this book.
This principle is available to you!
I have already mentioned Mahatma Gandhi. Perhaps the majority of people who know anything about Gandhi look upon him as merely an eccentric little man who went around without formal wearing apparel making trouble for the British Government.
In reality, Gandhi was not eccentric, but HE WAS THE MOST POWERFUL MAN ALIVE DURING HIS TIME (judging by the number of followers he had and their faith in him). Moreover, he is arguably one of the most powerful individuals who have ever lived. His power was passive, but it was real.
Let us study the method by which he attained his stupendous POWER. It may be explained in a few words. He attained POWER through inducing more than 200 million people to cooperate, with mind and body, in a spirit of HARMONY, for a DEFINITE PURPOSE.
In brief, Gandhi accomplished a MIRACLE, for it is a miracle when 200 million people can be induced—not forced—to cooperate in a spirit of HARMONY for a limitless time. If you doubt that this is a miracle, try to induce ANY TWO PERSONS to cooperate in a spirit of harmony for any length of time.
Every individual who manages a business knows what a difficult matter it is to get employees to work together in a spirit even remotely resembling HARMONY.
The list of the chief sources from which POWER may be attained is headed, as has been shown, by INFINITE INTELLIGENCE. When two or more people coordinate in a spirit of HARMONY and work toward a definite objective, they place themselves in a position through that alliance to absorb power directly from the great universal storehouse of Infinite Intelligence. This is the greatest of all sources of POWER. It is the source to which the genius turns. It is the source to which every great leader turns, whether consciously or not.
The other two major sources from which the knowledge necessary for the accumulation of POWER may be obtained—“accumulated experience” and “experiment and research”—are no more reliable than the five human senses. The senses are not always reliable. However, Infinite Intelligence DOES NOT ERR.
In subsequent chapters, the methods by which Infinite Intelligence may be most readily contacted will be adequately described.
This book is not a course on religion. No fundamental principle described in this book should be interpreted as being intended to interfere either directly or indirectly with any person’s religious habits. This book is confined, primarily, to instructing the reader how to transmute the DEFINITE PURPOSE OF DESIRE FOR MONEY into its monetary equivalent.
Read, THINK, and meditate as you read. Soon the entire subject will unfold, and you will see it in perspective. For now, you are seeing the detail of the individual chapters.
Money is shy and elusive. It must be wooed and won by methods not unlike those used by the determined lover in pursuit of the beloved. And, coincidental as it is, the POWER used in the wooing of money is not greatly different from that used in wooing a person. That power, when successfully used in the pursuit of money, must be mixed with FAITH. It must be mixed with DESIRE. It must be mixed with PERSISTENCE. It must be applied through a plan, and that plan must be set into ACTION.
When money comes in quantities known as “the big money,” it flows to the one who accumulates it as easily as water flows downhill. There exists in life a great unseen STREAM OF POWER which may be compared to a river—except that one side flows in one direction, carrying all who get into that side of the stream onward and upward to WEALTH, while the other side flows in the opposite direction, carrying all who are unfortunate enough to get into it (and not able to extricate themselves from it), downstream to misery and POVERTY.
Every person who has accumulated a great fortune has recognized the existence of this stream of life. It consists of one’s THINKING PROCESS. The positive emotions of thought form the side of the stream which carries one to fortune. The negative emotions form the side which carries one down to poverty.
Understanding that you yourself can control where you will be in this stream of life is of stupendous importance to the person who is following this book with the object of accumulating a fortune, for such understanding leads to the recognition that ANYBODY can WISH for riches, and most people do, but only a few know that a definite plan, plus a BURNING DESIRE for wealth, are the only dependable means of accumulating wealth.
If you find yourself in the side of the stream of life which leads to poverty, understand that you have within you the power to propel yourself over to the other side of the stream. Your oar is the philosophy and the principles set forth in this book. They can serve you ONLY through application and use. Merely reading and passing judgment on these principles, either one way or another, will in no way benefit you. You must take your oar in hand and ACT.4
Some people undergo the experience of alternating between the positive and negative sides of the stream, being at times on the positive side and at times on the negative side. Recent economic hard times have swept millions of people from the positive to the negative side of the stream. These millions are struggling, some of them in desperation and fear, to get back to the positive side of the stream. This book was written especially for those millions.
Poverty and riches often change places. Rapidly changing economic conditions have taught the world this truth, although many people may not long remember the lesson. Poverty may, and generally does, voluntarily take the place of riches. When riches take the place of poverty, the change is usually brought about through well-conceived and carefully executed PLANS. Poverty needs no plan. It needs no one to aid it because it is bold and ruthless. Riches are shy and timid. They have to be attracted. But they will rarely be attracted, and retained, until one learns, first, to tap the POWER OF THE MASTER MIND, and then proceed to understand The Tenth Step to Riches, which involves the “Mystery of Sex Transmutation.”