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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
In 'Prosperity & How to Attract It' by Orison Swett Marden, the author delves into the concept of prosperity and provides readers with insights on how to manifest abundance in their lives. Written in a clear and practical style, Marden explores the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction as tools for achieving success and prosperity. This book not only serves as a guide for personal development but also reflects the optimism and self-help movement of the early 20th century. Marden's uplifting and motivating words resonate with readers, urging them to take control of their destinies and create a life of abundance. Orison Swett Marden, a pioneer in the self-help genre, draws upon his own experiences and observations to offer timeless wisdom in 'Prosperity & How to Attract It'. As a successful author and founder of SUCCESS magazine, Marden's dedication to empowering individuals shines through in this influential work. His genuine desire to help others unlock their full potential is evident in every page, making this book a valuable resource for those seeking personal growth and prosperity. I highly recommend 'Prosperity & How to Attract It' to readers interested in harnessing the power of positive thinking and attracting abundance into their lives. Marden's timeless advice and inspirational teachings provide practical strategies for achieving success and fulfillment, making this book a must-read for those on a journey towards prosperity.
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PROSPERITY & HOW TO ATTRACT IT
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Table of Contents
Chapter I. How We Limit Our Supply
"A man will remain a ragpicker as long as he has only a ragpicker's vision."
Why go thru life exhibiting the traits of an underling? If you are a real man, don't go around looking like a beggar, talking like a beggar, acting like a beggar.
Only by thinking prosperity and abundance can you realize the abundant, prosperous life.
Fixing limitation upon ourselves is one of the cardinal sins of mankind.
Prosperity flows only through channels that are wide open to receive it. Doubt, fear and lack of confidence close these channels.
A pinched mind means a pinched, limited supply. Everything we get in life comes through the gateway of our thought.
If that is pinched, stingy, mean, what flows to us will correspond.
What would you think of a prince, the heir to a kingdom of limitless wealth and power, who should live in the condition of a pauper, who should go about the world bemoaning his hard fate and telling people how poor he was, saying that he didn't believe his father was going to leave him anything, and that he might as well make up his mind to a life of poverty and limitations?
You would say, of course, that he must be insane, and that his hard conditions, his poverty and limitations, were not actual, but imaginary; that they existed only in his mind; that his father was ready to load him with good things, with all that his heart desired, if he would only open his mind to the truth and live in the condition befitting a prince, the son and heir of a great king.
Now, if you are living in pinching poverty, in a narrow, cramped, limited environment in which there seems to be no hope, no outlook for better things; if you are not getting what you want, though working hard for it, you are just as foolish as the prince who, believing that he was poor, lived like a pauper in the midst of his father's limitless wealth.
Your limitations are in your mind, just as the prince's were in his.
You are the child of a Father who has created abundance, limitless wealth, for all of His children, but your pinched, limited, poverty-stricken thought shuts you out from all this abundance and keeps you in poverty.
A Russian laborer named Mihok, living in Omaha, Nebraska, had carried a "luck" stone in his pocket for twenty years, never guessing that it had any monetary value.
Time and again friends, who thought that it might be more than an ordinary stone, suggested that he have it examined by a jeweler. He obstinately refused until, finally, they became so insistent that he sent the stone to a Chicago jeweler, who pronounced it a pigeon-blood ruby, the largest of its kind in the world.
It weighed 24 karats and was worth $100,000!
There are millions like this poor day laborer, living in poverty, thinking that there is nothing for them but hard work and more poverty who, without knowing it, are carrying in the great within of themselves possibilities of wealth beyond their dreams.
Their wrong thinking is robbing them of their divine inheritance; shutting off the abundant supply provided for them by the Omnipotent Source of all supply.
The majority of people are in the position of a man who went out to water his garden, but inadvertently stepped on the hose, shutting off the water supply.
He had a big hose and was very much annoyed, very much disappointed, because he was getting only a mere dribble of water when he had every right to expect — and should get: — a liberal flow.
Water was at the source in abundance, ready to supply his needs; only one thing was at fault, the man himself was pinching his supply, limiting it to a miserable drizzle. He was standing on the hose and didn't know it.
That is literally what all who are living in grinding poverty are doing.
They are pinching their supply by stepping upon the hose through which plenty would come to them. They are stopping the flow of abundance that is their birthright, by their doubts, their fears, their unbelief; by visualizing poverty, thinking poverty, acting as if they never expected to have anything, to accomplish anything, or to be anything.
Everything in man's life, everything in God's universe, is based upon principle — follows a divine law; and the law of prosperity and abundance is just as definite as the law of gravitation, just as unerring as the principles of mathematics. It is a mental law.
Only by thinking abundance can you realize the abundant, prosperous life that is your birthright; in other words, according to your thought will be your life, your supply, or your lack.
Your mental attitude will be flung back to you, every time, in kind.
A poverty-stricken mental attitude will bring only poverty-stricken conditions to you. We are the creatures of our convictions. We cannot get beyond what we believe we are; what we believe we have.
Hence, if we think that we are never going to be strong or well like other people, or to be successful in our calling, we never will be.
If we are convinced that we will always be poor, we will be. You can't get'away from poverty when you don't expect to; when you don't believe that you are going to.
Many of the people who are living in poverty today never really expect anything else. Their fixed belief that they can never become prosperous keeps them in poverty; that is, it keeps their minds negative, and the mind cannot create, cannot produce, in this condition.
It is only the positive mind that can create prosperity; the negative mind is noncreative, non-productive; it can only tear down, inhibit, prevent the inflow of the good things that we long for.
It is not so much what you do with your hands as what you do with your mind that counts. Everything that has been accomplished by the hand or brain of man had its birth in the mind. The universe itself is the creation of Divine Mind.
A hard-working man who longs for prosperity, but is headed in the other direction mentally, who doesn't believe he is going to be prosperous, is neutralizing his hard work by his negative, destructive thought; he is standing on the hose that connects with his supply.
When you limit yourself in your thought, you are limiting yourself outwardly in a way which corresponds with your mental attitude, because you are obeying a law which is unchangeable.
You will notice that the man who puts a nickel in the contribution box, is not only stingy, close, and mean in all his money matters, but his face, his whole person, has a cramped, worried, pinched look. He is forever saving pennies, watching out for little things and never doing big things.
No matter how much natural ability he has, his narrow, limited, poverty thought dwarfs him and cuts off his stream of supply. He cannot do big things because he never thinks big things.
His warped mind will admit only a pinched supply instead of the big flow that is literally at his command.
It is because we have not learned how to use our thought forces that most of us go about like paupers, never glimpsing the marvelous inheritance left us by the All-supply, the All-good. Our parsimonious thought pinches our supply.
We often wonder why it is that certain people, in apparently no better circumstances than we are, get so much better things than we do; why they always insist upon and receive the best of everything. We never see them wearing cheap things — never see cheap things in their homes, or any pinching anywhere.
They buy the best food, the best fruits and vegetables in the market, and everything else in accordance. We think they are extravagant when we compare what they pay for things with what we pay for things of the same kind, and we pride ourselves that we are economizing and saving what they are wasting. But, are we?
How does our manner of living compare with theirs? Does the enjoyment we get out of life measure up to what they get? Do the few dollars we save compensate for the great lack in our lives — the lack of good food, of proper clothing, of the little pleasure trips, the social enjoyments, the picnics and various diversions which make life pleasant, healthful, and above all, much more productive for the neighbors whose extravagance we condemn?
As a matter of fact, our skimped, pinching policy leaves us poorer in the end.
Prosperity flows only through channels that are wide open to receive it. It does not flow through channels pinched by the poverty thought, by discouragement, doubt, or fear, or by a strangling narrow-visioned policy. A generous expenditure is often the wisest economy, the only thing that brings a generous success.
If a great manufacturer like Henry Ford, a great merchant like John Wanamaker, a big railroad manager, or other business man, should lose his broad vision and wide outlook; should begin to skimp on necessary output; should substitute inferior goods and men and service for the best; should reverse his policy, changing from a broad, generous one to a narrow, stingy one, he would soon find his business dwindling away to nothing.
There is no changing the principle of the law of supply. Whatever your business, your profession or occupation, or your circumstances, your mental attitude will determine your success or failure. A pinched mind means a pinched supply.
It means that you try to tap the great fountainhead of supply with a gimlet and then expect to get an abundant supply. That is impossible. Your mental attitude gauges the How of your supply.
Chapter II. The Law of Attraction
By the law of affinity you may know that your own is always seeking you if you are" seeking it With all your might and are not driving it away with your doubts.
John Burroughs thus beautifully expressed this: "I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, For lo, my own shall come to me. "Asleep, awake, by night or day, The friends I seek are seeking me.
"What matter if I stand alone? I wait with joy the coming years; My heart shall reap where it hath sown, What is mine shall know my face.
"Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high Can keep my own away from me."
It was never intended that God's children should ever want for anything.
We live in the very lap of abundance; there is plenty of everything all about us, the great cosmic universe is packed with all sorts of beautiful, marvelous things, glorious riches, ready for our use and enjoyment.
Everything the human heart can crave, the great creative Intelligence offers us. We can draw from this vast ocean of intelligence everything we wish: all that it is necessary for us to do is to obey the law of attraction, — like attracts like.
To realize prosperity and abundance does not depend upon man's own little brain, his own little one-sided efforts.
It is a question of his making his mind a magnet to attract the things he wants, to attract his desires.
Everything that the race enjoys has been attracted out of the great ocean of intelligence according to a law. All inventions, all discoveries, all the marvelous facilities of civilization, — our hospitals, our schools, our churches, our libraries, and other institutions, our homes, with their comforts and luxuries, — have all been attracted from this great cosmic storehouse of intelligence by the same law.
It was intended that our longings, our yearnings, our legitimate desires should be satisfied, that our dreams should come true. It is our ignorance of the law that would bring our own to us which keeps it from us.
When you were a boy experimenting with your little steel magnet, didn't you often try to make it pick up wood, copper, rubber, or some other substance different from itself?
And, of course, you found it would not, because it had no affinity for things that were unlike itself. You found that it would pick up a needle but not a toothpick. In other words you demonstrated the law that — Like attracts like.
Not a day passes that we do not see this law demonstrated in different ways in human life.
Sometimes the demonstrations are very tragic. Only a short time ago a little eight-year-old girl, the daughter of a Pennsylvania farmer, died from fright in a dentist's chair, where she had been placed to have a tooth extracted. Although the child knew nothing about the law, it worked just the same; and, Like Job, the thing she feared had come to her.
By the operation of the same law that draws to us disease and death, we draw to ourselves poverty or opulence, success or failure. The mind at any given time is a magnet for something.
It is a magnet for whatever thought, whatever convictions dominate the mind at the time, and the blessed, glorious thing about it all is that we can determine what the mind shall attract, what sort of a magnet it shall become.
Now, you may attract to you that which is not good for you, that which will damn you, that which will pain and humiliate.
By concentrating upon and working for it you become a specialist in that line and the law of attraction brings it to you.
If you have a prosperity mental attitude, if you have a vigorous faith that you are going to get away from poverty, that you are going to demonstrate prosperity, abundance, and strive intelligently and persistently to realize your vision, you will do so. That's the law. If you obey the law you will get good results.
If we could only see a picture of the mental processes of whatever is held in the mind, pulling the things which correspond to our thought; if we could see more failure, more bad business, more debts, more losses starting towards us because we have contacted with these things in our thought, we would quit worrying about the things we don't want and think the things we do want, attracting more instead of less, attracting abundance instead of poverty, prosperity instead of failure.
Oh, how often we make our mind a magnet to attract all sorts of enemy thoughts, poverty thoughts, sick thoughts, fear thoughts, and worry thoughts, and then somehow we expect that a miracle will be performed, and that out of these negative causes we will be sure in some way to enjoy positive results.
No miracle could perform such a change as this. Results correspond with causes.
Before we can be conquered by poverty, we must, first of all, be poor mentally. The poverty thought, the acceptance of a poverty-stricken environment as an inevitable condition from which you cannot get away, keeps you in the poverty current and draws more poverty to you.
It is the operation of the same law which attracts good things, a better environment, to those who think abundance, prosperity, who are convinced that they are going to be well off, and work confidently, hopefully, toward that end.
Not the things we long for most, not the things we wish for, but our own, that which has lived in our thoughts and mind, dominated in our mentality, in our mental attitude, that is what the law of attraction brings to us.
It may be that this law has brought us the very things we hated and wanted to get rid of, but we have dwelt upon them, and, because they formed the mental model, the life processes built them into our lives.
The law of attraction often brings us hated bedfellows, but they have lived so long in our minds, that they must become a part of our lives, by the very law that like attracts like.
Until recently many of us did not understand what Job meant when he said, "The thing which I greatly feared has come upon me." Now we know that he expressed a psychological law that is as inexorable as the laws of mathematics.
We know that the things we fear most, the things we have a horror of and want to flee from, we are really pursuing by our very fear of them. By predicting them and visualizing them in our minds, we are attracting them to ourselves, and when we do this we are turning our backs upon the very things which we long for most.
The time will come when the law of attraction will be known as the greatest power in creation. This is the law upon which all successes, all characters, all lives are built.
Mental attraction is the only power upon which we can build anything successfully.
It is an inevitable law, an inexorable principle, that everything attracts to itself everything else like itself, that all affinities tend to get together, and when you make your mind a magnet it will attract according to its quality, according to your mental vision, your thoughts, your motives, your dominant attitude.
The saying "Money attracts money" is only another way of stating the law, — "like attracts like." The prosperous classes think prosperity, believe in it, work for it, never for a moment doubt their right to have all the money and all the good things they need, and of course they get them.
They are living up to the very letter and spirit of the law of attraction. A Rockefeller, a Schwab, uses this law in a masterly way to amass a large fortune.
The newsboy uses the same law in selling his newspapers, running a news-stand and climbing gradually to the mayoralty of his city or town. We all use this law of attraction no matter whether we know it or not.
We use it every instant of our lives.
Many people wonder that bad men, wicked men, vicious men are successful in business, at money making, in amassing a fortune, while the good man, the upright man, doesn't seem to be able to make any headway.
They haven't the knack of accumulation in the way of making money. Good things do not seem to come to them. If they make an investment they almost always lose; they buy in the wrong market, or sell in the wrong market.
Now, a man's morals do not have anything specially to do with his money-making faculties, except that honesty is always and everywhere the best business policy. It is just a question of obeying the law of accumulation, the law that like attracts like.
A very bad man may obey the law of accumulation, the law of attraction, and accumulate a vast fortune. If he is honest, his other defects and immoralities, his viciousness, will not hinder the working of the law. The law is unmoral — it is neither moral nor immoral.
Multitudes of people are attracting the wrong things because they do not know the law. They have never learned that the great secret of health, happiness, and success lies in holding the mental attitude which builds, which constructs, the mental attitude which draws to us the good things we desire.
They have never learned the difference between building and tearing down thoughts; the difference between success and failure thoughts; in fact, they do not know that whatever comes to us in life, in our undertakings, great or small, is largely a question of the kind of thoughts we hold in the mind.
We can attract the thing we desire as easily as we can attract the thing we hate and despise and long to get rid of. It is simply a matter of holding the image of the thing in the mind.
That is the model which the life processes will build into our environment and which we will objectify.
Like attracts like, failure more failure, poverty more poverty. Hatred attracts more hatred, envy more envy, jealousy more jealousy, and malice more malice.
Everything has power to attract its kind. The feeling of jealousy or hatred is a seed sown in the great cosmic soil all about us, and the eternal laws return to us a harvest the same in kind. What we sow we reap, just as the soil will return to us exactly what we put into it.
Nothing has the power to reproduce anything but itself.
There is no exception to this law. The law cannot pity or help you if you break a bone, or are injured, any more than the law of electricity can help you when you abuse it. It will kill you if you break the law.
To think about and worry about the things we do not want, or to fear that they will come to us, is but to invite them; because every impression becomes an expression, or tends to become so unless the impression is neutralized by its opposite.
If we think too much about our losses, too much about our possible failure, all these things will tend to bring to us the very thing we are trying to get away from.
On every hand we see this law of like attracting like exemplified in the lives of the poverty-stricken multitudes, who, through ignorance of the law, keep themselves in their unfortunate condition by saturating their minds with the poverty idea; thinking and acting and talking poverty; living in the belief in its permanency; fearing, dreading, and worrying about it.
They do not realize, no one has ever told them, that as long as people mentally see the hunger wolf at the door and the poorhouse ahead of them; as long as they expect nothing but lack and poverty and hard conditions, they are headed toward these things; they are making it impossible for prosperity to come in their direction.
The way to attract prosperity and drive poverty out of the life is to work in harmony with the law instead of against it.
To expect prosperity, to believe with all your heart, no matter how present conditions may seem to contradict, that you are going to become prosperous, that you are already so, is the very first condition of the law of attaining what you desire.
You cannot get it by doubting or fearing. Whatever we visualize and work for we will get.
What we most frequently visualize, what we think most about, is constantly weaving itself into the fabric of our lives, becoming a part of ourselves, increasing the power of our mental magnet to attract those things to us.
It doesn't matter whether they are things we fear and try to avoid or things that are good for us, that we long to get. Keeping them in mind increases our affinity for them and inevitably tends to bring them into our lives.
It is a curious fact that many people seem to think that one must spend years as an apprentice to become an expert in any line of endeavor, in business or in a profession, but that in regard to prosperity it is largely a matter of chance, of fate, something which cannot be affected very much by anything they may be able to do.
They say, "Well, I was not built that way. I am not a natural money-maker, and never can be." Or they excuse themselves on the ground that their parents and those before them were never money-makers, and never did anything more than make a bare living.
There is nothing at all peculiar about prosperity any more than there is about legal efficiency or expertness in law or medicine.
Its realization is purely a matter of concentration and of preparation; a matter of focusing all our powers upon the prosperity law in order to attract prosperity and to make ourselves expert in attaining it.
The law of prosperity, of opulence, is just as definite as the law of gravitation, and it works just as unerringly. Its first principle is mental. Wealth is created mentally first; it is thought out before it becomes a reality.
If you would attract success, keep your mind saturated with the success idea. Develop an attitude of mind that will attract success. When you think success, when you act it, when you live it, when you talk it, when it is in your bearing, then you are attracting it.
When we once get this law of attraction thoroughly fixed in our minds we will be careful about attracting our enemies, contacting with them through our mind, thinking about them, worrying about them, fearing, and dreading them.
We will hold the sort of thoughts that will attract the things we long for and are seeking, not the things we dread, and despise, and are trying to avoid.
It is just as easy to attract what you want as to attract what you don't want. It is just a question of holding the right thought, and making the right effort.
There is no exception to the law of attraction, any more than there is to the law of gravitation, or the laws of mathematics.
Chapter III. Driving Away Prosperity
As long as you hold the poorhouse thought you are heading toward the poorhouse. A pinched, stingy thought means a pinched, stingy supply.
The man who sows failure thoughts, poverty thoughts, can no more reap success, prosperity harvests, than a farmer can get a wheat crop from sowing thistles.
No matter how hard you may work, if you keep your mind saturated with poverty thoughts, poverty pictures, you are driving away the very thing you are pursuing.
Stop thinking trouble if you want to attract its opposite; stop thinking poverty if you wish to attract plenty. Refuse to have anything to do with the things you fear, the things you do not want.
It is doubting and facing the wrong way, facing towards the black, depressing, hopeless outlook that kills effort and paralyzes ambition.
A man once told me that if he could be assured that he would never have to go to the poorhouse, and that he would have the necessities of life for his family, he would be perfectly satisfied.
He said it was evidently not intended that he should have luxuries or anything more than a bare living; he had always been a poor man and he always expected to be poor, that his people before him had also been poor.
Now, it was just this mental attitude, — for he was a hard worker, — of always expecting to be poor, believing he would always be poor, that kept him from attracting prosperity.
He had not expected prosperity and, of course, could not attract what he did not expect. He only just managed to get along, for that was all he expected to do.
One of the chief reasons why the great mass of human beings live such mean, stingy, poverty-stricken lives is because their negative mental attitudes, their doubts and fears and worries, their lack of faith, attract these conditions.
The Good Book tells us that "the destruction of the poor is their poverty." That is, their poverty thought, their poverty conviction, their poverty expectation and poverty belief, their general hopeless mental outlook keeps away prosperity.
The worst thing about poverty is the poverty thought, the poverty belief.
Multitudes of people never expect to be comfortable, to say nothing of having the luxuries and refinements of life. They expect poverty, and they do not understand that this very expectancy increases the power of their mental magnet to attract want and limitation, even though they are trying to get away from it; that we always head towards our expectations and convictions.
Poverty begins in the mind. The majority of poor people remain poor because they are mental paupers to begin with. They don't believe they are ever going to be prosperous.
Fate and conditions are against them; they were born poor and they expect always to be poor, — that is their unvarying trend of thought, their fixed conviction.
Go among the very poor in the slums and you will find them always talking poverty, bewailing their fate, their hard luck, the cruelty and injustice of society.
They will tell you how they are ground down by the upper classes, kept down by their greedy employers, or by an unjust order of things which they can't change.
They think of themselves as victims instead of victors, as conquered instead of conquerors. The great-trouble with most people who fail to realize their ambition is that they face life the wrong way. They do not understand the tremendous potency of the influence of the habitual mental attitude in shaping the career and actually creating conditions.
It is really pitiful to see people making slaves of themselves trying to get ahead, but all the time side-tracking the good things which would come their way if they did not head them off by their conviction that there is nothing much in the world for them anyway, nothing more than a bare living at the best.
They are actually driving away the very things which might flow to them in abundance if they held the right mental attitude.
In every walk of life we see men and women driving away the things they want. Most people think the things they do not want. They go through life trying to build happy, prosperous, healthful lives out of negative, destructive thinking, always neutralizing the results of their hard work.
They indulge in worries, in fears and envies, in thoughts of hatred and revenge, and carry habitually a mental attitude, which means destruction to health, growth, and creative possibility.
Their lives are pitched to a minor key. There is always a downward tendency in their thought and conversation.
Nine-tenths of the people in the world who complain of being poor and failures are headed in the wrong direction, headed right away from the condition or thing they long for.
What they need is to be turned about so that they will face their goal instead of turning their backs on it by their destructive thinking and going in the other direction.
The Morgans, the Wanamakers, the Marshall Fields, the Schwabs, think prosperity, and they get it. They don't anticipate poverty; they don't anticipate failure; they know they are going to be prosperous and successful, because they have eliminated all doubt from their minds.
Doubt is the factor which kills success, just as the fear of failure kills prosperity. Everything is mental first, whether failure or success.
Everything passes through our consciousness before it is a reality. Multitudes of people who work hard and try hard in every way to get on would be shocked if they could see a mental picture of themselves headed toward the poorhouse, in fact, as they actually are in thought.
They do not know that, by an inexorable law, they must head toward their mental attitude, that when they continually think and talk poverty and suggest it by their slovenly dress, their personal appearance, and by their environment, when they predict that there is nothing for them but poverty, that they will always be poor, no matter how hard they may work.
They do not know that their doubts and fears and poverty-stricken convictions are making prosperity impossible for them.
They do not know that as long as they hold such thoughts they cannot possibly head toward the goal of prosperity.
The sum total of our life is that upon which we have concentrated. If poverty or opulence, if success or failure, if prosperity or want has occupied our minds, if we have focused our attention upon one of these, that is just what we shall see incorporated in our life.
What you have, my friend, what you have surrounded yourself with, is a reproduction of your thought, your faith, your belief in your efforts; is what you have been conscious of.
Our thoughts, our faith, our beliefs, our efforts, all materialize, and are objectified about us. Our words become flesh and live with us; our thoughts, our emotions, also become flesh and live with us; they become our environment and surround us.
There is only one way to get away from poverty, and that is to turn your back upon it. Begin right away by putting the poverty thought, the poverty fear, out of your mind.
Assume as far as possible a prosperous appearance; think the way you want to go; expect to get what you are after, the thing you long for, and you will get it.
Mentally and physically, in your clothing, in your surroundings, in your home, in your bearing, erase, as far as you can, all marks of poverty.
Affirm with Walt Whitman, "I myself am good fortune." Don't let slovenliness in your home, shabbiness in your children or wife, be an unfavorable advertisement of you.
The fear of poverty is its greatest power. That is what gives it its stranglehold on the masses. Get rid of your fear of it, my friend. Let the prosperity thought take the place of the poverty thought, the poverty fear, in your mind.
If you have been unfortunate, don't advertise your discouragement. Brush up, brace up, dress up, clean up; and above all — look up and think up.
Give an up-look to your home, however humble.
Remember that a stream of plenty will not flow towards a poverty-saturated thought. A pinched, stingy thought means scanty supply. Thinking abundance, opulence, and defying limitations will open up the mind and set the thought currents towards greatly increased supply.
If all the poverty-stricken people in the world to-day would quit thinking poverty, quit dwelling on it, worrying about it and fearing it; if they would wipe the poverty thought out of their minds; if they would cut off mentally all relations with poverty and substitute the opulent thought, the prosperity thought, the mental attitude that faces toward prosperity, the change in their condition would be amazing.
The Creator never made a man to be poor. There is nothing in his constitution which fits drudgery and poverty. Man was made for prosperity, happiness, and success.
He was not made to suffer any more than he was made to be insane or to be a criminal.
Thousands of people have literally thought themselves away from a life of poverty by getting a glimpse of that great fundamental principle — that we tend to realize in the life what we persistently hold in the thought and vigorously struggle toward.
Don't think that by holding the constructive, creative thought only now and then, or just when you may happen to feel like it, that it is going to counteract the influence of holding the destructive thought most of the time.
Lots of people who treat for prosperity and opulence, hold the want thought, the lack thought too, and that is the reason their prayer is not answered. They get just the opposite, because that is the thought, the expectation which predominates in the mind.
Our conviction is much stronger than our will power. No will power can help you to do a thing when convinced that you can't. For instance, if you are convinced that a fatal disease which you believe you have inherited is overcoming you, this thought is infinitely stronger than your will to prevent it.
We cannot get away from our convictions. These are being built into the mind, being built into the life and character. If you are convinced that you are going to be poor, that you are never going to be prosperous, no matter how hard you may work, your convictions will triumph and you will live and die in penury.
A man will never be anything but a beggar while he thinks beggarly thoughts. If you are living in the thought of limitation, the conviction of lack and want, the fear of poverty, the belief that you can never become prosperous, you are holding yourself down, keeping yourself back.
