THE MIRACLES OF RIGHT THOUGHT. Orison Swett Marden

      Stop thinking trouble if you want to attract its opposite. Stop thinking poverty if you want to attract wealth. Do not have anything to do with the things you have been fearing. They are fatal enemies to your advancement. Cut them off. Expel them from your mind. Forget them. Think the opposite thoughts just as persistently as you can, and you will be surprised to see how soon you will begin to attract the very things for which you long.

      The menial attitude which we hold toward our work or our aim has everything to do with what we accomplish. If you go to your work with the attitude of a slave lashed to his task, and see in it only drudgery; if you work without hope, see no future in what you are doing beyond getting a bare living; if you see no light ahead, nothing but poverty, deprivation, and hard work all your life; if you think that you were destined to such a hard life, you cannot expect to get anything else than that for which you look.

      If, on the other hand, no matter how poor you may be today, you can see a better future; if you believe that some day you are going to rise out of humdrum work, that you are going to get up out of the basement of life into the drawing-room, where beauty, comfort, and joy await you; if your ambition is clean-cut, and you keep your eye steadily upon the goal which you hope to reach and feel confident that you have the ability to attain, you will accomplish something worthwhile.

      Keeping the faith that we shall some time do the thing which we cannot now see any possible way of accomplishing, just holding steadily the mental attitude, the belief that we will accomplish it, that somehow, some way, it will come to us, the clinging to our vision, gets the mind into such a creative condition that it becomes a magnet to draw the thing desired.

      I have never known a man who believed in himself and constantly affirmed his ability to do what he undertook, who always kept his eye constantly on his goal and struggled manfully toward it, who did not make a success of life. Aspiration becomes inspiration and then realization.

      Try to keep your mind in an uplifting, upbuilding attitude. Never allow yourself for an instant to harbor a doubt that you are finally going to accomplish what you undertake.

      These doubts are treacherous, they destroy your creative ability, neutralize ambition. Constantly say to yourself, “I must have what I need; it is my right and I am going to have it.”

      There is a great cumulative, magnetic effect in holding in your mind continually the thought that you were made for success, for health, for happiness, for usefulness, and that nothing in the world but yourself can keep you from it.

      Form a habit of repeating this affirmation, this faith in your ultimate triumph; hold it tenaciously, vigorously, and after a while you will be surprised to find how the things come to you which you have so longed for, yearned for, and struggled towards.

      I have seen a man, when all the results of half a lifetime of struggle and sacrifice had been swept away by financial disaster, when he had nothing left but his grit and determination, and a great family of hungry mouths to feed, who would not even for an instant admit that he would not get on his feet again. There was no use talking discouragement to that man! You might as well have tried to discourage a Napoleon. With clenched fists, and a determination which did not recognize defeat, he kept his eye resolutely on his goal and pushed on. In a few years he was on his feet again.

      A man was not intended to be a puppet of circumstances, a slave to his environment, he was intended to make his environment, to create his condition.

      Nothing comes to us without cause, and that cause is mental. Our mental attitude creates our condition of success or failure. The result of our work will correspond with the nature of our thoughts, our habitual mental attitude. To produce, the mind must be kept in a positive, creative condition. A discordant, worrying, despondent, poverty-facing mental attitude will quickly render the mind negative, and will produce a troop of mental enemies that will effectually bar our way to success and happiness.

      Our mental faculties are like servants. They give us exactly what we expect of them. If we trust them, if we depend upon them, they will give us their best. If we are afraid, they will be afraid.

      Negative characters wait for things to happen. They have a feeling that somehow things are going to happen anyway, and that they cannot do much to change them.

      It is the positive constructive mental attitude that has accomplished all of the great things in the world. It is the creative, aggressive, pushing, stimulating power that is back of all achievement. A strong, vigorous character creates a condition that will force things to happen. Knowing that nothing will move of itself, he is always putting into operation forces that do things.

      Many positive minds become negative by influences which destroy their self-confidence. They gradually lose faith in themselves. Perhaps this begins through the suggestion of incompetence from others, the suggestion that they do not know their business or are not equal to the position they hold. After a while, through this subtle suggestion, initiative is weakened; the victims do not undertake things with quite the same vigor as formerly; they gradually lose the power of quick decision, and soon fear to decide anything of importance. Their minds become vacillating. Thus, instead of the leaders they once were, they become followers.

      What we vigorously resolve to do, believe in with all our heart, confidently expect, the mental forces tend to realize. The very intensity of expectation enlists the vigor of all the mental processes in trying to accomplish things. In other words, all the forces of the mind fall into line with our expectation and resolution.

      Our expectancy, our determination to achieve the thing on which we have set our heart, forms a pattern, a working model, which the mind endeavors to reproduce in reality. It is the mental picture which is used as the model for the creative forces.

      The man who is endowed with great expectancy and is determined to reach his goal, let what will stand in his way, by his very resolution gets rid of a lot of success enemies which trip up the weak and the irresolute.

      There is a mysterious power in the Great Within of us which we cannot explain, but which we all feel to be there, which tends to carry out our commands, our resolves, whatever they may be.

      For example, if I persist in thinking and affirming that I am a nobody, that I am “a poor worm of the dust,” that I am not as good as other people, I shall after a while begin really to believe this, and then a fatal acceptance will be registered in my subconsciousness, and the mental machinery will begin to reproduce the “nobody” pattern. If I radiate the thought of lack and of weakness, of inefficiency, the pattern will, of course, be woven into my life, and I shall express weakness, failure, poverty.

      But, on the other hand, if I stoutly affirm that I am heir to all the good things in the universe and that they belong to me as my birthright, if I firmly declare my faith in my kingship and constantly assert that I am able to carry out superbly the great life purpose which is indicated in my bent, assert that power is mine, that health is mine, that I will have nothing to do with sickness, with weakness, with discord, I then make my mind so positive, so creative in its assertive attitude that, instead of destroying, it produces, instead of tearing down, it is building up for me the very thing for which I long.

      Constructive thinking means health and prosperity. Our faculties were intended to be producers. Negative thinking means wretchedness, disease, suffering of all kinds. Constructive thought is man’s protector, his savior from all discord, poverty, disease. The people in the great failure army are negative thinkers, while those in the successful ranks are positive, constructive thinkers.

      A vigorous, positive mental attitude IS the best possible self-protection.

      It is when we are negative that we say “yes” when if we had been positive—normal—we should have said “no.” It is when we are negative, because our judgment is then defective, that we make bad bargains, poor investments, and do all sorts of foolish things. A negative mind is not in a position to take important steps. When we make our slips, our bad breaks and our unfortunate ventures and bad decisions, we are in a more or less discouraged, despondent, unbalanced state and are willing to do almost anything to get into a comfortable position, an attitude of assurance, anything to get rid of our fears and anxieties for the