Your Appointment With Success

success!

Introduction

This book can make anyone rich and the rich richer. It can easily pay a thousand per cent dividend on your investment.

Everyone, regardless of past experience, education and profession will take from these pages powerful new thoughts and objectives. The author’s red-hot approach to the problems confronting any worthwhile success will quickly make you feel a surge of new energy, hope and vitality.

In short, if you sincerely want a stronger, more productive and successful tomorrow with greater happiness and peace of mind, then this book is for you, and you will discover that anything you want your tomorrow to bring, you can make it bring.

CHAPTER 1

Your Million-Dollar Mind In Action

You Are the Most Important Ingredient

Do you want a bigger slice of life? Of course you do. Everyone does. Life is an individual proposition—a complete do-it-yourself project. The most important ingredient in your success is you. Your whole well-being and progress stem from the mental tools given you and your ability to put them to proper use. The creative or destructive power of your thoughts is limitless. Your prevailing thoughts will appear into your tangible world as an actuality. They materialize into their physical equivalent. Every thought, positive or negative, born in your mind demands a result. Reality is that simple. To go from failure to success is as easy as withdrawing attention from the one and fixing it on the other. Stop thinking about what you don’t want, and fill your thoughts with what you do want.

The Iron Bar

Suppose you have a plain iron bar worth about $10. If you make it into horseshoes it will double in value; made into knives, pots, pans, etc., it will be worth in the neighborhood of $350; make the bar into pins and needles and it will be worth some $4,000; and if you make it into balance springs for watches, it is worth $300,000. Think of yourself as the material you have to work with. What you make of this material determines your value. You have countless unused faculties within you. The mind is like a piece of wood that needs only the proper spark to set it aflame. Each of us has the latent potential of an untapped gold mine, and like the mine, that potential is worthless unless developed. To utilize it we must first realize that it is there. Discover what you have and it won’t let you down. Unfortunately, most people have come to accept their work as a necessary evil and their level of meager happiness and accomplishment, of constant worry and pressure, as the normal state of affairs. When caught in the grip of illness or the blues, their spirits don’t sink from high to low—only from low to lower.

Success or Failure

The great majority of people are filled with fears—mostly imaginary—senseless worries, anxieties. They are obsessed with their own imagined limitations. They cling to familiar surroundings, however obscure, even when those surroundings breed poverty, sickness and despair. They thereby give themselves up to a similar fate. To them success is only a word; they will never experience the thrill of it. It’s sad that in our advanced, modern world most of us are totally unaware that we are the principal cause of the unpleasant and adverse circumstances in which we find ourselves—that if we will just change the direction of our mental attitude from downward to upward, all else will fall into place. People look to the outside world for success and happiness, and they look in vain. If they only knew, as you will know, to look inside themselves, they could then set about eliminating, one by one, such negative thoughts as doubt, worry, anxiety, fear and despair, and replace them with the positive—confidence, faith and happy, productive anticipation; they would turn their attention from destructive thoughts of failure to constructive thoughts of success. The universal Law of Action and Reaction is constantly at work, regardless of whether or not we are aware of it. Break this law—this invisible force—and you suffer the consequences; learn to work with it, and your opportunities are virtually limitless.

There are but two powers to which you can belong: the positive or the negative. Your automatic thought pattern becomes your attitude. No word or action can take place without first being preceded by the thought. Thought is the keynote to success; there is nothing you can’t do when you swing your mind around.

The Old Hebrew

An old Hebrew once said, The biggest sin for man is to miss the mark. In these few words he revealed his deep understanding of man’s unlimited potential. We know there are many archers, and but few hit the mark—simply because they don’t take full charge of their minds. You can only get out of life what you put into it—what you send ahead of you. You walk the road that your thoughts have paved.

Think Big—Act Big

A senior executive from one of the largest oil companies in America has very little formal education. If you were to ask him what single factor contributed most to his outstanding success, he would answer without hesitation, Think big and act big and success has no choice but to follow. After many years on top, he still reminds himself regularly to THINK BIG and ACT BIG.

You must realize that you have to think big to rise, that you must free yourself from the restraining, degrading shackles of petty, negative thought. Positive and negative are like light and darkness; they cannot be found together in the same person at the same time.

You! Make the Choice

The laws governing prosperity are always in force. Yet four out of every five individuals waste a lifetime in the stubborn and futile struggle to force these laws into their living pattern, rather than expend a little energy and effort to adapt themselves to and work with the laws. They are like the story of little Joe, who was marching through town with ten thousand other scouts, all of whom were in step but him. When he marched by where his mother stood watching, she pointed to her neighbor and said, See, there is my little Joe. And look at that! she added excitedly, everybody is out of step but him!

I am ever amazed at the multitude of otherwise intelligent people who are so preoccupied with failing that they can’t take time from their busy schedules to learn how to succeed, or even to differentiate between success and failure. Success is always there. If you seem hopelessly far from it, it is only because you are unaware of the right road. You have free rein over your mind—take stock of yourself and find out what is standing between you and success. What are your dominant thoughts? What will they get you? Success and happiness in your work and in your life, or frustration and failure?

You are the captain. Where are you heading? The road to success, or the road to failure? It’s. your own ball game to win or lose.

Science and the Mind

This fabulous, intricate mind of yours—what do scientists really know about it? Granted, the last ten years have seen tremendous strides in this field; but even so, understanding is just in the embryonic stage. Still, just as we can’t explain why a rubber ball bounces, but know that it does bounce, so science with only a fragmentary picture of the limitless capabilities of the human mind can tell you how to take advantage of the possibilities locked within the mind. And that is what we are concerned with here. It is not outer space that holds the key to your destiny, but inner space—the space between your ears.

Your Mind

We flatter ourselves that we are using eight to ten per cent of the capacity of our minds, but that figure is a gross exaggeration. Actually we have barely scratched the surface of its capabilities. Just as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima released only one thousandth of the potential energy hidden within the atom, so we are utilizing only a thousandth—or even less than a thousandth—of the creative abilities lying dormant and undiscovered within our brain.

The mind is man’s most prized possession. Physically it is not impressive—a grayish substance extending about seven and a half inches from the forehead to the back of the neck. It weighs approximately two and a half pounds and contains from fourteen to sixteen billion vibrating cells. But within this unimposing matter is locked a vast storehouse of potential creativity, the unrealized power and greatness that dwell in every man.

If scientists could copy your brain, they would need an area the size of the Rose Bowl. On it they would have to build a computer eighty stories high, and to keep it functioning would require the energy of a Hoover Dam, or 3 billion watts.

For clarification we will divide the mind into three sections. First, there is the conscious mind with its understanding and reasoning intelligence and studious nature. Closely connected to it is the subconscious, which exercises control over the entire impulsive and automatic system. The life-giving energy which enables the conscious and subconscious to function is produced by the over-all superconscious mind, or universal intelligence. Like a diamond flashing in the sun, each of these great divisions of man’s mind has many facets reflecting its own rays of limitless potential.

Schopenhauer’s Analogy

The conscious and subconscious, however, are not complete in their separate classifications, but need each other. This interdependence is well illustrated by Schopenhauer’s analogy of a strong and active blind man who can ‘walk,’ meaning the subconscious, bearing on his shoulders a weak, lame man who can ‘see,’ meaning the conscious, each one helpless without the other.

Conscious Mind

Let us pause here for a moment to recognize that success needs no explanations, and failure allows no alibis, and that when we understand the source of success, things run more smoothly. With this in mind, and further reminded by the sage words of Solomon, With all thy getting, get understanding, let us take a look at the conscious mind as step number one toward finding out why things work out for us the way they do.

The conscious is the part of the mind that you are most familiar with. It is here that all your thinking and reasoning take place. You use the conscious mind for planning, and it is your decision-maker for any beliefs, ideas, advice and opinions that are brought to its attention. Here also is the seat of your little memory, which in rare cases has a memory capacity of up to forty-eight hours, but generally is restricted to a maximum of twenty-four.

Guardian of the Subconscious Mind

All this, I am sure, is to some extent familiar knowledge, but what we must fully understand is that the most important function of the conscious mind is to stand as porter—act as watchman over the subconscious. Your major means of contacting and influencing this inner mind—this unlimited power—is with your conscious mind. If you remember nothing else, remember this. You will soon see that realization of this fact is tremendously important to your happiness, your well-being, and most definitely your financial success.

Subconscious Mind

First a quick look at the functions of this part of the mind and then we will concentrate on the qualities that most concern us here. The subconscious mind is in charge of all vital organs, glands and involuntary or automatic functions by which the body maintains itself. It is in charge of running the human machinery and sees to it that it functions properly. If, for example, your kneecap is in need of protein, your subconscious flashes an order to the liver, which in turn directs protein toward the deficient area. You may scratch an elbow; instantly your subconscious activates the soldiers of physical health to repair the damage. The one hundred million cells in your skin which act as a thermostat are under its direct jurisdiction. It also supervises the process of nutrition and digestion. It sees to it that your heart