Contents
Cover
About the Book
Also by Norman Vincent Peale
Title Page
A WORD TO THE READER
I DOES POSITIVE THINKING ALWAYS WORK?
II PRE-CONDITION YOUR MIND TO SUCCESS
III NO MORE FAILURE FOR YOU
IV THE KIND OF PEOPLE PEOPLE LIKE
V THERE CAN BE LOTS OF FUN IN LIFE
VI THE WONDERFUL LAW OF ABUNDANCE
VII WHAT TO DO ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE AFRAID OF
VIII HOW TO FEEL REAL SECURITY
IX HOW TO HANDLE YOUR DIFFICULTY
X DON’T LET PRESSURE PRESSURE YOU
XI BETTER HEALTH THROUGH POSITIVE THINKING
XII HOW TO BE MARRIED AND ENJOY IT
XIII LEARN TO LIVE WITH THE SPIRITUAL FORCES AROUND YOU
XIV YOU CAN BECOME STRONGEST IN YOUR WEAKEST PLACE
EPILOGUE
Copyright
THE POWER OF CONFIDENCE
Does positive thinking always work? The answer, as shown in this book, is a resounding YES.
Here, in greater depth than ever before Norman Vincent Peale offers detailed programmes to help you to eliminate areas of weakness, overcome insecurity, push past the first layers of fatigue and release the vast energy within you.
Here too are the dramatic stories of people who have transformed their lives through the power of confident thinking and faith to restore confidence and vitality to their lives.
The Power of Positive Thinking
The Power of Positive Living
The Amazing Results of Positive Thinking
The Positive Way to Change Your Life
The Power of Positive Thinking for Young People
Stay Alive All Your Life
Courage and Confidence
You Can if You Think You Can
HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE wrote this book. I have simply put together the combined experiences of many men and women.
This is a result book. It is the story of thrilling things which took place in the lives of thousands of people when they applied the principles of dynamic change.
Since publication of The Power of Positive Thinking, a book which teaches effective living through right thinking and practical religious faith, thousands of readers have communicated with me. They told how, by the application of positive thinking principles to their own life situations, they have mastered fear, healed personal relationships, found better health, overcome inner conflicts and gained strong new confidence.
Writers of these letters invariably expressed themselves in terms of joy and faith in God. Readers repeatedly said that they started reading the Bible, and they told how it took on new meaning. Indeed, they declared that they drew from it faith and happiness they had not previously known. They discovered new values in the church, and the use of practical spiritual techniques became an exciting adventure. These letters came from Catholics, Protestants and Jews alike, and told how God had become a living reality. Many referred to experiencing Jesus Christ in their lives, and this spiritual phenomenon is described with deep feeling as being very warm, rich and personal. New potentials were found in spiritual living, especially in the power of prayer. Some who had gone regularly to church for years, but with no joy or sense of life spoke wonderingly of fresh discoveries in faith.
What excitement, what sense of wonder, what new life, what love of their fellow men, and of life itself, these people told about.
While readers have graciously expressed appreciation of the teachings outlined in The Power of Positive Thinking, many have found either new uses for the suggested methods or, in some cases, exciting new formulas for effective living, which in their enthusiasm they sent to me. These discoveries of fresh techniques should, I felt, be passed on to others for the helpfulness they are certain to bring.
So wonderful were the letters and word-of-mouth statements concerning the workability of the positive way of life that, when I gathered many of them together in book form, a natural title was The Amazing Results of Positive Thinking. This book is a laboratory demonstration of the real experiences of many people with formulas that actually changed lives.
Through these formulas thousands of people have discovered a way of thinking and living that changed sorrow to joy, weakness to strength, failure to success, despair to hope, and defeat to victory. This new book explains how the same principles can help you. And, after reading these results, perhaps you will want to put these powerful techniques to work in your life. Then won’t you write to me about your own results, that I may pass them on to encourage and help others.
To you, my reader and friend, God bless and guide you always. And He will, too.
NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
DOES POSITIVE THINKING always work?
Yes.
Now, I realise this is a rather bold statement. And someone may object: ‘Is that so. I had lots of problems. I read positive thinking and I still have problems.’ Someone else may say, ‘Well, I had a business that was in the doldrums, and I tried positive thinking, and my business is still in the doldrums. Positive thinking didn’t change the facts. Failure exists. If you deny that, you’re just being an ostrich, burying your head in the sand’.
So often, people don’t really understand the nature of positive thinking. A positive thinker does not refuse to recognise the negative, he refuses to dwell on it. Positive thinking is a form of thought which habitually looks for the best results from the worst conditions. It is possible to look for something to build on; it is possible to expect the best for yourself even though things look bad. And the remarkable fact is that when you seek good, you are very likely to find it.
This seeking-the-positive is a deliberate process, and a matter of choice. Not long ago I received word that a friend of mine had been fired. In talking with Bill, I learned the circumstances. He had been summarily dismissed. No explanation was given except there had been a policy change, and he was no longer needed. To make matters worse, nine months earlier Bill had received a handsome offer from a competing firm, he had talked the matter over with his boss, and his boss had persuaded him to stay on, saying: ‘We need you here, Bill. And frankly, things look pretty good for you.’
Well, of course, Bill reacted rather bitterly to all of this. He went around feeling unwanted, insecure, rejected. His ego had been hurt. He became morose and resentful, and in a state of mind like that, he wasn’t in a very good condition to look for another job.
This is exactly the kind of situation where positive thinking can do its best. One day, Bill dug out an old copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and read it through. What possible good was there in his condition, he wondered? He didn’t know. But he could see plenty of negative factors, and he clearly realised that these negative emotions were dragging him down. If he was going to put positive thinking to work, the first thing he had to do was get rid of the negative feelings.
Here, at least, was a place he could begin. So he practised the principle of thought replacement. That is, he deliberately filled his mind with positive affirmations and crowded out the negative thoughts. He began a systematic programme of prayer and told the Lord: ‘I believe You have a plan for my life, so there must be some purpose in my getting fired. Instead of railing against my fate, I humbly ask You to show me the purpose in what has happened.’ Once he began to believe there had been a reason and some meaning behind what had happened to him, it was easier to rid himself of resentment against his former employers. And once that happened he was ‘employable’ again.
One day, shortly after he had reached this point in his thinking, Bill met an old friend. The got to talking, and the friend asked how things were.
‘Oh, I’ve just been fired,’ Bill said casually.
The friend was surprised. ‘Well you’re certainly honest enough about it,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
Bill told him, and he finished by saying: ‘. . . and I know the Lord has a job for me somewhere else.’
‘The Lord! Aren’t you worried?’
‘Not at all. Something better will turn up. In my philosophy, when one door shuts another will open if you just have faith and put your problem in God’s hands.’
A few days later Bill received a telephone call from his friend, saying that there was a long-unfilled opening in his company, and asking him if he wanted the job – salarywise is wasn’t as good as his last position, but it had potential. Bill took it. There was no doubt about the fact that in his new job he was in a better position to be of service to people. He realised this very shortly and soon discovered that his new activity was one he had always wanted. He became stimulated and excited about his work in a way that he had almost forgotten at his previous place of employment. He would grow. This, he felt sure, was part of the plan that God had in mind.
Now the important thing to analyse here is why positive thinking worked. It’s not that some magic entered the picture and created a job out of the ether. There was a definite scientific principle at work. When Bill had his mind filled with resentments and angers and hatreds, he was destroying his own value as an employee. He was making it impossible for himself to do his best at the business of job-seeking. On the day Bill met his friend, if he had been bitter and full of sly defences, do you think his friend would have considered him a good person to recommend for the new job? There is no mysticism at work here. This way of thinking and of acting is, above all, down-to-earth common sense.
Positive thinking is looking at events with the knowledge that there will be both good and bad in life, but that it is better to emphasise the good. And as you do that, good seems to increase.
The other day I went out of the door of my office and hailed a cab. As soon as I got in the taxi, I could tell that my driver was a happy man. He was whistling. First he whistled a tune from, ‘My Fair Lady’, and then he launched himself into a version of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’. After a while I said to him, ‘You seem to be in a happy mood.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ he said. ‘I’ve just learned something. I’ve learned that there’s no percentage in getting excited, or in the dumps, because things average out.’
And he went on to explain what he meant. Early that morning he had taken his cab out, hoping to take advantage of the morning rush hour. It was a bitterly cold day. The driver said it was ‘. . . the kind of temperature where, if you touch metal your hand will stick to it.’ And as luck would have it, no sooner had he started his day than he had a flat tyre. He was angry. Muttering, he got out his jack and lug wrench and tried to take off the tyre. It was so cold he could only work for a few minutes at a time. And while he was struggling, a truck stopped. The driver jumped out and, much to the taxi-driver’s surprise, began to help him. When the tyre was back in place, the trucker gruffly waved off the cabby’s thanks, got in his truck and drove off.
‘Well, this put me in a high mood,’ the cabby said to me. ‘Already things were averaging out. First, I was angry with the flat, then I felt good because of that trucker’s help and right away things started going good. Even the money has averaged out. I’ve never had a busier morning, one fare after another in and out of the cab. Things average out, Mister. Don’t get excited when a situation gets rocky; things average out.’
Here was a positive thinker, all right. He said he was never again going to let life’s mishaps annoy him. He was just going to live by the theory that things average out O.K. That is real positive thinking, and it will work, too, because things always come around to a brighter view when you wait them out and work them out optimistically. The law of averages is always on the positive thinker’s side. A positive thinker chooses to keep his mind fixed on the bright future that is always just around the corner, and in this way he helps make the dark moments more cheerful, productive and creative. That attitude gets you around the ‘corner’ quicker, too.
It is a fact of life that all of us will come face to face with plenty of frustration, difficulty and trouble. But there isn’t one of us who needs to be defeated by these obstacles. If you face life with the sincere faith that through the aid of the Almighty you can overcome your troubles, then you will keep defeat at arm’s length. And this applies in all the circumstances life can bring.
One evening in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of dining in the home of a charming lady named Elena Zelayeta. I have never attended a dinner party presided over by an individual of happier personality or more irresistible gaiety. Elena is Mexican, and the dinner she served that evening was a 17-course Mexican dinner (small courses) – the most delicious repast I could hope to experience. She cooked it herself – and she is totally blind.
Elena Zelayeta once ran a restaurant in San Francisco. It was a beautiful place, full of colour and life. Then her eyesight began to fail. Soon she was blind, living in darkness. One day the telephone rang and she groped her way to answer it and received the shocking news that her husband had just been killed in an accident.
Blindness – and now her husband suddenly dead. She sat by the telephone, utterly crushed, wondering what she was going to do. She was dejected for weeks, living in helplessness. But in this most complete darkness, emotionally and physically, she perceived finally, by the help of her strong faith, that there was something positive to which she could attach herself. She did not choose to dwell on the negative, she sought the positive, and she found it in a most remarkable way. As she struggled in shock and sorrow, suddenly she felt ‘as if a great, strong hand gripped her and lifted her up’.
Putting sincere faith and strong positive thinking against her sad conditions, she determined that she would conquer her grief, loneliness and handicap. So complete was her ultimate victory that presently she picked up her life again as a career woman. How well Elena Zelayeta succeeded is shown by the fact that in recent years she has lectured on cooking up and down the West Coast, sometimes to as many as a thousand women at a time. She has written three successful cookery books and a book of inspiration. She operates a frozen food business with her two sons and goes to the office every day.
She has to cook by sense of feel and taste and smell. But these, she says with a smile, are what cooking is all about anyway. This inspiring woman is one of the most marvellous examples of positive thinking I have ever run across. Naturally I sought for her secret of conquering adversity. While we were having dinner at her home, Mrs Zelayeta made this powerful statement, which is the guiding principle of her life. It is the formula through which she found victory. ‘Always act,’ she said, ‘as if it was impossible to fail, and God will see you through.’
Always act as if it were impossible to fail!
Elena Zelayeta is the type of person William James the philosopher-psychologist would call ‘tough-minded’. The world, according to this great thinker, is made up of two kinds of people – the ‘tough-minded’ and ‘tender-minded’. The tender-minded are the ones who wilt under obstacles and difficulties. They are cut to the quick by criticism and lose heart. They are the ones who whine and fail. But the tough-minded individuals are not like that. They are people from all walks of life, the manual workers and the merchants, the mothers and the fathers, the teachers, the old people, and the young people too, who have a strong element of toughness built into them by Almighty God. By toughness is meant the inner power to stand up to a difficulty; to have what it takes to take it.
Up in the little town of Carmel, New York, where we publish Guideposts magazine, lived a boy named Jim Mackey. Jim was fourteen years old; a lovable boy and a real man, one of the truly tough-minded people of this world. He was a natural born athlete, one of the very best. But early in his high school career, he began to limp. It soon developed that he had a cancer. An operation was required, and Jim’s leg was amputated. As soon as he was out of the hospital, he went around to the high school on his crutches, talking cheerfully about how he was going to have a wooden leg soon. ‘Then I’ll be able to hold up my socks with a thumb tack,’ he said. ‘None of you guys can do that!’
As soon as the football season started, Jim went to the coach and asked if he could be one of the team managers. For weeks he appeared regularly for practise, carrying the coach’s set of plays and infusing the team with his contagious, fiery courage. Then one afternoon he missed a practise. The coach was worried. He checked, and learned that Jim was in the hospital having another examination. Later, he learned that the examination had revealed lung cancer. ‘Jim will be dead,’ said the doctor, ‘within six weeks.’
Jim’s parents decided not to tell the boy about his death sentence; they wanted him to live as normal a life as he could for the last few weeks. So, Jim was soon back at practise again with his big smile and his offering of enthusiasm and courage. With his inspiration the team raced through the season undefeated, and to celebrate they decided to throw a banquet. Jim was to receive a victory football autographed by each member of the team. The banquet, however, was not the success it should have been. Jim was not there. He was too weak to attend.
A few weeks later, however, Jim was back again, this time at a basketball game. He was pale, very pale, but aside from that he was the same old Jim, smiling, laughing, making jokes. When, after the game, he went to the coach’s office the entire football team was there. The coach scolded him gently for missing the banquet. ‘I’m on a diet, Coach,’ said Jim with a grin that covered his pain. Then one of the team members presented him with the victor’s football. ‘We won it because of you, Jim,’ he said. Jim said a quiet thanks with tears in his eyes. The coach and Jim and the other boys talked about plans for the next season, and then it was time to go. Jim turned, and at the door he said, looking at the coach with a steady, level gaze:
‘Good-bye, Coach.’
‘Don’t you mean, “so long,” Jim?’ the coach asked.
Jim’s eyes lighted up and his steady gaze turned into a smile. ‘Don’t worry, Coach,’ he said. ‘I’m all set.’ And with that he was gone.
Two days later, he was dead.
Jim had known all along about his death-sentence. But he could take it, for you see he was a tough-minded positive thinker. He made of this sad and tragic fact a creative experience. But, some might say, he died; his positive thinking didn’t get him very much. This is not true. Jim knew how to reach out for faith and how to create something warm and uplifting from the worst possible situation. He wasn’t burying his head in the sand; he knew full well what was in store for him, and yet he chose not to be defeated! Jim was never defeated. He took his life, short as it was, and used it to instil courage, faith and laughter, permanently, into the lives and minds of the people who knew him. Could you, in any possible way, say that a person who succeeded in doing that with his life had been a failure?
That’s what positive thinking is; it is tough-mindedness. It is refusing to be defeated. It is making the most of what you have to deal with in life. I have always been a reader of the works of the apostle of tough-mindedness: Thomas Carlyle. Recently I went up to Ecclefechan, the little village in Scotland where he was born, to see if I might find there something of the strength of mind and character he possessed. Carlyle was the son of a stone mason. He started off to Edinburgh for his education with a shilling in his pocket and he walked into immortality.
Carlyle grew up in the little town of Ecclefechan, half way between the Scottish border and the town of Dumfries. He loved Ecclefechan and Dumfrieshire. He might have been buried in Westminster Abbey but he preferred Ecclefechan. Queen Victoria once asked Carlyle what he considered the most beautiful road in Britain, and he answered, ‘The road from Ecclefechan to Dumfries.’ And then she asked him what he considered the second most beautiful road, and he answered, ‘Why, it’s the road back to Ecclefechan.’
I visited Carlyle’s grave in the cemetery of his beloved Ecclefechan and sat at his graveside reading some of his words. Carlyle’s message came to me anew – the essence of which is never give up; never give in; stand up to it – fight it through. God will aid you. According to Carlyle’s understanding, life asks of each of us, ‘Will you be a hero, or will you be a coward?’ It is just that direct and fortright. Where did Carlyle get such ideas? Of course, from the most rugged Book ever put together. ‘Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’ (Joshua 1:9)
Will you be a hero, or will you be a coward? Will you be tough-minded or tender-minded. The positive thinker will not be a coward. He believes in himself, in life, in humanity and in God. He knows his own capacity and his own ability. He is undaunted and invincible. He will draw the best from whatever comes.
The formula he uses is one by which he is changed from weakness to strength. Some time ago The Chase Manhattan Bank started excavation for a new skyscraper. Most of Manhattan Island is composed of solid bed-rock. This is the reason we can have structures that pierce the sky. But early excavations revealed that this site was not solid rock, as had been supposed, but contained a large pocket of quicksand! And of course it would be very difficult indeed to build a skyscraper on such a base.
So the bank people called in experts to suggest ways for meeting this situation constructively. One expert suggested pilings; another said to seal it off with caissons; but the cost would be prohibitive. Geologists were consulted: How long would it take to turn quicksand into sandstone? About a million years, the geologists answered. Well, the bank didn’t feel they could wait that long. They then called in some soil solidification people, and this is where their search ended. These experts knew how to handle the quicksand problem. They sank pipes down into the quicksand and pumped into it a solution of sodium silicate and calcium chloride. In a few days the quicksand solidified into sandstone hard enough to permit the erection of a sixty-floor skyscraper building.
Does this seem miraculous? No, because it was done according to a sound, scientific principle; a proven, scientific formula. But I have seen ‘miracles’ that make this achievement fade into insignificance. I have seen weak, defeated personalities who have had infused into them a special mental-spiritual formula called positive thinking, and I have seen them become as solid as rock. They have become strong people, well able to bear the weight of life most successfully.
This kind of transformation is available to all of us. It is in this sense that positive thinking always works. Positive thinking is able to transform us from cowards to heroes, from tender-minded to tough-minded individuals, from weak, negative, vacillating people to men of positive strength.
Although the life-changing power of positive thinking is available to all, some people experience difficulty in making it work. This is because of some strange psychological barrier that stands between them and the full use of positive thinking? One that keeps cropping up, is simply that they do not want it to work. They do not want to succeed. Actually, they are afraid to succeed. It’s easier to wallow in self-pity. So, we create our own failure, and when a suggestion (such as positive thinking) comes along that will help overcome that failure, we subconsciously see to it that the suggestion doesn’t work, and so we believe the principle, rather than ourselves is at fault. But when we understand such unhealthy mental reactions, then positive thinking begins to work. Recently I received this letter from a reader who lives in Petaluna, California:
For the first time in my life I can see where I have created my own bad luck by my thought pattern. Since reading your book about positive thinking and trying to clear my mind, I find little resentments cropping up I thought I’d forgotten years ago. Such silly little things to carry along with me all these years.
Certainly if you have helped me rub out these little termites, I owe you a great deal for showing me the way. I, too have a pattern of failure and defeat. I never expected the best and I never got it, either. From here on out I’m going to go after the things I want, with confidence.
I feel God gave me a good chance and I just didn’t have sense enough to use it. My faith will certainly deepen as I remove these mental blocks that I have so industriously set up. Believe me I built them strong!
This woman states that, for the first time, she sees that she has been creating her own bad luck by her thoughts. We have to stop creating our own failure. We have to stop being afraid that success will come our way.
I have a very good friend who is outstanding in the field of industrial medicine. He is the medical director of one of the nation’s giant companies. He has come up from the worst kind of failure to the finest kind of success. Like the quicksand, he was made into rock, but by a spiritual formula of great strength. The other day I received a letter from him which had this paragraph in it:
I struggle constantly with success. For me, it has an insidious sweetness far more difficult to handle than the bitterness of failure, and much more uncertain as a stepping stone to spiritual progress.
I will call this man simply Dr Tom, because he has such a spectacular story hidden in his past that I cannot name him fully. His was a dramatic struggle with success. He did not want it. It frightened him so thoroughly that he came close to killing himself rather than face it. In 1938 Dr Tom was on the staff of a state mental hospital. Exactly ten years later he was paroled from this same hospital as a patient!
Dr Tom started out in life with all the advantages. In fact he had so many advantages that they got him into trouble. He had social position, a fine education, wealth, health and good looks. A nurse sat beside him in private school until he was nine years old; his father gave him an open cheque-book when he was in high school. If Tom wanted anything, he just wrote a cheque; it was as simple as that. But along with this ease went trouble. People were always watching him, expecting great things from him because he came of such an outstanding family and ‘wonderful’ environment. Nothing that Tom did seemed to live up to people’s expectations. He never got any satisfaction out of success; in fact, success always seemed to get people annoyed with him: ‘Of course he’s successful,’ they’d snap. ‘He ought to be!’
So Tom’s subconscious mind did the thing that so many of our minds do. It said, ‘All right. If I can’t get satisfaction from success, I’ll get it from failure.’ And he proceeded to fail magnificently. When he was in college he started drinking. At medical school, his drinking became excessive. Drug addiction compounded his troubles. He married, set up a practice and had a child; the degeneration continued. In about ten years he reached the place where ‘just one’ drink would start him off on a wild, blind drinking orgy that would last for days, even weeks. After one of his long disappearances, Dr Tom came home to find that commitment papers had been made out against him. He was put in the violent ward of the state hospital, the same hospital where he had served as a doctor only a few years earlier.
‘For forty-five days,’ Tom says, ‘I was out of my mind with D.T.s. I was in solitary confinement, eating out of a tin plate like an animal. Then I began to come out of it and for another eighty-six days I lay in a comatose state, halfway between life and death. Surely this was as low as a man could sink. And then, suddenly – my heart still pounds when I think of it – I heard words spoken very slowly, and very distinctly. ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far have I removed your transgressions from you.’ (Psalm 103:12) Nothing has been the same for me since.’
What had happened? Tom didn’t know. He only knew that he had changed. He became calm. He was released from solitary confinement and allowed the comparative freedom of the ward. There he met two men who befriended him, and introduced him to Alcoholics Anonymous. In time, under the sponsorship of his A.A. friends, he was paroled from the hospital.
It was at this point that I met Tom at a religious conference where I was speaking. Scarcely have I ever known a man so thirsty for the water of life, so hungry for the bread of life. He wanted God, and God wanted him, and they found each other.
Dr Tom did not go back to his practice right away. He felt he wasn’t ready for that. He wanted to get a job on his own, one that had no relation to his childhood education. The only work he could find was a manual labouring job in the city dump. Think of that! A highly skilled, wealthy young man working as a labourer on the city dump and in the very southern community of his birth. But it was what Tom wanted. He wanted to see if he could be accepted for himself, and not for his family or his money.
One day while he was working, several of the ‘city fathers’ came down to the dump for an inspection. Dr Tom recognised some of his former schoolmates. He was suddenly filled with shame that they might recognise him, and he turned his back, bent down, and pretended to be working with something on the ground. A Negro fellow-worker saw him do this, and at the same time saw the neatly dressed city fathers. He must have sized up the situation quickly because, without saying a word, he turned and did Dr Tom’s work for him until the visitors left. To my mind that is one of the greatest, kindliest acts of understanding and brotherhood that I have ever heard about. Dr Tom and his Negro friend never spoke about it, but it created a bond between them that was to have a wonderful effect on the young doctor. He took from it the strength that he needed.
‘That man’s name was Frank,’ Dr Tom told me. ‘Frank will never know what he did for me. He accepted me. He taught me that I could be accepted for myself. First I had the acceptance of God, there in the hospital’s solitary ward. Then I had the acceptance of man. It was what I needed in order to start again.’
Today, Dr Tom is again practising medicine very successfully. He has a kind of enthusiasm about him, and a basic solidarity that comes from the new tough-mindedness that he has found. He was transformed from a ‘coward’ to a ‘hero’, to use Carlyle’s terms. Of course, not many of us have such dramatic experiences with our fear of success, but it is nonetheless true that we often don’t want positive thinking to work. We subconsciously see to it that our failure patterns remain intact.
But this is not the only block that can keep positive thinking from being effective. Sometimes there are strong negative elements in our lives that we refuse to clean out. We make feeble efforts to put positive forces to work, but they get stymied behind negative forces.
One night after I finished speaking at a dinner meeting in a hotel ballroom a man came up to me with the challenge: ‘I’ve been reading your stuff,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried it and it won’t work.’
‘Why won’t it work?’ I asked him.
‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ he blustered.
Having a little time before taking a late plane I invited him to my hotel room for a talk. ‘I didn’t mean to be impolite,’ he said as we sat down to chat. ‘But I’m trying to find out what’s wrong. I seem to have lost my grip. I’m nervous and tense. I have a wonderful wife and family, a good business, a nice home, and I go to church. You’d think I’d be happy. But . . .’ The recital went on and on. One trouble after another. And positive thinking, he said, did him no good at all.
After some discussion it occurred to me to throw out this question: ‘Are you doing anything wrong?’
‘Nothing much,’ he muttered.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘There’s no point in going into that. I’m not doing anything that is in any way connected with my troubles. I’m only doing what everybody does.’
‘What does everybody else do?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there is a little affair with a woman in Milwaukee.’
‘How little?’ I asked.
He hesitated, ‘Well, maybe not so little.’
‘Maybe we had better face it. The plain truth is that you know you are doing something wrong, something you are ashamed of, something that could very well be the reason positive thinking isn’t working for you.’
‘But how?’ he demanded, on the defensive.
‘Because guilt has a way of closing off your personality,’ I continued. ‘It sprouts fear and self-doubt; it restricts the power that gives vitality to the thought-flow. Constructive thinking becomes more difficult. Also, there is the self-punishment mechanism to deal with. When you are doing something wrong, you want to punish yourself to get relief from conscience distress. So actually, you try to make yourself fail, strange as it may sound. Of course all this blocks the positive feelings and thought that you do have. It’s possible that all your misery and conflict stems from this sour area in your life.’
‘Well, what do I do about it?’ he asked. Then he continued, ‘I guess I know the answer – stop doing it, get forgiveness – is that it?’
‘That’s it,’ I agreed. ‘And then you must forgive yourself. Do you want to start now?’ He nodded. I could see that he was in earnest so I prayed, and he prayed. I made him pray out loud because he really had a lot to unload. And because he was sincere in his desire for change, God came into the picture and poured spiritual strength into him. Then his positive thinking really started working. Gone now is the woman in Milwaukee. Gone are the guilt and conflict feelings. As he became spiritually organised he found that it was quite possible for him to apply the principles of positive thinking with effective results. Naturally, this change did not happen all at once, but it did happen, and of course that’s the important thing. One of the greatest facts in this world is that when a man changes, really changes in the God-centred way, everything changes.
Again, there is nothing mysterious about this. It is just common sense. We do something wrong, we feel guilty about it, and we expect punishment. If this remains uncorrected, the tendency is to punish ourselves, often through failures. That is the way the human mind is made. To correct the situation we must first clean out the wrong-doings; then the guilt feelings disappear and the need to punish ourselves with failures is thus eliminated. When this process has been completed, the principles of positive thinking can be tremendously effective.
One of the most important reasons why positive thinking seems not to work sometimes is that it has not really been put to a test. Positive thinking requires training and study and long perseverance. You have to be willing to work at it, sometimes for a long while, as was the case of a woman who spent four months of good solid, even painful effort before she got the results she sought. She wrote the following:
Dear Dr Peale:
On the morning of January 21, 1956, I awoke with a headache. I am a registered nurse and I didn’t think much of it at the time. A headache for a mother of three children is not an unheard of thing. Little did I know, as I downed a couple of aspirins, that this one was to be my constant companion for the next eight months.
Why should I have a headache? Seven doctors later, a badly depleted bank account, and a skin full of the newest drugs found me fifteen pounds lighter, an almost raving maniac, the sight badly impaired in one eye, blood pressure sky high and the headache.
My husband and I are devout Catholics. I was beyond the ability to pray so my husband prayed for both of us. He prayed God would direct him to help for me. It was in a specialist’s office that I learned the power of positive thinking. I did not believe all this doctor told me, but when your book, The Power of Positive Thinking, fell into my hands I began to believe it might be so. Fortified with the spoken word of this sage doctor, plus the written material in your book, I began to apply to myself the principles.
To the degree I was able to understand and change my concepts from negative to positive – my headaches lessened. It took four months. I took no medication during this time and by September of that same year I had the last of the headaches.
I must add, our medical expenses have dropped about 80 per cent, since I’ve changed my pattern of thinking. Do you know how a nurse thinks? Well I’ll tell you. One of the children has a running nose. Now, to the average person it is a running nose, but not to a nurse. It’s pneumonia! She shoots that concept out into the air, and into the child’s head. The child accepts it and puts the picture into reality.
How do I know this – because I did it. Hospital insurance records will bear me out. I was so good at it I was able to put not one of our children in the hospital, but all three of them at once, plus myself.
Now when they get a cold I look at it for what it is, a cold. And you know something – that’s just as far as it goes. They throw it off in a couple of days.
Notice that it took four months of hard work to get results. This nurse understood the principle of positive thinking all right, but it wasn’t until she was willing to put it to a test, go all out with it, make an effort really to change herself that she got rid of her headaches and experienced radical change within herself.
Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, practises what he calls muscle memory. He gets out on the links and swings the very same golf shot over, and over, and yet over again until his muscles ‘memorise’ the exact pattern they have to follow. It is the same with our thinking habits. They have to be trained by a deliberate learning process to react the way we want them to react when we are faced with life’s problems. Our mind has to be trained to think positively.
A final thing that I would like to mention has to do with belief. Positive thinking will not work unless you believe it will work. You have to bring your faith to bear on your thinking processes. The reason a lot of people do not get anywhere with positive thinking is that their faith is diluted. They water it down with timid little doubts. They do not dare to believe! But when you do believe, what amazing results you have.
There is D. H. Metzger, for example. But first let me refer to one of the most effective positive thinkers I have ever been privileged to know, my friend, Roger Burman, New York Sales Manager for the National Cash Register Company. Roger has a passion for helping others. He is always bringing out latent possibilities and guiding men in overcoming difficulties.
Roger Burman’s teaching of positive thinking was a godsend to one of his top salesmen, D. H. Metzger, who suddenly was afflicted with a growth in the throat. During the days of crisis Dave Metzger was able to say, ‘My mind was alerted to think right and have faith. I knew my life was at stake, but the feeling of doing right at the right time added confidence as to my future.’
Then Dave Metzger encountered an even greater crisis, learning to speak again. How could he ever sell unless he could speak? Roger Burman told him that, with God’s help, he could and would; and he did too. In fact he became a top salesman, one of the most successful in his line. In his desire to help others Dave said:
In order that I may be helpful to others who may find themselves in a similar predicament, more or less, I would like to emphasise that I put into practise Dr Norman Vincent Peale’s philosophy as outlined in his Power of Positive Thinking, of getting to the point of emptying one’s mind of all negative thoughts, all unhappy thoughts and all pessimistic thinking and filling that vacuum with happy thoughts, filling the mind with a determination to get well at all costs. I pictured in my mind a return of my former faculties and good health. By following the specialists prescribed exercises, I visualised my return as a leading salesman for my company once again.
‘Faith power works wonders’ and I quote it from Dr Peale’s book. I cannot stress the value of this philosophy, the magic power of positive thinking for anyone who has any kind of a problem.
This whole new experience has renewed the statement: ‘Salesmen talk too much’. Finding it necessary to say the ‘mostest’ in the ‘leastest’ number of words I have framed my word story in such a manner and in such a tone that the results have been most gratifying. I speak slower and lower, and find the customer leaning forward if he misses a word. I am not dominating the situation and giving the customer a chance to say ‘yes’ much sooner than before. In this way I do not tax my strength. I ‘word plan’ my sentence and now give the buyer a chance to be part of the sales. I confess I used to be part of that etc., etc.
Conrad Hilton, an inspiring friend of mine for many years, magnificently demonstrated positive thinking in his victory over adversity in the building of his vast hotel empire. In his dynamic book, Be My Guest, he tells us that his parents gave him a two-part formula to which he owes much of his success. His mother said ‘pray’ and his father said ‘work’. Pray and work; how wise!
My own parents helped me similarly. My father said ‘think’ and my mother said ‘believe’. What power is in those four words when taken together; pray, work, think, believe!
Belief that is bold and daring – there is the formula. It carries all before it. Nothing can permanently stand against it. It magnificently focuses power. ‘If ye have faith . . . nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ (Matthew 17:20) Faith in God, faith in God’s power in you, faith in life itself – that is the essence of positive thinking; not timid doubt, not weak speculation, but big, bold daring faith – this is the victory.
Does positive thinking always work?
Of course it does; positive thinking will work if you are willing to work at it. It is not an easy discipline. It takes hard work and hard belief. It takes honest living, and a strong desire to succeed. And you will need to keep working at it constantly to achieve success in applying positive thinking. Just when you believe you have mastered it, you will have to develop it again.
My friend Justin Dart, head of Rexall Drugs, one of our greatest salesmen and business leaders said, ‘Positive thinking is just like golf. You get a good stroke or two, and you think you’ve mastered the game. But the next thing you know, you fluff your shots again. So, with positive thinking you have to work at it again and then again, ever re-learning it.’
How right Mr Dart is. You must do a day-to-day job on yourself, conditioning and reconditioning your thinking. But the results are really amazing. They are worth all the effort and change-in-habit that is required, as I will demonstrate in the chapters that follow.
YOU CAN PRE-CONDITON your mind to success. This is a basic principle of positive thinking. You can actually forecast what your future failure or success will be by your present type of thinking.
And right here I think it is important to define what we mean by success. Naturally we do not mean mere achievement, but rather the more difficult feat of handling your life efficiently. It means to be a success as a person; controlled, organised, not part of the world’s problem but part of its cure. That is the goal we should have for ourselves: the goal of successful living, of being a creative individual.
I learned a valuable lesson in successful living from a Pull-man porter. I had a speaking date in Olean, New York, and my travel schedule called for an overnight trip on the Erie Railroad. My journey got off to a wonderful start the moment I stepped into the sleeping car. I was greeted by the porter, a big, genial, friendly man.
‘Good evening, sir,’ he said. ‘Are you ready for a good night’s sleep?’
‘I sure am,’ I replied. ‘I can’t wait to get into bed.’
As he showed me into my compartment I saw that the bed was already made up. It was really an inviting sight. The sheets and covers were tight and neatly turned back, the bedroom was immaculate with a generous supply of towels, the temperature was exactly right. ‘You certainly know how to prepare an attractive room,’ I commented. I got into bed, read a few verses from my Bible, and then fell into a deep sleep. The next thing I knew it was nine o’clock and I usually wake up automatically at seven.
‘Good morning, sir,’ said the porter as I was going in to breakfast. ‘How did you sleep?’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘just fine.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised; I knew you would. But you should have seen the man who got on just after you. First thing he said was, ‘I know I’m not going to sleep, porter.’ And then nothing was right. He wanted to be moved to the centre of the car. He didn’t like the way his bed was facing. The room was too cold and then it was too hot. Do you know the difference between you two gentlemen and why you slept well and he didn’t?’
‘No. I’m interested.’
‘You slept well because you had made up your mind to it. That other man had made up his mind not to sleep. A long time ago I discovered that those who ride with me sleep if they think they are going to sleep. They pre-condition their minds to sleep.’
It was worth making the trip just to get that remark which contained such amazing insight. You can pre-condition your mind. You can pre-condition it to sleep, or to insomnia. You can pre-condition it to success, or to failure. In other words, that which you constantly think is going to happen, tends to happen. At this very minute, as you are reading this book, you are what your thoughts have made you over a long period of time. And it is possible to figure out, almost scientifically, what kind of person you will be ten years from now by analysing the kind of thoughts you are now holding in your mind. Are they negative, destructive thoughts? Are you pre-conditioning yourself to failure? Or are they positive, healthy thoughts, so that you are forecasting your own success?
Let me tell you about a friend of mine, Norman A. McGee. Better still, here’s a story from the Savannah Morning News about him:
Ten years ago, the Southland Oil Corporation was just an idea in the fertile brain of Norman A. McGee. Today it is a flourishing Savannah corporation occupying twenty-four acres at the Georgia State Port with fixed assets topping the $2,000,000 mark.
‘I’ve been lucky many times,’ the forty-three-year-old McGee says. ‘On the other hand, I’ve resorted to prayer often, too. I believe anybody could have done it with persistence and faith – and a wife like mine.’
McGee had this idea about forming a corporation for the distribution of oil products and he had worked hard to interest others in it. The prospects looked good, but McGee had no income and he was down to his last $1,000 in the bank.
‘I asked my wife,’ McGee recalls, ‘what should I do? Keep on trying, or give up and take a job?’
Her answer made Southland Oil possible. ‘Keep on trying,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever give up!’