The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity. Catherine Ponder
you have formed a vacuum, you are ready to fill that vacuum with rich, new good through the creative law of prosperity. Actually, the creative law of prosperity concerns the three basic steps given in this chapter and the next two: (1) Having a plan, writing out one’s desires concerning that plan, and constantly expanding that plan; (2) Mentally imaging that plan and those plans desired as fulfilled; (3) Constantly affirming their perfect fulfillment. However, the first part of the creative law, as discussed in this chapter, is all-important, because without a plan and notes concerning it, the other two steps are ineffective.
Strong Desire Is Success Power
The first step in the creative law of prosperity is desire, and the ability to do something constructive about that desire. Recently a businessman told me he has discovered in his work that when a customer comes to him greatly desiring certain products, he has found it best always to sell that customer what he really desires. This businessman said that even though he personally may feel that there are other products that would better serve his customer, if his customer has already made up his mind and strongly desires certain products, he never tries to change that desire, because desire is so impelling. He stated that strong desire denotes faith in the product, which almost inevitably brings satisfaction. There is nothing weak or lukewarm about true desire. It is intense and powerful. If properly developed and expressed, a strong desire always carries with it the power for success. The stronger your desires for good, the greater the power of your desires to produce that good for you.
I have discovered in counseling people who have various problems that the right kind of desire will dissolve anything that has stood in the way of fulfillment. Right desire is truly the first step in solving problems and getting on the road to prosperity. How can you release your deep-seated desires for prosperity and success? By centering your attention on one big goal at a time.
One big goal always includes a number of smaller desires that are automatically fulfilled when the big one is achieved. Psychologists agree that we influence people and events by having great desires and great goals. It is as though everything and everybody subconsciously tunes in on our big desires and goals, and gets busy helping us to achieve them. The amazing thing is that, of the millions of people who think they want to be successful, few of them have any really strong, impelling desires. They have been content to idly drift in a stream of small events and small expectations. When you meet a person who is really going places in this world, usually it is a person of intense desire for the highest and best in life. One of the basic statements I have often asked people to use to help expand and intensify their constructive desires is: I desire the highest and best in life, and I now draw the highest and best to me.
Write Down Your Desires
The law of creative prosperity is to take your deep-seated desires and, instead of suppressing them as impossible dreams, begin expressing them constructively through deciding what they really are, and then doing something very simple but very powerful about them: Write them down! That is, make a list or draw up some kind of potential plan, which you should feel free to change, revise, reform and rearrange as your ideas about it unfold. This idea of writing out your desires and formulating a plan on paper clarifies the desires in your mind, and the mind produces definite results only when it has been given definite ideas through which to work.
Many people work hard at prosperity in external ways, but they miss the mark because they are afraid to get definite in their thoughts and desires. They want to live better and to have more money, but they never get definite in their desires about how they want to live better or how much more money they need. In fact, many people hesitate to get definite, fearing that they are telling God what to do. But as Dr. Emilie Cady once wrote: “Desire is God tapping at the door of your mind, trying to give you greater good!’ If you suppress those deep desires, they have no constructive outlet and often turn into destructive channels expressed as neurotic tendencies, phobias, tension, or perhaps as suppression that finds outlet through alcoholism, mental illness, dope addition, sexual imbalance, or other negative actions. The power of writing out one’s desires and plans was first proved to me by my former boss, Joe Tally, a number of years ago. One day, just after he had been defeated in a Congressional race, instead of feeling sorry for himself, he immediately got busy formulating a new plan. He stated his desire for larger law offices; his desire for the expansion from a two-man firm to a five- or six-man firm; and the desire to increase the annual income he wished the firm to attain year by year for the next five years.
At that time, I did not know that this was one of the most powerful methods for attaining success. It seemed so simple! Nevertheless, I watched his scribbled plan come to life and fruition. The law firm gradually expanded into a five-man arrangement in which each attorney specialized in certain phases of legal practice. The firm moved from two small offices into spacious new quarters that occupied the entire floor of a modern, new bank building.
“Nothing succeeds like success” was surely manifested for Joe Tally after he formulated a plan, dared to put it in writing, and started moving toward it.
Prosperity Is a Planned Result
A stockbroker’s story further proves the power of formulating plans for prosperity and success. A few years ago, the president of a large corporation died. At the time of his death, this corporation was in financial difficulties. The vice-president, who had been considered outstanding in a financial way, then took the helm. Immediately this corporation began to prosper, and today its stock is one of the best on the market. Its sales records during recent years have superceded those of all of its well-known competitors. The prosperity secret? Well, it seems that this vice-president had for years worked on a plan he felt wise for the growth and prosperity of this corporation. The day he became president, he took that plan out of his desk drawer and began executing it. Today his corporation is no longer a mediocre one with indebtness pulling it down. Instead, it is one of the most prosperous in the country! He proved that prosperity is a planned result.
Prosperity is the result of deliberate thought and action. There is nothing hit and miss about prosperous living. It is a planned result, just as a bridge or building is a planned result. Without deliberate, prosperous plans, there will be no prosperous results on a consistent, permanent basis.
This law of creative prosperity was one that has surely “clicked” with the students in my prosperity classes. Many of the business people who attended told me that this one idea turned their previous faltering efforts toward prosperity into amazingly successful results. They had worked long and hard, but not in definite or specific ways. Then they discovered there was no reason to be afraid to ask for what they really desired. The Bible promises, Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and the door shall be opened.
Perhaps you are thinking that you do not really know what you want; that your desires are not that definite as yet. In that case, simply begin thinking about and even making lists of what you don’t want in your life that is there. List the things you wish cleared up and eradicated from your life. To that list declare, This too shall pass, or, Be thou dissolved.
I know of a man in the electrical business who did this. His business partner had died months earlier, leaving his share of the business in the hands of uncooperative heirs who would neither buy nor sell. It was almost in desperation that the surviving partner began applying prosperous thinking. His main desire was either to buy the other half of the business or sell his half. He simply wanted to dissolve the deadlock which was costing the business money; and he wanted to eradicate the unpleasantness, confusion and uncertainty of his business situation. Within a month after he wrote out notes about the unpleasantness and uncertainty being dissolved, he received word from a lawyer that his partner’s heirs would sell! They did immediately with no further ado.
A Prosperity Formula
One group of business people that experimented with me on prosperous thinking during a recent recession did this: They first wrote out their desires for six months hence, and then wrote out their desired achievements for each month of the six. Each week they added to their list or changed their list of desired results, as they felt led. In some instances,