Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
for or against you. A clear plan or idea by which you can make more money represents force. A muddled plan represents a lesser and imperfect force. A new invention is a new force. Talking your business with those who are really friendly to you, actively friendly, and without a shade of envy or grudge against you, adds their thought or force to your own for making clearer plans, and working on other minds, and enlisting them in some way in your favor. Sympathy is force. Any person’s good-will is a real, living, active substance, flowing always to you as that person thinks of you. It has a commercial value in dollars and cents. Ill will is also an element sent from the person that thinks it, and works against you though that person never speaks or acts with the body against you. This you can only successfully oppose by putting out against it the thought-element of friendliness. The thought of good to others is the stronger unseen element, and can turn the bad (the weaker) aside. It prevents it from reaching or harming you.
Through the working of that same law, it is dangerous to make enemies, no matter how good or just the cause.
To talk your business at random, is not only to give your secrets to such as will tell them to others, but it is to send your secrets and plans in thought-element flying far and wide in the air. Then they fall into other minds, and you may find your plan used by others before you. The air is literally full of supposed secrets. They herald themselves to thousands in the form of suspicion and impression.
Every disorderly meeting, every family quarrel, every discordance between man and man, sends into the air a wave of destructive and unpleasant substance. It affects unpleasantly minds thousands of miles distant. The thought so coming from some centre of turbulence forms a wave, or current. If you are by some trifle made angry, you then place your mind in the attitude of a magnet to attract and let in this hurtful thought-current. Your anger, peevishness, or irritation, caused at first by a trifle, is constantly fed from these currents. You must, for relief, turn your mind toward some more agreeable order of thought. Practice in so doing will give you more power, and make it more and more easy to change the character of the thought-element coming to you.
When interest, sympathy, and good-will meet to present pleasantly their opinions or thoughts on any special subject to each other, for an hour, there goes from that company a wave of thought-substance, which strikes other minds, and awakens or renews interest in that especial business, art, or cause, in proportion to the sensitiveness or capacity of such minds to receive thoughts. The new thought coming suddenly to you, comes because somewhere it is being talked out or agitated. The wave so caused acts in unseen element precisely like that made by throwing the stone in calm water. The waves so radiate from the talk-centre; and they will continue to spread out in every direction, striking other minds, so long as the agitation of talk is kept up at that centre. No thought is, in a sense, original. The same idea, or parts or shades of that idea, may float into a thousand minds within an hour, when once started, through a few people talking it. Talk with others in friendliness about an improvement in machinery, a new invention, a new idea for man’s comfort, and through thought-substance so sent far and wide you awaken desire or interest for the thing talked of. The more people interested in a thing, the more will be attracted to you to aid you, or buy the thing produced.
Regarding your plan, purpose, and aim, all your discreet talk, your interest and persistent determination, represent for you so much actual outlay of force expended in attracting the thing desired to you. If you expend such amount of force for, say, three months, and then get discouraged, and give it all up, you abandon so much of a structure you have built up having this attracting power. You may not see where that power is operating. But it is at work, bringing to you the people in sympathy with you, or those who want what you have to give.
Quarrelling, angry argument, and grumbling put out the silent destructive force. Friendly discussion, and peaceful presentation of individual opinion, put out the silent constructive force. If you set your mind persistently in the desire for having the best people to talk to, and so aid you, they will come to you through this power of thought attraction. Exactly the order of mind will so come you most desire. If you are not particular as to principle or honesty, this law will attract those not particular as to honesty.
There will always be a demand for a better article, a better effort in any art, or a better service of any kind, than those before produced. When you are sure yours is the better effort, push it. Get it before people. Talent in art or invention is one thing. Talent for pushing that art or invention is quite another. You must, to be successful, have both. The world pays best those who push. Hundreds of inventors and artists fail because they do not cultivate the science of pushing themselves before the world.
You can learn the science of pushing by yourself. You will acquire it by seeing yourself in mind or imagination as asserting yourself courageously, fairly, honestly, before others, and making yourself agreeable to all. The more you do this in imagination, the more will you feel like doing it in reality. What you do in thought is a reality. What you live most in thought, you make a reality. You will find, after a time of such mental exercise, that you have more nerve, more courage, more tact, more address, more desire to mingle with all sorts of people, to take hold of the world, and make it give you what rightfully belongs to you.
Poverty comes largely of shrinking away from people, and fear of assuming responsibilities.
See yourself always in imagination as diffident, bashful, shrinking, and by the same law you make yourself so. Reverse this process of silent mental treatment. See yourself courageous. You are always growing up to your highest ideal of yourself, and you reconstruct yourself by this process of silent thought. You cannot succeed and make money if you remain in a corner. You cannot do business with the world entirely by letter or by proxy. You must to an extent show yourself to others. When your spirit carries your body before another person, it carries the instrument for enabling your spirit to put out its fullest volume of thought-power on that person.
Thought being substance or force, you can pile up in your mind volumes of that force for or against you. To think of nothing but difficulties and possible troubles in business, is to set your mind as the magnet to attract only difficulties, first in thought, next in substance. This becomes with many a fixed habit hard to get rid of.
You have nothing whatever to do with a difficulty but to set your mind as a magnet in the direction for receiving force, ideas, and plans for overcoming that difficulty. If you have trouble with any person, and are always thinking of his injustice toward you, in the mood of anger or complaint, you are in thought-element making over again and again the wrangle or battle. You can use up in growling, scolding, complaining, and grumbling, be it thought out silently, or spoken to others, the same force or thought which would make a plan to get rid of the thing scolded or grumbled at. It is on precisely the same principle as the strength with which the mason builds his wall can be used in tearing it down, or in flinging about bricks at random. If you will give your body all the rest it needs, your mental force will work far and near more powerfully for you. Your plans will be deeper, and, when carried out, more productive of results. If the body is always fagged-out, much of the force of that spirit must be used-up in keeping its hold on the body,—in other words, keeping it alive. It matters not whether you tire yourself out voluntarily, or are obliged to do so to get a living. The result is the same.
If you want more time in which so to rest, desire and demand it persistently. An opportunity will then at length come to you by which you can earn enough for your present support without working the body at one employment so many hours daily. It will come by that mysterious law and attractive force which moves all things to all people according to their strongest desires and the persistency of such desire.
You can, through this same power (persistent desire), bring to you an evil as quickly as a good. The thing you are now strongly desiring may turn out an evil. If you desire or demand wisdom to know what will do you the most lasting good, you will, by the same law, bring to you the capacity to see what is really the best for you. Desire persistently a “clear head,” and a clear head will come to you. When your opportunity comes, granting you four or five more hours daily of leisure, do not pile on yourself any extra effort for the sake of the few dollars you may get by it. This opportunity may be your first step out into a newer life. Give yourself leisure. Don’t be afraid of enjoying yourself. Your mind will then breed plans for future success; and