Chapter - 08

Building Success Into Your Thinking

Thinking Rich

I know a man who was preparing to change jobs. He expected the new position to bring him an increase of forty per cent, from $5,200, to $7,200 yearly. His plan was made, his program worked out, and his first steps taken. To put himself in the right frame of mind, he took his wife out and "had a ball." He bought her a "silly" hat she admired, bought himself a fancy tie he wanted, then they went out to dinner and dancing. This is the way, he told me, he had expected to celebrate after he had the job. But this time he thought that celebrating ahead of time might give him the feeling of success, and thereby help him to achieve what he wanted. Thinking "rich" worked.

You can see the "think poor" and "think rich" ideas at work in children. Some boys of the same age want roller skates and others want bicycles. They may want them as aids to playing with friends, aids to making money, or merely because other children have them and they want to "belong." Both may have to work for their equipment. The boy who wants roller skates so it will be easier for him to deliver packages is thinking in a very different way from the boy who wants a bike so he can deliver packages to more people in the same time. One boy is thinking in a limited way, only about himself; the other is "thinking rich," about an expanding world and opportunities to be of service to more people.

The T. Eaton Company of Toronto, one of Canada's great stores, was founded nearly a hundred years ago by one Timothy Eaton, a "think rich" immigrant from Ireland. Young Tim got his merchandising training in the Old Country by getting up at 5 a.m. to light the candles and the stove in the small, gloomy store where he was supposed to work his way up to chief clerk in the course of a lifetime. At 10 p.m., and later on Saturday nights, he could lock the store, blow out the candles, and have the rest of his time to himself. His employer was a man who didn't believe there were enough hours in the day in which to accomplish what had to be done, but he believed in using as many hours as he could.

Tim so thoroughly disagreed with his employer that he hiked himself off for Canada at his first opportunity, and in Toronto opened his own tiny store. But he was thinking rich. He was the first to use coal oil lamps to brighten up the interior of the store, and the first to use "illuminating" gas, and the first with electricity. And while his competitors continued to stay open until the traditional hour of 10 p.m. to catch the last, late customer, Tim closed at eight, then seven, and finally six, in the meantime paying his ten-hour-a-day clerks what the 16-hour clerks of his rivals were getting. In well-lighted splendor, his well-rested clerks bustled around selling to well-satisfied customers who could see what they were getting and even see to read what was being weighed up on the scales. By thinking rich, by using everything he could get his hands on to increase service and efficiency, he was among the first of the great merchandisers to prove that it wasn't the number of hours in a day that increased sales, but in how you used the hours.

Today, in spite of all of our labor-saving devices, we still hear the complaint of Eaton's first boss: "There isn't enough time for everything that has to be done." We are still looking for some magic time-stretcher, and all too often ignoring the time savers we have.

The System That Worked For Him Will Work For You

We still have the same number of hours he had, and on a man-to-man basis each of us can produce eight times as much in a 40-hour week as the best of his clerks could during a 60-hour week. We are better fed, housed, and clothed. Our nightly entertainment, at the flick of a television dial, provides a range of diversions, from grand opera and Shakespeare to slapstick, that Eaton couldn't experience in a lifetime. We have all of this—riches beyond his wildest dreams—and yet as many of us "think poor" today as did in his time. Why?

It is our old enemy, tradition, again. A few decades of progress can't change traditions made "impregnable" by centuries of inherited thought. During the slow centuries in which our dominant traditions were taking shape, our world-changers were a few conquerors, empire builders, philosophers, merchandising and banking princes, and a thin scattering of scientific geniuses. The rest of us were the millions of the great unwashed, unfed, and uneducated. The gulf between the leaders and the masses was so great that no effort was made to bridge it. Instead of trying to bring the people up to their level, the leaders said, "Be content with your lot." "Let well enough alone." "If you want to keep your head, don't stick your neck out." "A penny saved is a penny earned." Et cetera.

And that kind of "thinking poor" is still with us even though we are now enlightened enough to know that "thinking poor" is poor thinking. Let's look at some of those world leaders. Alexander the Great conquered the world knowing less about it than a present-day high school senior. The Rothschilds owned vast portions of the world knowing less about international finance than a good accountant. Any person in the United States has available to him through town, city, and state libraries more information than did all the world leaders prior to the 20th Century combined, and just as much as any world leader of today. As for our own industrial giants like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, Jim Hill, Henry Ford, and scores of others, they would, were they to return today, find themselves "educationally undesirable" in their own empires.

Compared to us, those men were poorly informed, and what information they had was often poorly organized, and even more often inaccurate. But they "thought rich," and rich thinking helps to create riches.

Here is another reason for "thinking rich": Though the advances of the last quarter of a century have been called "vast," "explosive," and "overwhelming," every survey by academic, commercial, and governmental agencies indicates that greater advances will be made during the next decade than during the previous quarter-of-a-century. Not only will this open new opportunities that didn't exist a few years ago, but it will create a great need for success-oriented people to match the accelerated rate of expansion. Those who get the leading jobs will be the ones who think rich enough to get them.

The Idea Comes First

Money is only frozen energy. It becomes useful only after you defrost it and exchange it for what you want. The way you think, therefore, influences the way you use money. What you think you want, you buy—assuming you have the money. If you want something enough, you will devote the time and energy needed to acquire the money with which to buy it. By the same token, if you don't want much—if you "think poor"—you will only work enough to get the "poor" things you want.

The late Al Green was a merchandising genius who "thought rich," but not until he had gone through a shattering experience. At the start of his career he went into partnership with another man. He did very well, but after a year he decided he wanted the whole business so he could keep all of the profits. He knew he was a good promoter whose close attention to merchandising accounted for much of their profits, but in thinking only of his own contribution he was overlooking what his partner was contributing in the way of controlling financial affairs and customer service.

He bought his partner out, and continued to concentrate on merchandising. Because he thought about promoting as the big thing, he worked hardest on that rather than on customer service. Goodwill became non-existent. He went broke. He came to me for job-finding counsel.

Green could not understand how that could have happened to him. He was a man with great pride in his business astuteness, a trait that not only made his failure the more crushing, but also prohibited his seeking help from others. Not until his children began to suffer from the pinch was he forced to recognize that he needed help, something he had never asked before in his life. And help he certainly needed. He had thought so long in terms of profits for himself that he refused to consider at first how he could be profitable to others. Not until he had been helped to understand himself through analysis of his own achievements did he come to appreciate, in all humility, his real worth. Thus encouraged, he did a thorough job of Success Factor Analysis, deciding that he could use his talents to best advantage as a merchandiser of automobile products. Within a week of launching his program, he was offered a job at $10,000 a year to manage a used car lot.

I'm afraid my own enthusiasm did not match his when he reported his success. "You've proved that you are worth a ten-thousand-dollar offer," I said, "but you certainly are worth a lot more. Don't sell yourself short on the first offer. Borrow money if you have to, but think rich. Plan another attack, and go after a job that will really challenge your talents—and bring you the right pay for them."

His morale was bolstered and his imagination stimulated; he envisioned a job in which the used car lot would be run in conjunction with a good garage in which customers could get guaranteed service and related products could be merchandised. Two such jobs he uncovered within two weeks, the second of which he accepted at $14,000 a year. What is more, having discovered the value of service and goodwill, he promoted enough new business for his employer to bring in profits in excess of a hundred thousand the first year. His bonus—another $18,000, for a total of $32,000. Had he thought poor, he might have sold himself short to the first man who offered $10,000.

Success Therapy

Another illustration concerns a woman who had thought poor all her life. She was the daughter of an immigrant who had slaved to put his son and daughter through college so they would have the opportunities he couldn't have. His plan had worked with the son. He had lived up to his father's ambition and his own by becoming a successful engineer. Maybe the daughter had been too close to her father. She saw only his desperate struggle to put her through college, and remembered only her own efforts to scrimp and save by wearing old clothes and eating the cheapest meals so as not to be a burden on him.

Her one period of happiness followed her marriage to a school teacher on a sub-standard salary. Upon his death in an accident, she was left with a five-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son. The insurance policy was almost too meager to contemplate. That was the blow that convinced her that she was doomed to poverty for life.

Some of her story I got from her brother. "I wanted to help her," he told me, "but she insisted I needed my money for my own sons. Finally I sent her thirty dollars, and to make sure she didn't think it was charity, I insisted she take the kids to the finest restaurant she could find for a real banquet. I hoped dining in a nice place would cheer her up and give her something pleasant to remember for a change. Know what she did? She took the kids to the Automat, and then cried for a week because she couldn't afford to do better for them. The funny thing is, she works on old-clothes drives for the poor when her own kids wear the poorest clothes in the neighborhood. She works on the committees to raise funds for refugees, and for milk funds, and for fresh air camps. I'm in favor of this. These committees need somebody to work for them to help the poor, but my sister seems to have a different approach. Mr. Haldane: that girl works harder at being poor than any human I've ever seen."

Of course I agreed to be of assistance, not knowing I was up against the toughest challenge of my life. She "thought poor" so consistently that she could find only four achievements—her college degree, volunteer pre-kindergarten teaching, her two children. Even when it developed that her college degree qualified her as a school teacher, and teachers were in great demand, she began offering excuses. She couldn't leave her two-year-old son, she couldn't neglect her daughter, their clothes needed constant mending, the house took all her time, and who would do her charity work?

My own thought was that she didn't want to face a classroom filled with well-dressed, happy children, fearing that in comparing them to her own "neglected" two she would feel worse than ever. But there was one field in which she could be of invaluable assistance. In several schools there were "slow-learner" groups in desperate need of the special coaching of part-time teachers.

That was something she could understand. These were children more in need of help than her own bright ones. She began by working two hours a day, soon increased to four when a neighbor proved fully capable of caring for her children during her absence. And she proved to be a tigress at fighting for new equipment and brighter-looking books for her retarded children. A grateful mother wrote to the schoolboard in praise of what she had done for her "slow" son. A newspaper picked up the story and followed it up with a feature article on her work, complete with pictures.

Was she rewarded? At one meeting of the school staff an envious teacher who had never had her picture in the paper in 20 years of teaching called her a publicity seeker. An indignant mother at a PTA meeting used the article as proof that the school was spending more time and money on the "dumb kids" than on her smart one. Her principal defended her work, but that he should have to do so made her worry about how long he could put up with the attacks. Fear and doubt made her nervous, she found herself sleepless at night, and when she came to me again, it was only to tell me my Success Therapy couldn't work for her. She had her mind made up to quit.

"Don't be afraid to accept a little help," I assured her. "You know how much your slow learners need help, and fast learners can't get there without help, either. Now about that newspaper article—your good work is what made it a good article. Did it ever occur to you that newspapers are not in the habit of wasting valuable space on subjects that are not worthy of it? Maybe the publicity created a little envy, and then again, maybe it gave you the support you need to fight harder for your children." At that point I remembered enough from Shakespeare to quote: "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt."

That restored her courage. "Yes," she said, "and if I don't fight for my poor children, who will?" She was still thinking in terms of "poor" children, but at least she was thinking more richly. She went back to organize meetings and conferences with parents that brought her further newspaper attention. The envy and the carping didn't stop, but it was recognized for what it was, and its power was gone. In another year she was sent as the local delegate to a national convention on the teaching of retarded children, and won national publicity for the work her school was doing. Envy turned to pride in being associated with the school which she represented, and her principal, instead of being the goat, became something of a hero for supporting her.

All told, six years of constant encouragement and even prodding were necessary to shift this lady's gears from thinking poor to thinking rich, but the results were well worth it. Today, recognized across the nation for her pioneering work with slow children, she has made such a habit of success that even her children are infected with it. Thanks to her, many of her students otherwise doomed to become public wards are now useful citizens.

These examples, backed by thousands of others, demonstrate what rich thinking can do and does for your career. It is not that thinking makes it so any more than, in the words of the old song, "wishing will make it so." But success-oriented thoughts, supported by a knowledge of your own achievements and guided by intelligent planning, will certainly make it so.

The Penalties Of "Thinking Poor"

I have heard, and frequently, that one of the rewards of being satisfied with one's lot is that at least one has peace of mind. The idea seems to be that if one doesn't strive to better himself, he won't be hurt and frustrated if he doesn't make it.

Quite the opposite is true. Man is a proud creature, but pride, unless it is false, can be based only on achievement. When a man's work becomes so routine that all sense of achievement is lost, pride suffers, and all the platitudes about contentment with one's lot cannot soothe an injured pride. To put it more strongly, achievement on which to feed one's pride is as necessary to the complete man as income on which to feed his family. The corollary of that is that a poorly fed pride means a poorly fed family, with a further loss of pride and a greater increase of worry and frustration.

Worry is a doubly vicious form of mental harassment. It consumes an enormous amount of mental and physical energy while contributing not a thing to one's welfare. At the same time, like a wasteful disease, it produces "think poor" thoughts that create more room in which worry can expand. I remember its effects on one man whose achievements indicated that he was of management caliber though he was currently employed as an assembly line worker fitting tires on automobile wheels.

"Don't tell me that," he moaned. "It takes all I've got to fit tires on wheels, let alone thinking about tackling a foreman's job."

His was not an unusual case. Many men seem to feel that by using only half their talents on the job, they have the rest in reserve, like an army that has half of its men on the front line, with the rest in reserve to be called up in emergencies.

Not so. There can be no half-way measures with success. Talent unused is talent wasted. One might as well say that the Olympic high jumper should practice with the bar set at three feet to keep his talent in reserve for the great day when he will be called upon to jump seven feet-six inches. With his muscles subdued by that kind of training, he'll never make it, and with your best talents subdued by "think poor" thoughts, neither will you.

Here is what actually happened to John Carleton, a married veteran who went through college on the G.I. Bill of Rights. His second child was born during his senior year, and he was one proud graduate when he posed in his cap and gown with his wife and family. Then at a graduation party that night he was brought crashing to earth by a statistically minded fellow graduate.

"You know, John," this realist informed him, "I've figured it out. By the time your two kids are ready for college, it will take fifty thousand bucks to put them through, and no G.I. bill to help. As a matter of fact, now that we've graduated, we haven't got any G.I. bill to help us any more."

For three years during his Army career, and three more during college, John had never had to worry about where the money was coming from. It was not much money, but at least a regular income. Now, all of a sudden, he saw himself confronted with a $50,000 debt, and it overwhelmed him. He had tentatively accepted a teaching job in a small town high school, but it no longer looked adequate for his needs. The higher paying job with a wholesale house that he had turned down as "too drab" had already been filled. He scurried around hunting for the "big money" job he thought he had to have, only to discover that the big companies had signed up the college graduates they needed during the same period he had signed up to teach school. He was out all the way around.

During the summer months he did uncover a few possibilities, but each job had something wrong with it. The starting salary was too low, there was no room for rapid advancement, it wasn't his kind of work, it was routine work beneath the dignity of a college graduate—always something. His subconscious mind had frozen on the $50,000 debt he saw hanging over him. When no job promised him that much—and no job can promise that much until you can promise that much to the job—his morale dropped to zero. He moved his family into the home of his parents, blaming his plight on "the recession" that was purely one of his own "thinking poor."

With John still jobless in November, his father told him firmly that if he wanted to give his children any Christmas presents, he would have to earn the money himself. "I'm taking care of you," his father told him, "because you are part of the family, and your children are my grandchildren. But I'll not buy gifts for the kids and have you sign them to John and Kate from daddy. That would make liars out of both of us."

Thus stung, John got his first job as a toy salesman in a department store, one of the scores hired for the Christmas rush. To say he was thinking poor is to put it mildly. "I hit bottom," he told me later. "There I was, a college graduate, and a lot of high school kids were filling in for the rush at the same salary. Doing a better job than I was, I have to admit, because they were eager and I wasn't. I couldn't stand that, having kids ring up more sales than I did, so I went to work to top them. I did, too, but I couldn't take any pride in it. Beating kids."

Not until John saw the pleasure of his children in the gifts he had bought with his own money did he really snap out of it. "I thought then that maybe I wouldn't be able to give them much, but at least they'd enjoy what they got," he said. "I stopped worrying about their college educations, and started worrying about buying them clothes for grade school."

If he was still worrying and thinking poor, he had freed his subconscious mind of the $50,000 debt. He was ready to analyze his achievements in a more constructive light. He was even ready to plant some small seed successes instead of trying to "shoot the works" for an unrealistic $50,000 job. He was prepared, in other words, to make his climb towards success one step at a time.

The first thing an analysis of his achievements did for him was to restore his morale. The achievements were real. They represented things he had done well, and which had rewarded him with a feeling of pride and accomplishment. Each achievement represented a "think rich" situation. On the basis of that kind of constructive thinking, he determined that advertising was the field that could use his achievements to greatest advantage. We worked out a program through which he got a job in the advertising department of the store in which he had worked during the Christmas rush. Since then he has become Advertising Manager, and his future and the education of his children are assured.
 
Unconscious Attitudes

John's case is not an exaggerated one. All of us suffer from fixations (like his "$50,000 debt") that cause us to freeze in the face of the enormity of the thing instead of looking for the ways to cut it down to size. Your brain creates these fixations when it is conditioned by "think poor" thoughts, and will just as readily banish them free of charge and with little effort when you train it to "think rich." As we know today, there is no trick to setting up a mind-training program. Part of your brain is always working—on regulating your heart beat, your breathing, digestion, and other automatic functions. This subconscious part of your mind also responds to commands from your conscious mind, enabling you to walk, run, drive a car and perform all the routine tasks of living without having to concentrate your mental powers on every step, turn of the car wheel, or blink of the eye. But the greatest, and most misused, function of the subconscious is to collect all your experiences, evaluate them, and file them in your memory for future reference.
At some time or other, when faced with a knotty problem, you have said the equivalent of "let me sleep on it." And if you actually did sleep on it, feeling strongly that you would have the solution by morning, the chances are good that you woke up with the answer. Your conscious mind, before losing itself in sleep, had transferred the problem to the sleepless subconscious mind, commanding it to produce. Of course, if the facts on which to base a conclusion are not stored in your memory, no solution can be forthcoming, but if the facts are there and need only correlating, your subconscious can and will produce, sometimes with such startling suddenness as to wake you out of a sound sleep.

It is this mysterious obedience of the subconscious to the commands of the conscious mind that only recently has come to be appreciated. Now we know that if the conscious mind "thinks poor," the subconscious responds in the same low key.

If you think you don't have time to do all that must be done, if you feel that you are a hard-luck victim for whom things always turn out badly, your subconscious will influence your conscious mind to waste time on projects that are bound to turn out badly. Conversely, if you "think rich," this same subconscious will go to work with enthusiasm, slaving away for you even while you sleep.

The readiness of your subconscious to go to work for you is one of the great discoveries of recent years. The subconscious has been so long cloaked in Freudian words and symbols that a belief exists that it has some immutable identity of its own, probably bad, and the least said about it in polite society, the better. According to that belief, your "think poor" thoughts are dictated by your subconscious, with your conscious mind being the unwilling victim. Recent tests have not only disproved this belief, but they have demonstrated quite the opposite. You can change your subconscious mind as easily as you can change your conscious mind, and once changed and put on the right course, it will work tirelessly to follow through. So subservient is it, in fact, that it will even learn a foreign language for you while you sleep. With an earphone planted beneath your pillow, and a tape recorder repeating the lesson over and over, you dream your way through Spanish, French or whatever, your conscious mind pleasantly soothed by the words your subconscious ear is absorbing, and the lessons learned by the subconscious are there for the conscious mind to command as surely as the lessons learned in a classroom.

What this means to you is that when your conscious mind makes a habit of success, your subconscious mind will also make a habit of success, awakening you every morning with "think rich" ideas and answers. When it is conditioned by "think poor" thoughts, your subconscious drags you out of bed to go "back to the salt mines," already defeated before the day begins.

What this boils down to is that either you put your subcon scious to work with "think rich" ambitions, or it will enslave you with "think poor" goals. It has no ambition of its own. It is lazy, and will seek the path of least resistance. Only your conscious mind can determine what you want out of life, and guide your subconscious accordingly. And once it has been mastered, it becomes the obedient servant that works day and night to help you achieve your objectives.

One other point. Your subconscious mind can be commanded, but it cannot be deceived. When you set unrealistic goals, as John Carleton did with his $50,000 job that he wanted "right now," the subconscious recognizes the futility of trying, and either gives up or replaces practical work with wishful daydreams. Then you freeze, or have fantasies, and become powerless. When you do know what your achievements are, and know how they relate to your future, and when you plant seed successes that lead to quickly attainable goals, your subconscious will back you all the way, and help you make a habit of success.

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