What Penalties Do You Pay By Thinking Poor?

A man getting ready to change jobs had made plans, worked out his program and taken the first steps. To put himself in the right frame of mind, he took his wife out for dinner and dancing and “had a ball.”

This was the way he expected to celebrate after he had the job, but he thought that celebrating ahead of time might give him the feeling of success, and help him achieve what he wanted. His “thinking rich” worked!

You can see the “think poor” and “think rich” ideas at work in children. Boys of the same age often want bicycles. They may want them as aids to playing with friends, aids to making money, or merely because other children have bikes and they want to “belong.”

One boy wants the bike because he can finish the morning paper route faster and have more time with his pals. He is thinking differently from the boy who wants the bike because it will allow him to deliver packages to more people in the same amount of time.

The first boy is thinking in a limited way, only about himself; the other is “thinking rich” about expanding his world to serve more people. By thinking rich, the second boy increased his service and efficiency because he understood the value of how he used time.

Narrow outlooks are evident in adults as well. Too often adults continue to follow thoughts of what profits they will get personally rather than first considering how to be profitable to others.

Worry is a doubly vicious form of mental harassment. It consumes an enormous amount of mental and physical energy while contributing nothing to one’s welfare. It is like a wasteful disease. It produces “think poor” thoughts that create more room in which worry can expand.

There can be no half-way measures with success. Talent unused is talent wasted. Some people seem to believe that by using only half their talents on the job, they will have the rest in reserve to be called up in emergencies.

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 will never make it, and with your best talents subdued by “think poor” thoughts, neither will you.

All of us suffer from fixations (like a $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.”

There is no trick to setting up a mind-training program. Part of your brain is always working—on regulating your heart beat, 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.

The greatest but 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.

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 do not 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.

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.

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.

Build Success Into Your Thinking

Today, in spite of all of our labor-saving devices, we still hear the complaint: “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 that we have.

We still have the same number of hours as our grandparents, or even great-grandparents, 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 could do in 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 slapsticks. We have all of this—riches beyond their wildest dreams—and yet as many of us “think poor” today as did in their time. Why?

How often growing up did your elders say: “Be content with your lot.” “Let well enough alone.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” “The rich get richer while the poor get poorer.” “Get an education and find a job that’s secure for life.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” (There’s plenty more, but you get the idea.)

We call ourselves enlightened, but that kind of “thinking poor” is still with us. 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.

Compared to us, men like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, 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.

Though the advances of the last quarter of a century have been called vast or 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.

Make rich thinking a habit for it will work wonders 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 knowledge of your own achievements and guided by intelligent planning, will certainly make it so.

Some have said that the reward of being satisfied with one’s lot is that at least one has peace of mind. The idea suggested is that if one does not strive to better himself, he will not be hurt and frustrated if he does not 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 become so routine that all sense of achievement is lost, pride suffers, and all the platitudes about contentment 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. A poorly fed pride means a poorly fed family, with a further loss of pride and a greater increase of worry and frustration.

Are You Clinging To The Myth About Job Security?

Job security is a myth that must be replaced by the reality of ability security! But the very reasons that make jobs insecure—obsolescence, automation, decentralization, company mergers and the like—are in themselves symptoms of progress and greater productivity, and therefore more security.

Changes can vary between painful and disastrous for the man who is unprepared for them, while the man who is prepared welcomes them for the opportunities they provide.

And the changes will be coming faster. Some of the Department of Labor statistics suggest that within six years one out of seven of us will be employed in a job category that does not exist at the present.

When a university teacher repeated that prediction to his class it was greeted with groans accompanied by bitter cracks such as “How can you study for a career if it is not going to be there?”

The teacher’s response: “You are not selling the label put on a chosen career, but the intelligence and talents of the man who chooses it. Your career label can change, but there will always be a demand for your abilities.”

We no longer have the luxury of believing that the college degree has us set up for life. Occupational security exists only when confidence in known abilities exists. It is only through being your best self that you can live up to your potentialities.

You are well on your way to performing at your best when every morning you can face the day filled with expectation instead of resignation.

The added factor is that what is best for you is best for the others around you. The successful man is not he who gets ahead by climbing over others, but he who gets ahead by producing the values that are of service to others.

Remember that you will not be the only one who is producing services of value. If no one is competing with you, if you never have to dig to find the best that is in you, you may never know just how good your best might be.

Never worry about the competition. Worry produces fear and hate, and fear and hate can take up so much room in your mind and so color your thinking that you cannot present your best side at all.

The Chinese proverb “A bit of fragrance clings to the hand that gives flowers” also goes for the verbal or written bouquet. Say something nice to someone, and a bit of its niceness will cling to you. The man who finds good things to say about others will find others saying good things about him.

And while one man saying a good thing to another is only one man expressing an opinion, when a lot of men begin saying good things about one man, you have got a consensus.

This is not “do-gooder” advice that I am thrusting at you. It is cold, practical business advice. When you speak well of and to your associates, they will think and speak well of you. Look for what is good in others, and they will look for what is good in you.

Let us carry that one step further. To repeat, the successful man is not the one who climbs over others but who is of most service to others. The higher you go, the more people you can serve, and to be practical about it, the more people you will have serving you.

It is rather discouraging when the average employee is not giving you their best abilities. Your own success is being slowed down by the inertia of employees who are living to punch the time clock on the way home to freedom.

This will not be the case if you have made a habit of recognizing that best that is in you, and the best that is in your associates. The best employer is the man with the best employees, and he doesn’t get them until he learns how to recognize and appreciate a good employee when he has one.

This valuable educations starts when you begin to look for the best qualities in your associates. Then when you get your promotion, you will be able to use their best qualities in support of your own, and the executive with that kind of support has at least twice the strength of the executive who stands alone.

In this world the real shortage is in the number of people who know how to use their best abilities for the advancement of themselves and others. When you prepare yourself for progress, you are preparing to double your earning power while doubling your hours of leisure. When you prepare yourself for a label, such as a title on the door, you are saying you want to leave things as they are.

Now which do you really want—all the fantastic wonders of the future, or the world pretty much in the condition your father has it now? The entire career to which you thought you had devoted your professional life may have been merely a preparation of your talents for this new job you were really born to do.

Be Very Careful Using Labels--Especially About Yourself

Labels are often greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Ask five friends or strangers to describe a career title like administrator or engineer and you will most likely get five very different answers.

The quicker someone attaches verbal or mental labels to people, the more shallow and lifeless their reality becomes. These instant experts believe they know all about a person even though they have never met. They pre-judge without waiting for any facts.

A variety of labels are given to each one of us in our lifetime: husband, wife, mother, father, parent, grandparent, employee, employer, citizen and on and on. However, for now concentrate on the labels surrounding work.

Asking about a persons work is an easy way to start a conversation when meeting someone for the first time. A problem occurs if, as a child, you were told repeatedly to stop sounding like a braggart or know-it-all. So the answer is a vague word or two with the unspoken hope that the person listening is interested enough to pursue the subject further.

In contrast to the excessive modesty are the individuals at the other end of the spectrum. Remember the person who rattled off a bunch of techno-babble jargon or shop-talk supposedly designed to impress you with his importance within his super-duper company.

After a few minutes your eyes started to glaze over, you wished for a pair of ear plugs and discovered someone across the room you had to see immediately!

How do you answer when someone asks what work you do? Dull, nondescript words create nothing in anyone's mind--no image, no feelings; just blah. Generalities make no impact because they speak to no one in particular; they leave no impression. They get no one's attention.

You can joke or make flip remarks about your job or employer when talking to close friends or relatives. But be warned that careless comments made within or outside that circle may come back to haunt you.

Once words are said you have lost control of where or when they might be repeated. The stranger (to you) just might be a close friend or relative of an important executive in your company or a potential future employer when you want to change jobs.

You know you will get questions about work so take some private time to draft an appropriate answer. Forget the label (title) that the personnel office gave you. Remember you are writing a response to use in a social situation. You are not on an interview trying to impress a future boss.

When that job label question comes up, you will be ready with a three or four sentence answer that leaves an impression that you are a contributing employee. Pick out something about your work that would be interesting—the challenges, contact with customers, travel, making a difference or the location.

It might help to practice speaking it while you gain confidence. That way you will eliminate all those pauses while you scramble for words.

The secret for making this a memorable conversation is to immediately get back to learning more about the stranger. Your sincere interest in them is going to make a favorable impression. Your job label is really not important. It was just a way of getting to know you.

A reminder: No two things can occupy the same space at the same time. There is no room to have another agenda going on in your head—like wondering what you are going to say next.

When you are really listening to someone, you become connected with that person. What you want is for them to notice and remember you as a person worth knowing. Someone who actually listened to what they were saying.

How To Be Happy Now!

We have heard (and possibly even made) comments like:

• I will be happy when I can spend summer at the beach.
• I will be happy when I get promoted.
• I will be happy when I live in my dream house.
• I will be happy when I reach my ideal weight.
• I will be happy when I get my bright red Cadillac.
• I will be happy when I win the lottery.
• I will be happy when I _________ ______ (fill in the blanks).

The problem with this kind of thinking is that happiness waits until you have some possession or a certain event happens. In the meantime you have pushed the pause button on your life and are simply going through the motions like some robot. Supposedly real living will only start when you get all the “things” on your list of wants.

No one deliberately chooses to put their life on hold or to live somewhere in the middle—neither good or bad, just okay. All these circumstances are the result of the thousands of little decisions, which are reached as a result of the thoughts you give attention to.

Be conscious of all the negativity, fear, anxiety, and lack in the messages you receive daily. It pummels you from every direction. It comes from television, radio, the internet, your friends and family. The quickest way to get you to buy something new is to make you dissatisfied with what you have.

Being conscious of negativity is one thing but wallowing in it is quite another. Our minds are like a garden. We can intelligently cultivate our garden, or we can allow it to run wild. Something will grow. Either we choose what that will be or we can let things happen by default.

We all avoid the individuals, whether family, friends, neighbors or co-workers, who are constantly whining, complaining or bitching—on any subject. It is no fun to be around them. Yet, without really trying, we can fall into that habit ourselves if we stop monitoring our thoughts.

Be happy and appreciative of all the wonderful things you have in your life right now! It all depends on your perspective on what has happened.

A teacher once suggested that we end each day by making a list of 10 things for which we were grateful. After a week of trial, everyone was groaning that it was impossible to list that many things day after day after day!

Put your mind towards looking at things in a different way. Here are some ideas from an unknown author that will help you get started. For instance:

Be thankful that you do not already have everything you desire. If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you do not know something, for it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for your limitations, because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful when you are tired and weary, because it means you have made a difference.

It is easy to be thankful for the good things. A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who are also thankful for the setbacks.

Gratitude can turn a negative into a positive. Find a way to be thankful for your troubles, and they can become your blessings.

I choose to be grateful for the clothes that fit a little too snug because it means I have enough to eat.

I choose to be grateful for the parking spot I find at the far end of the lot because it means I am capable of walking and I have been blessed with transportation.

I choose to be grateful for all the complaining I hear about the government because it means we have freedom of speech.

I choose to be grateful for my shadow that watches me work because it means I am out in the sunshine.

I choose to be grateful for the lady behind me in church who sings off key because it means I can hear.

I choose to be grateful for the lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning, and gutters that need fixing because it means I have a home.

I choose to be grateful for the alarm that goes off in the early morning hours because it means I am alive.

When we start appreciating the simple pleasures of an ordinary day, it takes the pressure off. The cumulative effect of a series of ordinary days is actually extraordinary. You create a kind of exceptionality that everyone can share. Most importantly, you will wake up each day happily planning how to have another successful day.