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.