SELF-DISCIPLINE
The eighth principle of Your Right to Be Rich is Self-Discipline, but not self-discipline as you might normally think of it. Dr. Hill gives this vital asset a very specific and significant meaning: to take possession of your own mind. The only thing over which you have complete, unchallenged control is your power of thought. Developing control over yourself, developing control over your mind, focusing on the things you want, and ignoring the things you do not want are essential to achieving success. If you do not control your thoughts, you cannot control your deeds.
In its simplest terms, the principle of self-discipline teaches you how to develop control, causing you to think first and act afterward. Through the application of this principle, the power made available by each of the other principles of this philosophy becomes condensed, focused, and ready for practical application on a daily basis. The power you can unleash and the benefits you may receive are boundless. Dr. Hill will help you appreciate the potential that awaits you once you understand and apply the principle of self-discipline in your life.
The first edition of the book Success, Unlimited includes one of my contributions, called “A Challenge to Life.” This challenge to life is my reaction to one of the worst defeats that I’ve ever had in my entire career. It illustrates how I transmute an unpleasant circumstance into something useful. When this circumstance happened, I had real reason to go out and fight—I don’t mean to fight mentally or orally, but, instead, to fight physically. If I had to settle business from behind pine trees with six-shooters, it would have been justified under the circumstances. But instead, I elected to do something that would damage no one and that would benefit myself. I elected to express myself through this essay, which says,
Life, you can’t subdue me because I refuse to take your discipline too seriously. When you try to hurt me, I laugh, and the laughter knows no pain. I appreciate your joys wherever I find them. Your sorrows neither discourage nor frighten me, for there is laughter in my soul. A temporary defeat does not make me sad. I simply set music to the words of defeat, and turn it into a song. Your tears are not for me. I like laughter much better, and because I like it, I use it as a substitute for grief and sorrow and pain and disappointment. Life, you are a fickle trickster; don’t deny it. You slipped this emotion of love into my heart, so that you might use it as a thorn with which to prick my soul. But I learned to dodge your trap with laughter. You tried to lure me with the desire for gold, but I have fooled you by following the trail, which leads to knowledge instead. You induced me to build beautiful friendships, and then converted my friends into enemies so you may harden my heart. But I sidestep your fickleness by laughing off your attempt and selecting new friends in my own way. You caused men to cheat me at trade so I will become distrustful, but I win again because I possess one precious asset which no man can steal: it is the power to think my own thoughts and to be myself. You threaten me with death, but to me, death is nothing worse than a long, peaceful sleep, and sleep is the sweetest of human experiences, excepting laughter. You build a fire of hope in my heart, and then sprinkle water on the flames. But I go you one better by rekindling the fire, and I laugh at you once more. Life, you are licked as far as I am concerned, because you have nothing with which to lure me away from laughter, and you are powerless to scare me into submission. To a life of laughter, then, I raise my cup of cheer.
It’s easy to have a vengeful kind of an emotional reaction to an unpleasant experience where you’ve been damaged and hurt and injured by those who should have been loyal to you. However, this business of striking back at people who have injured you or tried to injure you is just a lack of self-discipline. You haven’t really become acquainted with your own powers, nor your own ways and means of benefiting by those powers, if you stoop to the low level of trying to strike back at some person who has slandered you, vilified you, or cheated you in one way or another. Don’t do it, because you’ll only lower yourself in the estimation of yourself and of your Creator.
There’s a better way to defend yourself against all who would injure you. There’s a better weapon I’m trying to put in your hands. And if you’ll take my word for it and never allow anybody to drag you down to their level, you’ll find that this self-discipline will set the level on which you wish to deal with people. If they want to come up to your level, all right. If they don’t, let them stay down on theirs. There’s no sin in that. Set your own high level, and stand your ground, come what may. I have a better way of defending myself: I have a mind. I know what to do with that mind, and I never am without defense.
When our editor chose the Challenge to Life essay out of one of my books to publish in the first edition, I said, “That’s fine. I want every one of the students to have a copy, because I want to tell them the story back of that essay.” You may be interested in knowing that that essay was largely responsible for the late Mahatma Gandhi becoming interested in my philosophy and having it published throughout India. That essay has already influenced millions of people, and will in time be indirectly beneficial or a direct positive influence to millions of people who are not yet born. It’s not the brilliance of the essay; it’s the thought back of it.
When you react to these unpleasant things in life in such a way that life can’t conquer you, nobody can conquer you, and when you’ve got laughter in your soul, you’re sitting very close to the plane on which the Creator acts himself—when you’ve got laughter in your soul. It’s a wonderful thing to have laughter in the soul and laughter on the face. You’ll never be without friends, you’ll never be without opportunity, and you’ll never be without a means of defending yourself against people who do not know anything about laughter.
Autosuggestion is suggestion to self through which dominating thoughts and deeds are conveyed to the subconscious mind as the medium by which self-discipline becomes a habit.
The starting point in the development of self-discipline is definiteness of purpose. You’ll notice that no matter what approach or angle is used, every one of these lessons includes definiteness of purpose. It stands out like a sore thumb and you can’t get away from it because it is the starting point of all achievement and of everything that you do. Whether it’s good or bad, you can be sure that it all starts with definiteness of purpose.
What is the reason for repetition of an idea? Why should you write out your definite major purpose, for instance, and memorize it and go over it as a ritual day in and day out? To get it into the subconscious mind, because the subconscious mind gets into the habit of believing that which it hears often. You can tell it a lie over and over again until you’ll get to where you don’t know whether it’s a lie or not, and the subconscious doesn’t, either. I know of people who have done just that thing.
The dynamo that gives life and action to definiteness of purpose is obsessional desire. You make a desire obsessional in the first place by living with it in your mind, calling it into your mind, and seeing the physical manifestation of it in the circumstances of your life.
Let’s say you have an obsessional desire for enough money to buy a new Cadillac. Right now, you might be driving a Ford or something less than a Ford, and you want that nice, new Cadillac, but you don’t have enough money to pay for it. What do you do? The first thing you do is to go over to the Cadillac agency and get one of those nice, new catalogs with all the models in it, go through it, and pick out the model you want. And every time you get in that Ford and start down the street, just before you start off, kick off the starter, shut your eyes for a few moments, and see yourself sitting in a nice, new Cadillac. As she purrs down the street as you give her the gas, imagine right now that you already have the Cadillac. Know that you own this Cadillac. You don’t exactly have possession of it, but for the time being, you’re there at the wheel of your Cadillac. It may sound silly, but I can assure you it’s not silly. I talked myself into my first Rolls-Royce that very way.
I’ll tell you how I got my first Rolls-Royce. I put myself out on a limb one evening in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, saying that I was going to have it before the week was over (though I didn’t have enough money in the bank to get it). Well, one of my students sitting right in that audience had exactly the same car that I described, even down to the orange-colored-wire wheels. He called me at my hotel the next morning and said, “Come on down, I have your car, Mr. Hill.” And I went down there, he had the legal transfer made out and the keys ready to hand to me. All he wanted to show me was a little trick or two that you had to know about a Rolls-Royce in order to get the best results out of it. He took me down Riverside Drive and after we drove a little bit, he got out and shook hands with me, and said, “Well, Mr. Hill, I’m very happy to have the privilege of letting you have this nice car.” Wasn’t that a wonderful thing for a man to do? Now, he said nothing about price. He didn’t say, “Well, I’ll tell you what I paid for it and we’ll fix the price.” Instead, he said, “You need it worse than I do. I don’t actually need it at all. But you do need it, and I want you to have it.”
Be careful what you set your heart upon through obsessional desire, for the subconscious mind goes to work on translating that desire into its material equivalent. Self-discipline cannot be attained overnight. It must be developed step-by-step by the formation of definite habits of thought and physical action. You must go through the motion of doing something about it.
You learn to become enthusiastic by acting enthusiastically. That’s definite.
Be careful what you set your heart upon because, if you set your heart on anything and stand by that decision, you’re going to get it. And before you start any obsessional desire about anything, be sure that what you desire is something that you will be willing to live with after you get it—or him or her (married people understand exactly what I’m talking about). What a marvelous thing it is to demonstrate in your own mind something that you desire above everything else, something that may even be hard to get, and then come to know after you’ve demonstrated it that you want to live with it the rest of your life. But be careful what you demonstrate before you start demonstrating.
You may be interested in knowing that every one of the five hundred or more men that collaborated with me in building this philosophy was immensely wealthy. I didn’t pay any attention to any other kind. I was only after the ones that had made a big demonstration financially. I had no time to fool with the little boys. That wouldn’t apply today, but it applied then. You may be interested to know that every single solitary one of them had an abundance of wealth but did not have peace of mind. As they demonstrated their wealth, they neglected to demonstrate along with it the circumstances of life through which they would not worship that wealth, through which it would not be a burden to them, and through which they would have peace of mind in their relationships with their fellow men. They didn’t learn that lesson. If those men could have heard the remarks I made when I stepped on this stage for the first five minutes, if they could have had that lesson back in the early days before they became immensely wealthy, they would have learned how to balance themselves so their wealth would not have affected them adversely. To me, the most pitiful sight in the world is to see an extremely rich man who doesn’t have anything else but monetary riches. And there are a lot of them in this world.
The next most pitiful thing is the boy or girl who has come into possession of great riches without having earned them. Your power of thought is the only thing over which you have complete, unchallenged control. In giving human beings control over but one thing, the Creator must have chosen the most important of all things—control by the power of will. This is a stupendous fact that merits your most profound consideration. If you do consider it, you will discover for yourself the rich promises available to those who become master of their mind power through self-discipline. Self-discipline leads to sound physical health, and it leads to peace of mind through development of harmony within one’s own mind.
Many of my students already know my background, and all of them will know of my background before they’re through working with me. And because of my background, I couldn’t stand up with a straight face and say that I have everything in this world that I need, or can possibly use, or can possibly wish for, and have it in abundance, if I hadn’t learned self-discipline—because that’s how I got it. There was a time when I had much more money in the bank than I have in the various banks I’m doing business with today . . . very much more. But I wasn’t as rich then as I am today. I am very rich today because I have a balanced mind. I have no grudges. I have no worries. I have no fears.
I have learned through self-discipline to balance my life as I balance my books. I may not be entirely at peace with the income-tax man, but there is a big boy up somewhere that stands looking over my shoulder that I am at peace with all the time. I wouldn’t be at peace with him if I hadn’t learned the art of self-discipline or the art of reacting to unpleasantries of life in a positive way instead of a negative way. I don’t know what I would do if somebody came up and hauled off and slapped my face real hard without any provocation. I don’t know what I would do. I’m still pretty human, I think. As apt as not, I would double up my fist, and if I was close enough to him, I probably would hit him right here in the solar plexus, and he would go down with it. No doubt I would do that. But instead of doing that, if I had a few seconds to think about it, I would pity him instead of hating him. I’d pity him for being such a fool to do a thing like that.
There are a lot of things I used to do the wrong way that I now do the right way. Because I’ve learned to act the right way through self-discipline, I’m in a position to be at peace with other people, at peace with the world, and more importantly, at peace with myself and with my Creator. That’s a wonderful thing to have. No matter what other kinds of riches you have, if you’re not at peace with yourself, your fellow men, and those you work with, you’re not truly rich. You will never be rich until you learn through discipline to be at peace with all people, all races, and all creeds. My audiences have Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Gentiles, people of different colors, and people of different races. To me they’re all the same color and all the same religion. I don’t know the difference and don’t want to know the difference, because in my mind, there is no difference. I’ve risen above this idea of letting petty things such as racial differences anger me or cause me to feel the least bit out of step with my fellow man. I just won’t let those things happen, though there was a time when they did happen.
One of the curses of the world in which we’re living, and particularly this melting pot here in America, is that we haven’t learned how to live with one another. We are in the process of learning, and when we are all indoctrinated with this philosophy, we’ll have a better world here in the United States. I hope it’ll spread into other countries, too.
Self-discipline enables one to keep the mind fixed on that which is wanted and off that which is not wanted. At the very least, this lesson should start you on a habit or a plan whereby you occupy your mind from here on out mostly with the things you desire, and keep your mind off the things you don’t desire. And if you did nothing else, all the time and all the money that you spend on this course would be paid back a thousand times over—because you’d experience a new birth, a new opportunity, and a new life. Learn through self-discipline to not let your mind feed upon the things you don’t want, upon the miseries, upon the disappointments, and upon the people who injure you.
I know it’s much easier for me to tell you than it is for you to do it. I appreciate how difficult it is to keep your mind occupied with the money that you’re going to have when you don’t have any now. How do I know it? I know all about it. I know what it is to be hungry. I know what it is to be without a home. I know what it is to be without friends. I know what it is to be ignorant and illiterate. I know all about that. I know how difficult it is when you’re illiterate and ignorant and poverty-stricken to think in terms of becoming an outstanding philosopher and spreading your influence throughout the world. I know all about that, but I did it. I’m speaking now in the past tense. I did it. And if I can conquer the things that I’ve conquered, I know that you can do an equally good job.
You’ll have to take possession. You’ll have to be the person in charge. Take possession of your own mind and keep it busy, occupied with the things that you want, the things you want to do, and the people that you like, so there will be no time left to think about the things you don’t want or the people you don’t like.
Have you ever thought of carefully examining (as near as you can without bias, that is) the people you think you don’t like? The point is not to look for their faults to justify your opinion of them. That might seem the easy and natural thing, and that’s what the weakling would do. But a strong person will use self-discipline to look in the life of the person he doesn’t like for some things that he does like. If you’ll look fairly and squarely, you will find some of those things in every human being. There is nobody so bad in this world that he doesn’t also have some good in him. If you look for it, you’ll find it. If you don’t look for it, you will not find it.
This is one of the evils of this age, and maybe the evil of all ages. When we come into contact with other people, if they give us the slightest reason on earth for doing it, we not only look for all of their shortcomings, but we multiply those shortcomings and step them up into something bigger than they are. Underestimating another person is a great discredit and disservice to the person who does it. If you underestimate your enemies, they can destroy you. You may always have opposition. But you can convert a lot of that opposition—from enemies into friends—if you work on yourself first.
Don’t start to work on the other fellow, trying to convert him over to your ways of thinking. Work on yourself to become charitable, to become understanding, and to become forgiving. If a person causes you an injury (an out-and-out injury without provocation, that is), you have one of the grandest opportunities in the world. In fact, you have a prerogative that he doesn’t possess, because he’s lost the initiative. If a person injures you with or without provocation, he’s lost the initiative, and you have it. What is that initiative? What is it that you have that he doesn’t? You have the prerogative to forgive him and pity him. That’s what you have.
There are three mental walls of protection against outside forces that I want you to memorize. Because it’s necessary to build up a way of immunizing yourself against outside influences that would disturb your mental capacity, anger you, make you unhappy, make you afraid, or take advantage of you in any way. I have this system and it works like a charm. When you have as many people knowing you all over the world as I do and as many beloved friends clamoring for appointments and so forth as I have, you’ll have to have a system of choosing how many of them you’ll see and how many off them you won’t. That just goes without saying; you’ll have to have that. Maybe you won’t in the beginning. I didn’t in the beginning, but I do now. My beloved friends, all over the world, would take up all of my time if I didn’t have a system of keeping them from doing it. I try to keep most of them confined to dealing with me through my books. In that way, I can reach millions of them. But when they want to deal with me in person, I have to have a system for telling how many can see me in a given length of time. This system is a series of three imaginary walls, and they’re not so imaginary, either. They’re pretty real.
The first one is a rather wide wall. It extends way out from me. It’s not too high, but it’s high enough to stop anybody that wants to get over the wall and get to me with anything unless he gives me a very good reason for wanting to see him. Now, my students would never need to, because each one of them has a stepladder. They can go right over that wall without any trouble at all; they don’t even have to ask me. But outsiders who are not privileged students would have to go over that wall, and they’d have to make contact in some sort of formal way. They couldn’t just ring my doorbell or my telephone because my name’s not listed in any telephone book. They’d have to go through some formality. Why do I have that wall? Why don’t I just leave it down and let everybody come to see me, or have everybody write to me and answer all the letters that I receive from all over the world? Why don’t I do that, do you suppose? You may be interested in knowing that on one occasion, I received five mail sacks full of letters. I couldn’t even look at the outside of the letters, let alone open them. I didn’t have secretaries enough to open all that mail, so thousands of them were never even opened. They came from all over this country. It’s not quite as bad today, but the very moment I get a little publicity about something, letters come to me from all over the country. There’s a write-up about me in this last issue of Printer’s Ink, and I’m getting letters from people who knew me thirty-five and thirty-eight years ago right here in Chicago but didn’t know that I was here. So we have to have a system.
When they get over the first wall, they immediately come into contact with another wall that’s not so big and not so commodious, but it’s much higher. In fact, it’s many times as high. No one can even go over that wall with any stepladder, not even my students. But there is a way to get over it and I’m going to tip you off to what it is. You can get over that wall easily if you either have something I want, or if you have something in common with me. Let me clarify that statement because I don’t wish to convey that it’s mean or selfish. I mean that you can get to me very easily if I am convinced that the time I devote to you is going to be of mutual benefit to both of us. But if it’s just something that’s going to benefit you and not me, chances are that you won’t make it. There are exceptions, but very, very few, and I use my judgment as to what constitutes an exception. There’s nothing selfish about this, I assure you—it’s a necessity.
When you get over that second wall, you come in contact with one more wall that’s much more narrow. It’s as high as eternity. No living person ever gets over that wall, not even my wife, as much as I love her and as close as we are together. She never gets over, and she doesn’t even try, because she knows that I have a sanctuary of my soul, wherein nobody but my Creator and myself commune. Nobody. There is where I do my best work. When I go to write a book, I retire into my inner sanctuary, lay out that book, commune with my maker, and get instructions. When I come to an intersection in life that I don’t understand which way to go, I go into my inner sanctuary. I ask for guidance, and I always get it. Always.
Do you see what a wonderful thing it is, to have this system of immunity? Do you see how unselfish it is? Your first duty is to yourself. Shakespeare’s marvelous poetic line, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” I was thrilled to the marrow of my bones when I first read that. I’ve read it hundreds of times and I’ve repeated it thousands of times. How true it is that your first duty is to yourself. Be true to yourself. Protect your mind. Protect your inner consciousness. Use self-discipline to take possession of your own mind, to direct it to the things you want and to keep it off the things you don’t want. That’s the prerogative the Creator gave you. It’s the most important and precious gift of the Creator to mankind. Show your appreciation by respecting that gift and using it.
Make a list of five traits of personality in which you need self-discipline for improvement. I don’t care how perfect you are, there’s not a person who wouldn’t benefit by doing this, if you’re being perfectly honest about it. If you don’t know the answers, get your wife to tell you. She’ll tell you some of these things that you should put in this list. Maybe your husband will do a good job, too. In some cases, you won’t have to ask the husband (because he’ll tell you without it!) or the wife, vice-versa. In any case, find five things in your personality that you need to change and write them down. Right now, for the sake of experiment, write just the first one in your mind. Everyone can think of one trait of personality that they’d like to change.
You can’t do anything about your defects until you take inventory of them, find out what they are, get them on paper where you can see them, and then start doing something about them. And after you discover these five traits for improvement, you can immediately start to develop the opposite of those traits. If you’re in the habit of not sharing your opportunities or your blessings with other people, start sharing them, no matter how much it hurts. Start where you are. If you’re greedy, start sharing. If you’ve been in the habit of passing on a little gossip to somebody, stop that for all time. Just stop it and start passing on complimentary things instead. You’d be surprised at how a man will blossom out and become a different person if you start telling him about some of the things that you know are good about him.
Don’t rub it on too thick. If you do, he’ll wonder what you’re after. Be reasonable about it. When anybody walks up to me and shakes my hand and says, “Napoleon Hill, I have always wanted to meet you. I appreciate so much the books that you’ve written, and I just wanted to tell you that I have found myself. I’ve been a success in my profession or business, and I owe it all to Think and Grow Rich or to The Law of Success,” I know that that man is telling the truth. I can tell by the tone of his voice, the look in his eye, and the way he takes hold of my hand. I appreciate it. Now, if he stood there and handed out compliments out of proportion to what I deserve, I would know right away that he’s getting ready for a touch of some sort. So you do have to use discretion.
Next, make up a list of all the traits of personality of those nearest to you who need to be improved by self-discipline. You’ll have no trouble at all making up that list. You’ll find that one will be very easy. Notice the difference as to the ease with which you’ll carry out that transaction, versus the one where you’re looking into your own life for traits that need to be changed. Self-examination is a very difficult thing, isn’t it? That’s because we’re biased in our own favor. We think that whatever we do, no matter how it turns out, since we did it, it must be right. On the other hand, if it doesn’t turn out right, we always think it was the other fellow’s fault. Not ours. Always.
One of these days, someone is going to walk in and tell me that they had been at odds with somebody for a long time, only to find out when they got into this philosophy that the trouble was not with the other fellow, it was with themselves. As they started through self-discipline to improve themselves, lo and behold, when they got their own house clean, they discovered the other fellow’s house was also clean. That’s the way it’ll work out.
It’s astounding how many motes you can see in the other fellow’s eye when you’re not looking for those in your own eye. Before anybody condemns anybody, they should go before a looking-glass and say, “Now, look here, fellow. Before you start condemning anybody, before you start passing out gossip about anybody, I want you to look yourself in the eye and find out if you have clean hands.” The Bible passage says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Cast the first stone before you commence condemning other people. If you make a practice of that, you’ll get to the point at which you can forgive people for almost anything.
Here is the most important form of self-discipline, which should be exercised by all who aspire to outstanding success: control of thought. There’s nothing else of more importance in the world than the control of your mind. If you control your own mind, you’ll control everything that you come into contact with. You really will. You’ll never be the master of circumstances; you’ll never be the master of the space that you occupy in the world until you first learn to be the master of your own mind. Never.
You’ve heard me speak of Mr. Gandhi many times. He bided his time to gain freedom for India using these five principles. He had definiteness of purpose because he knew what he wanted. He used the second principle, applied faith, when he began to do something about it by talking to his fellow men, indoctrinating them with the same desire. He didn’t do anything vicious. He didn’t commit any acts of mayhem or murder. Third, he practiced the principle of going the extra mile. Fourth, he formed a mastermind the likes of which this world probably has never seen before. At least 200 million of his fellow men, all contributing to that mastermind alliance, focused on the main object: to free themselves from England without violence. He used the fifth principle, self-discipline, on a scale without parallel in modern times. These are the elements that made Mahatma Gandhi the master of the great British Empire. No doubt about it. Self-discipline. Where in the world would you find a man that would stand the things that Gandhi did—all of the insults, all of the incarcerations—while standing his ground and not striking back in kind? He struck back on his own ground, with his own weapons.
If you have to go to battle with somebody, select your own battleground, select your own weapons, and if you don’t win, it’s your own fault. You’re going to have battle to do in one way or another throughout life. You’re going to have to plan campaigns, put yourself across, and remove opposition out of your way. You’ve got to be smarter than your opposition or your enemies, and the way to do it is not to strike back on battlegrounds of their choice, with weapons of their choice. Instead, select your own battleground and your own weapons.
The time will come when this will be helpful to you. At some point, you’ll have a problem to solve, somebody opposing you, or you’ll need to go around somebody. You will remember that I told you to choose your own battleground and choose your own weapons. First, condition yourself for the battle, making up your mind that under no circumstances will you try to destroy anyone, or injure anyone other than what might come of defending your own rights. With that attitude, you’ll win before you ever start. No matter who your adversary is, how strong he is, or how smart he is, with those tactics, you’re bound to win.
Create a system whereby you take full possession of your own mind. Keep it occupied with all the things, circumstances, and desires of your choice. Keep it strictly off of the things you do not want. Do you know how you go about keeping your mind off of things you don’t want? It’s an elementary question, and I don’t mean to insult your intelligence by asking it. I only wanted to emphasize it so that you really think about it.
I was not blessed with anything that you do not have, and maybe not half as much as some of you. My background was certainly much more difficult than that of most, and if I made the grade, I know you can make it. You have to take possession, to be in charge of your institution and your enterprise. You are an institution and an enterprise. You have to be in charge, you’ve got to call the shots, and you must see that they’re carried out. You’ll need self-discipline with which to do it. That’s how you go about keeping your mind off the things you don’t want, by occupying your mind and seeing in your imagination the things that you do want. Even if you don’t have physical possession of them, you can always have mental possession, can’t you? Unless you have mental possession of a thing first, you can be sure you’ll never have the physical possession of it, unless somebody wishes it upon you or it accidentally falls off the top of a house and onto you as you’re walking by. Anything that you get or acquire by desire must be created and gotten in your mental attitude first. You must be very sure about it in your mind. To see yourself in possession of it takes self-discipline.
Mastery of your own destiny is the reward for taking possession of your own mind. Taking possession of your own mind gives you direct contact with Infinite Intelligence. You’ll be guided by Infinite Intelligence. No doubt about it. When I tell you that there’s someone looking over my shoulder and guiding me, I’m telling you the truth of what happens when I meet with obstacles. All I have to do is to remember that he’s right there. If I come to an intersection of life and I don’t know if I should turn this way or that way, or if I should go ahead or go back, all I have to do is to remember that invisible force looking over my shoulder will always point the right direction—if I pay attention to him and have faith in him. How can I make a statement like that? There’s only one way, and that’s by having practiced it. That’s the only way I would know. I will never be guilty of telling you that anything will happen unless I have made it happen and I tell you how you can make it happen, too.
The penalty for not taking possession of your own mind, which is the penalty that the majority of people pay all through their life, is this: you will become the victim of the stray winds of circumstance, which will remain forever beyond your control. You’ll become the victim of every influence that you come into contact with, enemies and everything. All these things that you don’t want will sway you like a leaf on the bosom of the wind, unless you take possession of your own mind. That’s the penalty that you must pay. It’s a profound truth.
You have been given a means by which you can declare and determine your earthly destiny. It carries a tremendous penalty that you will pay if you don’t embrace that asset and use it, and it carries a tremendous asset or reward that you will automatically receive if you accept that asset and use it.
If I didn’t have any other evidence of a first cause or a Creator, if I didn’t have any evidence other than what I know about this principle, then I would know there had to be a first cause. Because it’s too profound for any human being to think out!
Giving you a great asset with a penalty if you don’t accept it or a reward if you do accept it—that’s the sum and the substance of what happens when you use the self-discipline with which to take possession of your own mind, to direct it to the things you want. Never mind what you want; that’s nobody’s business except yours. Don’t let anybody come along and sell you on what you should want. Who’s going to tell me what I want or what I should want? You can bet your life it’s me!
It hasn’t always been that way, but it is that way today. Nobody is going to tell me what I want. I’ll do that. If I allowed anybody else to tell me, I’d think it was an insult to my Creator, because he intended that I should have the last word about this guy here (me, that is). Believe me, I take it.
I wouldn’t choose anything that would hurt anyone else. I wouldn’t do anything in this world, under any circumstances, to injure anybody or anything.
Did you know that whatever you do to or for another person, you do to, or for, yourself? It’s an eternal law. Nobody can avoid or evade that law. That’s why I could never be a prosecuting attorney, and it’s why I’m glad that I didn’t follow my inclination to become a lawyer. I had a long visit with my brother Vivian. He’s a lawyer who specializes in divorce suits, especially divorce suits of very wealthy people. Let me tell you the penalty he’s paid for knowing too much about the bad side of domestic relations. The penalty is that he never married, because his experience led him to the conclusion that all women were bad. He’s never had the pleasure of a wife like I have. He thinks that all women are bad, because he judges them by the ones he’s seen in divorce suits. It’s a common trait of all of us. We judge people by the ones we know best, don’t we? It’s not always fair to do that. Certainly not in his case.
These are some of the vital things in life that you need to deal with. You need to understand yourself, understand people, and understand how to adjust yourself around people that are difficult to get along with. As long as you and I live, and long after that, there will always be a lot of people in this world that are difficult to get along with. We can’t do away with difficult people, but we can do something about it by doing something with ourselves.
Self-discipline means having complete control over both the body and the mind. It doesn’t mean changing your mind or your body; it means controlling it. The great emotion of sex gets more people into trouble than all of the other emotions combined, and yet it’s the most creative, the most profound, and the most divine of all of the emotions. It’s not the emotion that gets people into trouble; it’s their lack of controlling it, directing it, and transmuting it, which anyone is readily able to do if they have self-discipline. So it is with other faculties of the body and the mind. You don’t have to change completely. You just have to be the master. Be in control and recognize the things that you must do in order to have sound health and peace of mind. Develop daily habits by which your mind is kept busy with the things and the circumstances that you desire, and off the circumstances you do not desire. Do not accept or allow yourself to be influenced by any circumstance or thing you do not desire. You may have to tolerate it, or recognize it’s there, but you don’t have to submit to it. You don’t have to let it conquer you or admit that it’s stronger than you. Instead, prove that you’re stronger than it by not submitting to it. Give your imagination a wide range of operation as to what these things are that you’re going to have to deal with but that you’re not going to submit to.
Build a three-wall protection around yourself so no one will ever know everything about you, or what goes on in your mind. No one wants everybody to know everything that’s going on in his or her mind. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want everyone to know all that you think about him or her, either. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who make the mistake of letting anybody know everything that goes on in their mind. All you have to do is start them talking. You know the type I’m talking about. Just get them started, and you’ll find out all about them, good and bad.
I did some professional work with J. Edgar Hoover on a great many occasions, and still do at times. He once told me that the fellow he’s investigating is the best help to him of all. Yes, he gets more information from the guy that he’s tracing than from all other sources combined. I asked, “Why?” He said, “Well, because he talks too damn much.” That was his exact reply.
Tell me what a man fears and I will tell you how to master him. The very minute you find out what anybody fears, you’ll know exactly how to control him (that is, if you’re foolish enough to want to control anybody on that basis). I don’t want to control anybody on fear, not at all. If I controlled anybody, I’d want it on the basis of love. It’s too bad that the average person talks too much for his own good.