CONTROLLED ATTENTION
Controlled Attention, sometimes called Concentration, is the tenth principle of Your Right to Be Rich. It is the highest form of self-discipline because it requires coordinating all the faculties of your mind. In other words, it is organized mind power.
This principle of success concentrates all effort behind the definite major purpose of your life so you will achieve it. The essential function of concentration is to aid you in developing and maintaining habits of thought. Habits will enable you to fix your attention on any desired purpose and hold your mind there until you have achieved that purpose. Concentration is power and that power is within your grasp.
I’ve never known a successful person in the upper brackets of success, no matter what their calling, that hadn’t had to acquire great potential powers of concentration in order to achieve their success. I’m talking about highly focused attention upon one thing at a time. You’ve heard people describe others (intending it to be derogatory, that is) as having “one-track minds,” haven’t you? Anytime someone says I have a one-track mind, I want to thank him for it, because a lot of people have multitrack minds, and when they try to run on all of them at the same time, they don’t make a good job on any of them. Outstanding successes are people who have developed high capacities to keep their mind fixed upon one thing at a time.
When you have learned to concentrate on one thing at a time, you have learned to key yourself up to see yourself already in possession of the thing that you’re concentrating on.
Motive is the starting point of all concentration, because you don’t concentrate unless you have a motive for doing it. Do you want to make a lot of money? Let’s say you want to buy an estate, or a farm, and you concentrate on money in the upper brackets. You’d be surprised at how that concentration would change your whole habit and attract to you opportunities for making money that you never thought of before. I know that’s the way it works because that’s how it worked for me.
Years ago, I wanted a thousand-acre estate. At first, I didn’t know just how much a thousand acres was, but I was concentrating on a thousand acres. Actually, the land that I was looking for cost approximately $250,000, which was a lot more money than I had at that time. Nonetheless, from the very day that I fixed my mind on the estate size that I wanted, opportunities began to open up and develop for me to get that money—in larger amounts than I’d ever gotten it before. Royalties on my books commenced to increase, demand for my lectures commenced to increase, and demands for my business counsel commenced to increase. I sold myself on the idea that I had to have the money, and I was going to get it by rendering service for it.
I got the estate. I didn’t get a thousand acres, but I got six hundred acres. I told the man I was buying it from that I wanted a thousand acres. He said, “I have six hundred acres, and by the way, do you know how much six hundred acres are?” I said, “I have a rough idea. Would you mind walking around this estate with me?” We started off bright one morning with a couple of golf sticks we took along to knock the rattlesnakes with. We started around the outer edge, walking up and down the Catskill Mountains, and at noon we weren’t even halfway around the property. I said, “Let’s just turn around and go back. I’ve seen enough. Six hundred acres will be plenty.” I bought the place and then the Depression came. Believe me, it was tough going but I had accumulated enough money to buy the place. I wouldn’t have had it after the Depression, if I hadn’t concentrated on that idea.
Concentration requires a definiteness of purpose in such proportion that it becomes an obsession. There’s no use of having a motive unless you put obsession of desire or obsession of purpose in back of it. What’s the difference between an ordinary purpose or desire and an obsessional desire? The word intensity is fitting here. In other words, to wish or hope for a thing isn’t enough to cause anything to happen. However, when you put a burning desire or obsessional desire back of a thing, why, it moves you into action, attracts you to others, and attracts to you all that you need in order to fulfill that desire.
How do you go about developing an obsessional desire about anything? By thinking about a lot of things, changing from one thing to another? No, you select one thing. You eat it, sleep it, drink it, breathe it, and talk about it to anybody who’ll listen. If you can’t find anybody, talk to yourself. By repetition, keep telling your subconscious mind exactly what you want. Make it clear, make it plain, make it definite, and, above all else, let your subconscious mind know that you expect results.
An organized endeavor or personal initiative is the self-starter that begins the action of concentration. Applied faith is the sustaining force that keeps the action going. In other words, without applied faith, when the going gets hard (as it will, no matter what you’re doing), you’d either slow down or quit. You need applied faith to keep your action keyed up to a high degree, even when the going is hard and when the results are not coming as you would like them. Have you ever heard of anybody achieving outstanding permanent success right from the start, without any opposition whatsoever? Don’t look now, but I’ll tip you off—nobody ever did that, and probably nobody ever will. No matter what you’re doing, the going is hard for everyone.
There’s tremendous amount of information in every one of these lessons that you can concentrate on. You’ll have to concentrate on every one of these lessons when you come to it. Put everything else aside and concentrate only on that lesson. Add to your notes everything you can find that’s related to the subject, and come back to each lesson many times. When you do concentrate on any given lesson, don’t let your mind run over all the other lessons. Stick to that one lesson while you’re at it.
The mastermind is the source of the live power necessary to ensure success. Can you imagine anybody concentrating on the attainment of something of an outstanding nature without making use of the mastermind, and the brains, and the influence, and the education of other people? Did you ever hear of anybody achieving an outstanding success without the cooperation of other people? I never have and I have been around this success field quite a bit—at least as much as the average and maybe more than the average person—and I have yet to find anyone in the upper brackets of achievement (in any line) that didn’t owe his success to the friendly, harmonious cooperation of other people. Their success largely came by means of the use of other people’s brains, and sometimes other people’s money (because you need to do that once in a while, too). You need the mastermind alliance in your concentration if you’re aiming for anything above mediocrity.
Of course, you can concentrate on failure. You won’t need any mastermind help on that—although you’ll have a lot of volunteer help and a lot of good company if you just aim to fail. But if you’re going to succeed, you’ve got to follow these regulations I’m laying down for you. You can’t escape them and you can’t neglect any one of them.
Self-discipline is the watchman that keeps action moving in the right direction, even when the going is difficult. That’s when you need self-discipline the most, when you meet with opposition or when the conditions and circumstances that you’ve got to cut through are difficult. You’ll need self-discipline to keep your faith going and keep yourself determined not to quit just because the going is hard. You can’t possibly get along in concentrating without self-discipline. If everything went your way, it’d be no trouble at all. You could concentrate on anything if everything was going your way and you didn’t meet any difficult circumstances.
Creative vision or imagination is the architect that fashions practical plans for your action back of your concentration. Before you can concentrate intelligently, you’ve got to have plans, you’ve got to have an architect, and that architect is your imagination (and the imaginations of your mastermind allies, if you have them). What happens when you start out to do something without a definite or practical plan? Have you ever heard of anybody who had a very fine objective, a very fine purpose, or a very fine idea but it failed because he didn’t have the right kind of plan for putting it over? Have you ever heard of any other kind except that? It’s a common pattern for people to have ideas, but their plans for carrying them out are not good or not sound.
Going the extra mile is the principle that ensures harmonious cooperation from others. Going the extra mile is something you need in the business of concentrating. If you’re going to get other people to help you, you’ve got to do something to put them under obligation to you. You’ve got to give them a motive. Even your mastermind allies in your own organization won’t serve as mastermind allies without a motive.
What are some of the motives that would get people to join you in a given undertaking? What’s the most outstanding motive? There’s financial gain, of course, in all business and professional undertakings. I’d say the desire for professional or financial gain is the most outstanding motive. If you’re going into a business where the main object is to make money, and you don’t allow your mastermind allies (or the key men and women or the people who are helping you most) to get sufficient returns, you’re not going to have them very long. They’ll go into business for themselves or they’ll go to your competitors.
I was astounded when Andrew Carnegie once told me that he paid Charlie Schwab a salary of $75,000 a year and, in some years, a million-dollar bonus in addition to his salary. He did that for several years. To me, that was a lot of money then, and it’s still a lot of money now. It made me curious about Mr. Carnegie. I wanted to know why someone of his great intelligence would pay one man a bonus of more than ten times his salary. I said, “Mr. Carnegie, did you have to do that?” He said, “No, I certainly didn’t. I could let him go and be in competition with me. So, no, I didn’t have to do it.” There’s quite a bit of meaning back of that statement. In other words, he had a good man that was very valuable to him, he wanted to keep him, and he knew that the way to keep him was to let him know he’d make more money with Mr. Carnegie than he would without him.
The Golden Rule gives one moral guidance as to the action on which one is concentrating.
Accurate thinking prevents daydreaming and focuses on the creation of plans. Do you know that most of the so-called thinking is nothing but daydreaming or hoping or wishing? That’s what it is. There are a lot of people in this world who spend the vast majority of their time daydreaming, hoping, wishing, and thinking about things. But they never take any physical or concrete mental action in carrying out their plans.
A long time ago, I was lecturing on this philosophy in Des Moines, Iowa. After the lecture was over, up to the stage toddles an elderly man who was decrepit and not very strong. He fished around in his pocket and brought out a great bundle of papers that had dog-ears on them. He fished among those papers and finally came up with one yellow paper. He said, “Nothing new, Mr. Hill, in what you just said. I had those ideas twenty years ago. Here they are on paper. I had those ideas.” Sure he did. Millions of other people had them too, but nobody did anything about them. Nothing new in the philosophy, not a thing new in it, except the law of cosmic habit force. That’s the only new thing about it, and strictly speaking, that is not new—that’s a proper interpretation of Emerson’s essay on compensation, but stated in terms that people can understand the first time they read it. There he was, carrying those ideas around in his pocket. He could have been Napoleon Hill instead of me, if only he’d gotten busy back before I started. One of these days some smart fellow will come along and take up right where I stop and he’ll create the philosophy based on what I’ve done and perhaps it will be far superior. Maybe that person is here now.
Learning from defeat insures one against quitting when the going is hard. Isn’t it a marvelous thing to learn beyond any question of a doubt that failure and defeat and adversity needn’t stop you—that there’s a benefit in every such experience?
What is the benefit to a man going through a depression, losing all of his money right down to the last penny, and having to start over again? I can tell you, because I am a man who did just that. That was one of the greatest blessings that ever came along, because I was getting just to be a kind of smarty-pants, making too much money, and making it too easily. I had to get taken back a notch. I came out fighting and I’ve done more good work since that time than I ever did before. Without that experience, I’d probably be up there on my estate in the Catskill Mountains instead of down here teaching.
Sometimes adversity is a blessing in disguise, and often not so disguised, if you take the right attitude toward it. You can’t be whipped and you can’t be defeated until you have accepted defeat in your own mind. Regardless of the nature of your adversity, there is always a seed of equivalent benefit in it, if you concentrate on the circumstance to look for the good that came of it instead of the bad. Don’t spend any time brooding over the things that are lost or gone, or the mistakes that you have made, except to take the time to analyze them, learn from them, and profit by them, so that you won’t make the same mistakes twice.
Controlled attention involves the blending and the application of many of the other principles of the philosophy. Persistence should be the watchword behind all of these principles.
Controlled attention is the twin brother of definiteness of purpose. Just think what you could do with those two principles, definiteness of purpose—knowing exactly what you want—and concentrating everything you’ve got on carrying out that purpose. Do you know what would happen to your mind, to your brain, to your own personality, and to yourself if you would concentrate on one definite thing? By concentrating on it, I mean to put all of the time you can possibly spare when you’re not sleeping and not working. Devote all of the time that you can possibly spare to see yourself in possession of the thing that represents your definiteness of purpose. See yourself in possession of it, see yourself building plans retaining it, working out the first step you can take, and then the second, and then the third, and so on. Concentrate on it day-in and day-out, and in a little while you’ll get to the point where, every way you turn, you’ll find an opportunity that will lead you a little bit closer to the thing that represents your definiteness of purpose. When you know what you want, it’s astounding how many things you will find that are related to exactly what you want.
When I was living in Florida several years ago, I had a very important letter coming to the Tampa, Florida, Post Office. I knew the letter came because I talked to the National City Bank in New York. I knew that letter was in the mail and was down at the post office—and I had to have it before twelve o’clock. I called the postmaster, who was a friend of mine, and he said, “That mail is somewhere between here and your Temple Parish (which was ten miles away, since I lived out in the country). It’s on Route 1 and I don’t know any way you can get that letter before twelve o’clock unless you run that postman down. I’ll tell you which stations to start at, because he’s already passed station number nine. If you want to pick him up there, I’ll give you the instructions on how to follow his route.”
Well, Route 1 was the same highway I used to travel from Tampa to my home in Temple Parish. I traveled that highway every day. I didn’t know there were any mailboxes on it but when it began to be important for me to observe mailboxes, I never saw so many mailboxes in all my life. Believe me, there looked to be a mailbox almost every hundred feet! They were all numbered and I was looking for the number the postmaster had given me as the one where he would probably be at that very hour and I finally caught up with him. It was on a Monday, and so he had an enormous load of mail. He said, “Man, I can’t do anything about it. I don’t know where your letter is and I won’t know until I get rid of all this mail.” I said, “Listen, fellow, I have got to have that letter. It’s in there, and I have got to have it. The postmaster told me to run you down and not to take no for an answer. He said to tell you to get out and sort that mail and let me have that letter. That’s what he told me, and if you don’t think so, come right over here to this farmhouse and call him yourself.” He said, “I can’t do that. It’s unlawful.” I said, “Unlawful or not, I’ve got to have that letter now and that’s all there is to it. Now listen, fellow, be a good sport. No use you and me arguing. You’ve got a job to do and I’ve got a job to do. Mine’s important and yours is important. It’s not going to hurt you very much to go through that mail.” “Oh, hell,” he said, “all right.” So he went to work and the third letter that he picked out was mine. The third one. It’s just one of those things, when you know what you want, somehow or other you’re determined to get it, and it’s not nearly as difficult to get as you thought it would be.
I often think of that experience, how indicative it is of people who know what they want and are successful in getting it. They don’t let anything stop them at all. They don’t pay any attention to opposition.
I’ve often watched my distinguished business associate, Mr. Stone, talk to his salesmen. I get a thrill every time I hear him speak, because I don’t believe he knows what the word no means. I think he’s long since believed it means yes—and the results he gets show that he believes it means yes. He can be the most definite about the things he wants of anybody I’ve ever known. He’s the most definite about failure and in refusing to accept a turndown. When objects get in his way, he just moves right over them, around them, or blows them out of the way, but he never lets them stop him. That’s concentration and definiteness of purpose put into action.
Everybody knows what Henry Ford’s definiteness of purpose was. People have been riding around in a part of his major purpose every day of their lives. It was a low-price, dependable automobile. He didn’t allow anybody to talk him out of it. I have heard promoters approach Mr. Ford with opportunities that seem to me most glittering. He told them that the thing he was engaged in consumed all of his time and all his effort. He was not interested in anything outside of his definite major purpose, which was to make and distribute all over the world low-priced, dependable automobiles. Sticking to that job made him fabulously rich.
I saw hundreds of people spend infinitely more money than Mr. Ford had when he started out, and they ended up in the graveyard of failure. I couldn’t find a dozen people in the world today who would know what their names were. Men who were better educated than Mr. Ford, had better personalities, and had everything that he had and a lot more, except one thing. They didn’t stick to the one definiteness of purpose the way he did when the going was hard.
As an inventor, Mr. Edison gives a marvelous illustration of what concentration can do. Truth be known, Mr. Edison was a genius in any sense, because when the going was hard, that’s when he turned on the most steam and didn’t quit. Think of a man keeping on through ten thousand different failures as he did when he was working on the incandescent electric lamp. Ten thousand! Can you imagine going through ten thousand failures in the same field without wondering if you shouldn’t have your head examined? I was astounded when I heard that and actually saw his logbooks. There were two logbooks, each with about two hundred and fifty pages, and on every page there was a different plan that he had tried, which failed. I said, “Mr. Edison, suppose that you hadn’t found the answer. What would you be doing right now?” He said, “I would be in my laboratory working instead of out here fooling away my time with you.” He grinned when he said it, but he meant exactly what he was saying.
If you don’t give up when the going is hard, Infinite Intelligence will throw itself on your side. You will have your faith, your initiative, your enthusiasm, and your endurance tested, but when nature finds out that you can stand the test, and you’re not going to take no for an answer, it will say, “You pass. You’re in.”
I think that nature—or Infinite Intelligence, or God, first cause, or whatever you choose to call it—conveys information to people in simple terms, in ways they can understand. That’s what this philosophy teaches. It’s not like sending a high school boy or girl to the dictionary or to the encyclopedia to read about it. On the contrary, you understand it. Your own intelligence tells you the moment you come across one of these principles that it’s sound. You don’t need any proof; you can see that it’s sound. This philosophy wouldn’t be in existence today if I hadn’t concentrated on it through twenty-odd years of adversity and defeat. It pays to concentrate and my own experience corroborates this—if you stand by when the going is hard, Infinite Intelligence will throw itself on your side.
I don’t think that would be true in a case like that of Hitler’s. No doubt he had definiteness of purpose and an obsessional desire. What was wrong with his definiteness of purpose is that it ran counter to the plans of Infinite Intelligence, the laws of nature, and the laws of right and wrong.
You may be sure that whatever you’re doing will come to naught, to failure, and to grief if it works a hardship or an injustice upon a single individual. If you hope to have Infinite Intelligence throw itself on your side, you must be “right,” meaning that everything you do benefits everybody whom it affects, including yourself.
Christ’s whole life was devoted to concentration upon a system of living for the brotherhood of man. He didn’t fare too well while he lived, but he must have been doing the right thing, because if it hadn’t been right, it would have been destroyed and gone long before this. He may have only had twelve people to start but I believe what he was preaching must have been right based on what’s happened since he passed on.
There is something in nature (or in Infinite Intelligence), which brings forth with every evil the virus of its own destruction. There’s no exception to that. The overall plan of nature and the natural laws of the universe dictate that, no matter what the circumstance, every evil, by itself, brings its own virus of its own destruction.
Take William Wrigley for instance. William Wrigley Jr. was the first man that ever paid me for teaching this philosophy. My first hundred dollars that I ever made came from William Wrigley. Just think what that man did on a five-cent package of chewing gum. I never ride down Michigan Boulevard and see that building on the river, lit up at night, that I don’t think of what concentration can do even with such a thing as a five-cent package of chewing gum.
The signers of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson had the concentration to give personal liberties to all of the American people and, eventually, to the people of the world. It may well be that America is the cradle for the birth of freedom of mankind. I know of no other nation on the face of this earth that is concentrating upon the freedom of the individual as we’re doing here in the United States. I know of no other philosophy, and no one as engaged in any other study, whose objective is to free so many people as those who are studying this philosophy.