ACCURATE THINKING
Dr. Hill’s eleventh principle, Accurate Thinking, will help you penetrate the innermost secrets of Your Right to Be Rich. It analyzes the mystery of all mysteries, as well as the power of the human mind.
Anyone who intends to achieve any form of enduring success must learn the art of thinking accurately. He or she must understand the fundamentals of thinking, including inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and logic. They must learn to distinguish between important and unimportant facts, separate fact from fiction, and discern emotions vs. opinions. Ultimately, they must do their own thinking, and so must you.
Permit no one, no acquaintance, friend, relative, media expert, or authority to do your thinking for you. Remember that everything begins with an idea, a thought, and if the thought is based on faulty logic or reasoning, then the work that evolves from that thought must also be flawed. It is not easy to become an accurate thinker, but it is absolutely essential that you do so.
Accurate thinking is something everybody talks about but hardly anybody ever does. It’s a marvelous thing to be able to think accurately, analyze facts, and make decisions based upon accurate thinking rather than upon emotional feelings. The majority of opinions and decisions you and I (and everybody else, for that matter) make are based upon things that we desire or things that we feel, and not necessarily upon the facts. When it comes to a showdown between the things you feel like doing and the things that your head tells you to do, which one usually wins? What’s the matter with the head? Why do you suppose it doesn’t get a better chance? Why isn’t it consulted more? Someone once said that most people do not think, they just think that they think, and I think that just about covers it.
There are certain simple rules and regulations that you can apply to the subject of accurate thinking and this lesson covers every one of them. They will help you avoid the common mistakes of inaccurate thinking, such as snap judgments and being pushed around by your emotions. The truth of the matter is that your emotions are not reliable at all. The emotion of love, for instance, is the greatest and the grandest of all of the emotions, and yet it can also be the most dangerous. More trouble in human relationships grows out of misunderstanding the emotion of love than all other sources of difficulty combined.
Let’s begin at the beginning on accurate thinking and see just what it is. First of all there are two kinds of thinking based upon three major fundamentals as follows.
Of those three types of thinking that we do, which one do you think we put into operation most? Inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, or logic?
Inductive reasoning is based on assumption of unknown facts or hypotheses. You may not know the facts, but you assume that they exist. In fact, you create them and base your judgment on what you have created. When you do that, you must keep your fingers crossed and be ready to change your decision—your reasoning may not prove to be accurate because you’re basing it upon assumed facts.
Deductive reasoning is based on known facts or what are believed to be known facts. This is where you have all of the facts before you and you can deduce from those facts certain things that you ought to do for your benefit or to carry out your desires. That’s supposed to be the type of reasoning or thinking that the majority of people engage in, only they don’t do a very good job of it.
Step #1: Separate Fact from Fiction or Hearsay. There are two major steps in accurate thinking. The first one is to separate facts from fiction or hearsay evidence. Before you do any thinking at all, you must find out whether you’re dealing with facts, fiction, real evidence, or hearsay evidence. If you’re dealing with fiction or hearsay evidence, it behooves you to be especially careful to keep an open mind and not reach a final decision until you have examined all the facts very carefully.
Step #2: Distinguish Important Facts from Unimportant Facts. The second step is to separate facts into two classes, important and unimportant. What is an important fact? You may be surprised that the vast majority of facts—not hearsay evidence, not hypotheses—the vast number of facts that we deal with day in and day out are relatively unimportant. When you understand what an important fact is, you’ll know why.
An important fact may be assumed to be any fact that can be used to one’s advantage in the attainment of one’s major purpose, or any subordinate desire leading toward the attainment of one’s major purpose. That’s what an important fact is.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the vast majority of people spend more time on irrelevant facts that have nothing to do with their advancement than they do on facts that would be of benefit to them. Curious people, people that meddle in other people’s affairs, gossipers and all that sort of thing, put in a lot of time thinking and talking about other people’s affairs. They deal with petty small-talk and petty facts—in other words, dealing with unimportant facts. If you doubt this is true, take inventory of the facts that you deal with for one whole day, and at the end of the day, sum up that inventory and see how many really important facts you’ve been dealing with. It would be better to do this on a Sunday or an off day when you’re away from your occupation or business, because that’s where an idle mind usually goes to work on unimportant facts.
Opinions are usually without value, because they are based on bias, prejudice, intolerance, guesswork, or hearsay evidence. It’s surprising to take inventory and find out how many people have how many opinions on how many things. They have no basis for their opinions whatsoever, except the way they feel, what somebody said to them, what newspaper they read, or what influence they’ve come under. Most of our opinions come as a result of influences that we don’t have any control over.
Free advice, volunteered by friends and acquaintances, is usually not worthy of consideration. Why? Because free advice is rarely based upon facts and there’s too much small-talk mixed up in it.
What kind of advice is the most desirable when you need advice? How do you go about getting it? The best kind of advice is from someone who is a specialist or who is known to be a specialist at the problem at hand. Go and pay him for his services. Don’t go after him for free advice.
I can tell you a story about free advice.
Here’s what happened to a student of mine in California. Actually, he was my friend before he was my student. For three years, he used to come over to my house every weekend and spend three or four hours with me. Now, I ordinarily would get $50 an hour, but I didn’t get anything from him because he was a friend and acquaintance. He’d come over to get three or four hours of free counsel, and I gave it to him every time he came. But I knew he didn’t hear a single word that I said. Not a word. That went on for three years. And finally he came over one afternoon. I said, “Now look here, Elmer, I’ve been giving you free counsel for three years and you haven’t heard a darned thing” (but darn’s not the word that I used). “You haven’t heard a darned thing that I’ve been saying! You’ll never get any value out of this counsel that I’m giving until you start paying for it. We’re starting a master course right away, so why don’t you go ahead and join that course like everybody else, and then you’ll commence getting some value.” He took out his checkbook and gave me a check for the master course, and he entered the course and went all the way through it. I want to tell you that his business affairs began to thrive from that moment on. I have never seen a man grow and develop so fast. After he paid a substantial sum for some counsel, he commenced listening to it and putting it into action.
That’s human nature I’m talking about. I’m telling you it’s a fact: Free advice is worth what it costs. Everything in this world is worth just about what it costs. Love and friendship, what are love and friendship worth? Do they have any price? Try to get love and friendship without paying the price and see how far you go. Those are two things that you can only get by giving them. You can only get the real McCoy by giving the real McCoy, that’s the only way you can get it. If you try to mooch and get friendship and love without giving it in return, your source of supply will soon play out.
Accurate thinkers permit no one to do their thinking for them. How many people permit circumstances, influences, radio, television, newspapers, other people, and relatives to do their thinking for them? What percentage would you say of the people permit that? I’ve heard some of my students say it’s 97, 99, or even 100 percent. It’s not quite that high, but I can tell you the percentage is way up there. Most people let other people do their thinking for them.
I have one asset of which I am proudest. Can you guess what it is? It has nothing to do with money, bank accounts, bonds, stocks, or anything of that kind. It’s something even more precious than any of that. I’ll tell you what it is.
I have learned to hear all evidence and get all of the facts that I can from all of the sources that are available before I put them together in my own way and have the last word in my own thinking. That doesn’t mean that I’m a know-it-all, a doubting Thomas, or that I don’t seek counsel. I certainly do seek counsel, but when I receive counsel, I determine how much of it I will accept and how much I will reject.
When I make a decision, nobody can ever say that it isn’t a decision by Napoleon Hill, even if it’s a decision based on a mistake or error. It’s still mine, I did it, and nobody influenced me. That doesn’t mean I’m hard-hearted or that my friends have not had any influence on me. They certainly do, but I determine how much influence they have on me and what reaction I have to their influence. I would never permit a friend to have such influence on me as to cause me to damage some other person, just because that friend wanted it done. That’s been tried many times, and I would never permit that.
Do your own thinking. I think the angels in heaven sing out when they discover a man or a woman that does his or her own thinking and doesn’t allow relatives, friends, enemies, or anyone else to discourage that business of accurate thinking. I emphasize this because the majority of people never take possession of their own minds. Thinking is the most valuable asset anybody has. It’s the only thing the Creator gave you that you have complete control over. It can also be the one thing that people generally don’t discover and use but allow others to kick around like a football (not you, of course).
I don’t know why our educational system (or someone in our system of teaching or writing) has never informed people of the asset of thinking. The greatest asset in the world—an asset sufficient unto all of your needs—is the privilege of using your own mind, thinking your own thoughts, and directing those thoughts to whatever objective you choose. Yet you don’t do it.
Whatever this philosophy touches, and however it begins to touch people, they blossom out as they never blossomed before. It makes a great difference when they find out that they have a mind, that they can use that mind, and that they can make it do whatever they want it to do. I won’t say that they all run and immediately take possession of their mind. In fact, they rather sneak or slip in, a little at a time. But eventually, the affairs of their lives begin to change, and the reason they change is that they discover this great mind power and start using it.
It’s not safe to form opinions based upon newspaper reports. In fact, “I see by the papers” is the preparatory remark that usually brands the speaker as the snap judgment thinker. “I see by the papers,” or “I hear tell,” or “They say.” How often have you heard those terms? When I hear anybody start off with, “They say so and so,” I mentally pull down my earmuffs and don’t hear a doggone thing they say, because I know it’s not worth hearing. When anybody starts giving you information and identifies the source by saying, “I see by the papers,” or they say, “I hear tell,” don’t pay the slightest attention whatsoever to what’s said. It’s not that what they’re saying might not be accurate, but I know that the source is faulty and, therefore, the chances are that the statement is faulty also.
Scandalmongers and gossipers are not reliable sources from which to procure facts on any subject whatsoever. They’re not reliable and they’re also biased. Do you know that when you hear anybody speak in a derogatory way of anybody else, whether you know the person or either one of the persons or not, the very fact that one person speaks in a derogatory way of another person puts you on guard and gives you the responsibility of studying and analyzing very closely everything that’s said? Because you know you’re listening to a biased person. You know that.
The human brain is a wonderful thing. I marvel at how smart the Creator was in creating a human being, giving us all of the equipment, machinery, and mechanism with which to detect falsehood from truth. There is always something present in the falsehood that notifies the listener of it. It’s something you can tell and you can feel. It’s the same when someone is speaking the truth.
By the same token, what about when you hear someone overpraised by a doting or loving friend? That’s a compliment and it’s less dangerous to depend upon, but certainly if you want accurate facts, study the remarks of a complimentary nature just as closely as you study the others.
What if I send somebody to you for employment, send along a very laudatory letter, or get you on the telephone and give you a sales pitch about how marvelous this person is? If you’re an accurate thinker, you’re going to know that I’m rubbing it on pretty thick, that you’d better be very careful how much of it you accept, and you’d better do a little outside investigating. Right? I’m not trying to make a doubting Thomas out of you. I’m not trying to make a cynic out of you. I’m trying to bring to your attention the necessity of using this God-given brain that you have with which to think accurately and to search the facts (although when you find the facts, they may not be what you’re looking for). There are a lot of people who fool themselves and there’s no worse fooling than the fooling that one does for himself. That old Chinese proverb says, “A man fools me once, shame on the man. Fool me twice, shame on me.” People just never seem to think to do a little accurate thinking or a little investigating.
You’d think bankers, for instance, would be so shrewd that a confidence man couldn’t come in and take them. One of the most outstanding confidence men in the world was Barney Birch. I don’t know what ever happened to him but he used to operate here in Chicago. I got acquainted with him once and interviewed him on several occasions. I asked him what type of men were the easiest victims, and he said, “Bankers, because they think they’re so damn smart.”
Maybe now you won’t pay too much attention to scandalmongers and gossipers.
Wishes often are fathers to facts and most people have a bad habit of aligning facts to harmonize with their desires. Did you know that? You have to look in the looking glass when you’re searching for the person who can do accurate thinking. You’ve got to put yourself under suspicion a little too, don’t you? Because if you wish a thing to be true, you’ll often assume it is true and you will act as if it were. If you love a person, you’ll overlook his faults. If you love him a great deal, you may never even see his faults. We need to watch ourselves with those we admire most until they have proved themselves entirely, because I have admired a great many people who turned out to be dangerous—very dangerous indeed. As a matter of fact, I think most of my troubles in my early days came from trusting people too much. When I let people use my name, they didn’t always use it wisely. That happened five or six times in my life, because I trusted the people. I trusted them because I knew them, they were nice people, and they said and did the things that I liked. Be careful of the fellow that says and does the things you like, because you’re going to overlook his faults. Don’t be too hard on the man who steps on your corns and causes you to reexamine yourself. Don’t be too hard on him, because the person who irritates you but causes you to examine yourself carefully may be the most important friend you ever had in your life.
We all like to meet and associate with people who agree with us, that’s human nature. However, some people that you associate with and who agree with you (though it’s all very nice and lovely) can take advantage of you, and they do. Information is abundant, and most of it is free, but facts have an elusive habit and generally there is a price attached to them. Certainly the price is unmistakably in examining them for accuracy, because that’s the least you have to pay for facts.
There’s a favorite question of the accurate thinker, when a thinker hears a statement that he can’t accept. He immediately asks the speaker, “How do you know? What is your source of information?” If you have the slightest doubt in what they’re stating, ask them to identify their source of knowledge, because it puts the person right out on a limb, and he won’t be able to do it. If you ask him how he knows and he tells you, “By believing,” how can you believe anything unless it is based upon something? I believe there’s a God. A lot of people do. But I bet there are a lot of people who say that they believe in God but couldn’t give you the slightest evidence of him if you backed them into a corner. I can give you evidence. When I say that I believe in a God, you might say, “How do you know?” I don’t so much have evidence with anything in this world as much as I do with the existence of a Creator, because the organization of this universe couldn’t go on and on, until the end of time, ad infinitum, without a first cause and without a plan in back of it. You know that’s absolutely true. And yet, a lot of people try to prove the presence of God in devious ways that, in my book of rules, wouldn’t constitute evidence at all. Anything that exists—including God—is capable of proof, and where there is no such proof available, it is safe to assume that it doesn’t exist. When no facts are available for the basis of an opinion or a judgment or a plan, turn to logic for guidance. No one has ever seen God, but logic says that he exists of necessity; he has to exist or we wouldn’t be here. We couldn’t be here without a first cause, a higher intelligence than ourselves. We couldn’t be here.
Let’s talk about that thing called logic. There are times when you have a hunch; you have a feeling that certain things are true or are not true. Be careful to pay high respect to that hunch or those feelings, because that’s probably Infinite Intelligence trying to break through the outer shell and let you use a little logic.
Let’s say one of you got up and said, “My definite need, or major aim, is to make a million dollars this coming year.” What do you think would be the first question I would ask? I’d ask, “How are you going to do it?” I want to hear your plan, and then after I hear your plan, what am I going to do about it? Am I going to accept or reject it? First, I’m going to weigh you, your ability to get a million dollars, and what you’re going to give for it. My logic will tell me whether or not your plan for doing it is probable and workable and practical. That doesn’t take an awful lot of intelligent thinking, but it’s a very important thing to do. I’d go over it and analyze your plan. I’d analyze you, your capabilities, your past experience, and your past achievements. I’d analyze the people you’re going to help and the people who you’ll get to help you make that million dollars. When I got through analyzing, I would be able to tell you that probably you can do it or I’d be able to point out to you that probably it would take longer than that year that you said (for example, maybe it’d take two years, maybe three). Then again, I might tell you that you probably wouldn’t be able to do it at all. If my reasoning taught me that was the answer, then I’d give it to you just that way.
I’ve had some of my students put propositions before me that I had to turn down. I had to tell them to absolutely forget about it, because they’re wasting their time. That’s the way an accurate thinker proceeds. He doesn’t allow his emotions to run away with him. If I allowed my emotions to do my thinking for me, it wouldn’t matter what any of my students undertook to do. I’d tell him he could do it.
This leads to a famous quote you’ve seen many times. “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, your mind can achieve.” I don’t want anybody to misread that statement, as “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, your mind will achieve.” I said, “It can achieve.” Do you see the difference between the two? It can, but I don’t know that it will. That’s up to you; only you know that.
The extent to which you use your own mind, intensify your faith, the soundness of your judgments, and your plans—all of these factor into what your mind can achieve. Some acid test now has to be made in order to separate facts from information. Let’s see how we go about it.
Scrutinize with unusual care everything you read in newspapers or hear over the radio. Form the habit of never accepting any statement as a fact merely because you read or heard it expressed by someone. Statements bearing some proportion of fact are often intentionally, or carelessly, colored to give them an erroneous meaning. In other words, a half-truth is somewhat more dangerous than an out-and-out lie. It’s more dangerous, because the half-truth is liable to deceive one who understands half of it, but thinks the whole of it is true. Scrutinize carefully everything you read in books, regardless of who wrote them. Never accept the works of any writer without asking the following questions and satisfying yourself as to the answers. That also applies to lectures, statements, speeches, conversations, or anything else. Here are the rules that I’m going to give you.
Before accepting statements by others as facts, ascertain the motive that prompted the statements. Ascertain the writer’s reputation for truth and veracity, and scrutinize with unusual care all statements made by people who have strong motives or objectives they desire to attain through their statements. Be equally careful about accepting as facts the statements of overzealous people who have a habit of allowing their imaginations to run wild.
Learn to be cautious and to use your own judgment, no matter who is trying to influence you. Use your own judgment in the final analysis. What if you can’t trust your own judgment? There are times when an individual can’t trust his own judgment because he doesn’t know enough about the circumstances he’s faced with. That’s when he’s got to turn to somebody with broader experience or a different education or a keener mind for analysis.
By the way, can you imagine a business succeeding which is all made up of master salesmen? Have you ever heard of such a business? I have. You’d probably think it’s wonderful—if there are only master salesmen, they’ll bring in all the business in the world. Sure they do. They spend all the money in the world too. A million! In every organization, you need a wet blanket man, a hatchet man, and a man that will cut through the red tape (and everything else that gets in his way) and let the chips fall where they may. I wouldn’t want to be the hatchet man, or the wet blanket man, but I’d certainly want those two in my organization (if my operation was very extensive).
In seeking facts from others, do not disclose to them the facts you expect to find. Why do I say that? If I say to you, “By the way, you used to employ John Brown and he’s applied to me for a position. I think he’s a wonderful man. What do you think?” If John Brown has any faults, I certainly won’t get them with that kind of a question, will I? If I really wanted to find out about John Brown, who used to work for you, how would I go about getting the information? In the first place, I wouldn’t go about getting it from you at all. I would rather contact a commercial credit company to get an unbiased report on him, because it would probably provide me facts that you’d give a credit rating company that you wouldn’t give to me or anybody else.
It’s surprising how much information you can get if you know the right commercial agency through which to get it. When you go to someone directly to get information about a man, unless it’s very friendly and favorable, chances are you won’t get the real facts, you’ll get a varnished or watered-down set of facts. If you ask a man a question, don’t give him the slightest idea as to what you expect the answer to be. Most people are lazy anyway, and they don’t want to go to too much trouble in explaining. They’ll just give you the answer they know you want. You’ll be tickled to death, and go on with it, and fall down on it later.
Science is the art of organizing and classifying facts. That’s what science means. If you wish to make sure you’re dealing with facts, seek scientific sources for their testing, if possible. A man of science has neither the reason nor inclination to modify, change, or misrepresent facts. If he had that inclination he would not be a scientist; he would be a pseudo-scientist. Or a fake. There are a lot of pseudoscientists and fakes in this world who would assume to know things that they don’t know.
Your emotions are not always reliable. As a matter of fact, most of the time, they’re not reliable. Before letting your feelings influence you too much, give your head a chance to pass judgment on the business at hand. The head is more dependable than the heart, but what makes a good combination? Balance them so both have an equal say, so to speak. If you do, it will give you comfort that you are coming up with the right answer. The person who neglects this generally regrets his neglect.
Here are some of the major enemies of sound thinking.
1. Emotion of love. This is the head of the list. How in the world could the emotion of love interfere with anybody’s thinking? If you ask that, I would know right away you haven’t had many love experiences. If you ever had an experience with love at all, you know very well how dangerous it is. It’s like playing around TNT with a match in your hand. When it starts exploding, it doesn’t give any notice.
2. Hatred. Anger. Jealousy. Fear. Revenge. Greed. Vanity. Egotism. Desire Something for Nothing. Procrastination. All of these are enemies of thinking. Be on the lookout for them constantly, to be sure that you’re free of them, provided that the thinking at hand is of importance to you, or maybe your whole future destiny depends upon your thinking accurately. Isn’t it a fact that it does? Doesn’t your future destiny depend largely on your accuracy or your lack of it in your thinking? If that weren’t true, then what would be the use of the Creator giving you complete control over your own mind? What good would that be? The answer is that mind is sufficient unto all of your needs—absolutely . . . at least in this life span. I don’t know if this is true on the preceding plane where you came from, or on the succeeding plane where you’re going. I don’t know about those planes because I don’t remember where I came from and I don’t yet know where I’m going. I wish I did, but I know a great deal about where I am now. I’ve found out a great deal about how to influence my destiny here now so that I get a lot of pleasure of it—I get joy and I can give joy. I learned how to make myself useful and justify my having passed this way. I can say that because I have discovered how to manipulate my own mind, keep it under control, and make it do the things I want it to do. I throw out the circumstances I don’t want and accept the ones that I do want, and if I don’t find the circumstances I want, what do I do? I create them, of course. That’s what definiteness of purpose and imagination are for.
Your mind should be an eternal question mark. Question everything and everyone until you satisfy yourself that you are dealing with facts. Do this quietly in the silence of your own mind. Avoid being known as a doubting Thomas. Don’t come out and question people orally, because that’s not going to get you anywhere. Instead, question them silently, in your own mind. Furthermore, if you’re too outspoken or too oral about your questioning of people, it puts them on notice, they cover up, and you don’t get the information you want. If you quietly go about seeking information and applying accurate thinking, you’ll probably come up with the answers you need. Be a good listener, but also be an accurate thinker as you listen. Which is most profitable, to be a good speaker or a good, good listener? Why?
I don’t know of any virtue (or any quality) that would help an individual get along in this world better than to be an effective and enthusiastic speaker. And yet, I would also say that it is far more profitable to be a good listener—an analytical listener—than it is to be a good speaker.
Let your mind be an eternal question mark. I don’t mean that you should become a cynic or a doubting Thomas. I mean that no matter who you’re dealing with, deal with them on the basis of thinking accurately. It will improve your satisfaction with every relationship you have. You’ll be more successful if you’re also tactful and diplomatic. You’ll have a lot more substantial friends than you have by the old method of snap judgment. If you’re an accurate thinker, most of your friends will be friends worth having.
Your thinking habits are the results of social heredity and physical heredity. Watch both of these sources carefully but particularly social heredity.
Through physical heredity you get everything that you are physically: the stature of your body, the shape and texture of your skin, the color of your eyes and hair. You’re the sum total of all of your ancestors farther back than you can ever remember. You’ve inherited a little of their good qualities and a little of their bad, and there’s nothing you can do about that—that’s static, it sticks at birth.
The most important part of what you are is the result of your social heredity. This includes environmental influences, things that you have allowed to go into your mind, and things you’ve accepted as a part of your character. That’s the important thing by far.
Your conscience was given to you as a guide when all other sources of knowledge and facts have been exhausted. Be careful to use it as a guide and not as a conspirator. Do you know people who use their conscience as a conspirator instead of a guide? They soft sell their conscience on the idea that what they’re doing is right; eventually, the conscience falls in line and becomes a conspirator.
If you sincerely wish to think accurately, there is a price that you must pay for this ability and it’s a price that is not measured by money. First, you must learn to carefully examine all of your emotional feelings by submitting them to your sense of reason. That’s step number one in accurate thinking. In other words, the things that you like to do best are the things that you should examine most. Make sure that they lead you to the attainment of some object, and that you’ll want that object after you get it. Be careful about the thing that you set your heart on, because when you get it, sometimes you find that it’s not what you wanted at all.
I could give a thousand illustrations of someone who paid too big a price for what they got. They either wanted something too badly, or tried to get too much out of it, or did get too much of it, or didn’t get peace of mind, or weren’t able to balance their lives along with it. The saddest thing that ever came out of my research was what I learned about the wealthy men that collaborated in building this philosophy. The fact that they didn’t get success along with their money was a very sad thing to me. They didn’t get success because they became too obsessed with the importance of money and power—the power the money would give them, and the money the power would give them.
You must curb the habit of expressing opinions that are not based upon facts or what you believe to be a fact. Did you know that you don’t have a right to an opinion about anything—not anything at all—unless you base it upon facts, or what you believe to be facts? You have a right, of course, but I mean to say you have the responsibility of assuming what happens to you, if you express an opinion that’s not based upon facts or what you believe to be facts. You can fool yourself that way, and a lot of people go through life fooling themselves by opinions that have no basis for existence. You must master the habit of not being influenced by people in any manner just because you like them, or they are related to you, or they may have done you a favor.
I know that when you’ve gone the extra mile, you’re going to put a lot of people under obligation to you, and I want you to do that. It’s perfectly proper and legitimate to put people under obligation to you by helping them. No one can find any fault with that. But be careful in being influenced by people just because they have done you a favor. I’m talking now to the people for whom you’ve gone the extra mile. You may either be in that position, or in a position where somebody’s put you under obligation, and you don’t want to be. Form the habit of examining the motives of people who seek some benefit through your influence.
Control both your emotion of love and your emotion of hate in making decisions for any purpose, because either of these can unbalance your thinking habits. No man ought to make an important decision while he’s angry. You just shouldn’t do it. In correcting children, for instance, it’s a mistake to discipline children when you’re angry. Nine times out of ten, you’ll do and say the wrong thing, or do more harm than good. That applies to a lot of grown-ups, too. If you’re really angry don’t made decisions. Don’t make statements to people while you’re mad because that can end up doing you a lot of harm.
There’s a separate lesson on self-discipline, but self-control and self-discipline apply to this lesson, too. There are a lot of times when you need a lot of self-discipline in order to be an accurate thinker. You’ve got to refrain from saying and doing a lot of things you would like to say and do. Bide your time. There’s plenty of time for you to plan what you’re going to say and do it properly. Accurate thinkers do that. They don’t just fly off of the handle, start their mouths and keep them going, like some people do. Carefully study the effect on the listener of everything before you utter the next thing. Don’t make any decisions or plans until you have carefully weighed what the effect may be on yourself and on others. I can think of a lot of things I could do that would benefit me but wouldn’t benefit you (and might even injure you). However, I wouldn’t engage in them because I would eventually have to pay the price.
You see, whatever you do to or for another person, you do to or for yourself. It comes back to you and multiplies. That’s another thing that comes under the heading of accurate thinking. After you’ve become thoroughly indoctrinated with this philosophy, you learn not to do anything that you don’t want to come back and affect you. You learn not to think anything, say anything, or do anything that you don’t want to come back and give countenance later on in life.
Before accepting as facts the statements of other people, ask yourself if their statements are beneficial. Ask them how they came by their so-called facts. When they express their opinions, ask how they know their opinion is sound. I don’t want someone else’s opinion, I want facts, and then I’ll form my own opinion. Give me the facts and I’ll put them together in my own way, says the accurate thinker.
Learn to examine with extraordinary care all statements of a derogatory nature made by one person against others. The very nature of such statements brands them as being not without bias (and that’s putting it politely). Overcome the habit of trying to justify a decision you have made that turns out to have been unsound. Accurate thinkers just don’t do that. If they find out they’re wrong, they reverse their decision just as quickly as they made it.
Excuses, alibis, and accurate thinking never are friendly bedfellows. I’ve never seen a person yet that wasn’t adept at creating alibis for the things that he didn’t do but should’ve done. Most people have a great stack of them and it doesn’t take much before they’ll fling them together and throw them at you. Good excuses and good alibis don’t amount to a thing unless there is something behind them that’s sound that you can depend upon.
If you are an accurate thinker, you will never use the terms “They say,” or “I heard,” or repeat others who say them. Instead, identify the original source and attempt to establish its dependability. It’s not an easy matter to be an accurate thinker. There’s quite a bit you have to pay in order to be one, but it’s worth it. Without accurate thinking people will take advantage of you, you won’t get as much out of life as you want, and you’ll never be a well-balanced person.
To think accurately, you’ve got to have a set of rules to go by and you’ll find them in this lesson. Go over this lesson, study it carefully, add some notes to it of your own, start now to do some accurate thinking. Start putting these things into practice tomorrow morning or even sooner.
Separate facts into two classes: important and non-important. If you learn to separate facts from information, this lesson alone is easily worth a thousand times as much as you have put into the entire course. Be sure that you’re dealing with facts, state the facts as you’re dealing with them, break them down, and throw off the unimportant facts that you’ve been wasting so much time with until now.