LEARNING from ADVERSITY and DEFEAT
The central theme of the twelfth principle, Learning from Adversity and Defeat, may be stated in one simple sentence: every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. Pain, failure, setbacks, defeats, losses—misfortunes we all must suffer—are simply a part of the human condition. No one wins all the time. Those who succeed are those who do not let adversity stop them. They persevere. They view hardships as tests that permit them to build their strength to even greater dimensions and carry on. Remember this critical point: defeat is never the same as failure unless and until it has been accepted as such. Once again, this principle is presented in a context of a test in which you will evaluate yourself as to how much or how little the major causes of failure are part of your life.
No one likes to undergo adversity, unpleasant circumstances, or defeat. After careful consideration of real circumstances and the laws of nature, I believe it was intended that we all should undergo adversity, defeat, failure, and opposition. People do not like defeat or adversity, and yet I’m compelled to tell you that had it not been for the adversity that I went through during the early part of my life, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you tonight. I wouldn’t have completed this philosophy that reaches millions of people all over the world. It was out of the opposition that I met with that I grew the strength, the wisdom, and the ability to complete this philosophy and take it to the people in the shape that it’s in now.
If had my choice, there’s no doubt that I would have made it easier for myself, just the same as you would from here on out. We’re all inclined to find the line of less resistance. Did you know that picking the line of less resistance is what makes all rivers, and some men, crooked? That’s right, yet it’s a very common habit for us to do that. We don’t want to pay the price of intense effort, no matter what we’re doing. We like to have things come the easy way. The mind is just like any other part of the physical body. It atrophies, withers away, and becomes weak through disuse. One of the best things that can happen to you is to meet with problems, circumstances, and incidents that force you to think, because without a motive, you might not do much thinking anyway.
There are forty major reasons or causes of failure—more than twice as many causes of failure as there are principles of success. There are seventeen principles of success, some combination of which is responsible for all successful achievements, and more than forty major causes of failure. The forty I talk about are not all of them; they’re just the major causes.
Self-examination is one of the most profitable things that you can indulge in. Sometimes you don’t want to do it but it’s a very necessary thing for us to know ourselves as we are—especially our weaknesses.
In sharing this philosophy of success, it is necessary to tell you the things that you should do and also the things you should not do. Grade yourself as I go along and comment on each one of them. Grade yourself from zero to one hundred. If you’re 100 percent free of any one of them, grade yourself 100 percent. If you’re only 50 percent free, grade yourself 50 percent. And if you aren’t free at all, grade yourself 0. When you’re through, add the total and divide it by forty to get your general average on controlling the things that cause men and women to fail.
If you don’t follow that habit of drifting, if you make decisions quickly, lay out plans and follow those plans, know exactly where you’re going and are on the way, you can grade yourself 100 percent on this one. However, be careful before you mark your grade, because it’s the rarest thing in the world that anybody would grade himself 100 percent on this one. To do that, you really have to be organized and you really have to be prepared.
I may not need to make any comment about an unfavorable hereditary foundation at birth. On the other hand, it could be a cause of failure, or it could also be a cause of success. Some of the most successful people I have ever known were handicapped by bad afflictions at birth.
Without curiosity, we’d never learn anything; we’d never investigate anything. But the wording, as “meddlesome curiosity,” involves other people’s affairs, something that doesn’t really concern you, right? If you’re not guilty of that, you’ll grade yourself 100 percent. Or will you? As you grade yourself, go back to your past experiences and determine to what extent you have control of this weakness.
Lack of purpose specifically refers to lacking a definite major purpose as a lifetime goal. If you lack this, here’s a mighty good place to rate yourself 0.
One of the most astounding things that I have discovered is that there is very little relationship between schooling and success. I want you to think about that one. Some of the most successful people I have ever known have been people with the least amount of formal education or formal schooling.
A lot of people kid themselves into believing that they’re failures because they don’t have a college education. If you come out of college with the feeling that you should be paid for what you know instead of what you do, then that college education hasn’t done you much good. Wait until you meet that old man destiny standing just around the corner with a club (and it’s not stuffed with cotton). Sooner or later, you’ll find out that you’re not going to be paid for what you know, you’re going to be paid for what you do with what you know or what you can get other people to do.
Lack of self-discipline is generally manifested by excesses in eating, drinking, and indifference toward opportunities for self-advancement and improvement. Lack of self-discipline. I hope you can grade yourself very high on this one.
Lack of ambition is an inability to aim above mediocrity. How much ambition do you have? Where are you going in life, what do you want out of life, and what are you going to settle for? There was a young soldier I came across just after World War I who said he just wanted a sandwich and a place to sleep that night, but I wouldn’t let him do it. I talked him into settling for a higher rate than that, and the result was that he became a multimillionaire within the next four years. I hope I’ll have as much success with you in stepping your ambition up to where you’re not willing to settle for a penny. Aim high. It’s not going to cost you anything to aim high. You may not get as far as you aim, but you can certainly get farther than if you don’t aim at all. Get your sights raised up. Be ambitious and be determined that you’re going to become in the future what you have failed to become in the past.
Ill health is often due to wrong thinking and improper diet. People have a lot of alibis on account of ill health, I can assure you. They have a lot of imaginary ailments (they call it hypochondria in the Materia Medica). I don’t know to what extent you’ve been coddling or babying yourselves on this, that, and the other imaginary aliments. If you have, grade yourself pretty low on that one.
What about unfavorable environmental influences during childhood? Once in a great while you’ll find that the influences upon a person during childhood are of such a negative nature that a person will go all the way through life with those negative influences. I’m quite convinced that if I had been permitted to continue in my childhood as I started out, before my stepmother came into the picture, I really and truly would have become a second Jesse James—only I would have been able to shoot faster and straighter than he did.
Lack of persistence is failing to follow through with one’s duties. What is it that causes people to fail to follow through when they start something? What’s the main reason why people do not follow through, do the thing right, and see that it’s done right? Lack of motive, that’s the answer. They don’t want to do it badly enough. I’ll follow through on anything that I want to follow through on, but if I don’t want to follow through, I can find a lot of alibis to keep from doing it. Is it profitable for you to get in the habit of following through when you undertake something, or is it profitable to permit yourself to be sidetracked? How do you rate on that one? Do you follow through or are you easily sidetracked? Are you easily dissuaded from doing a thing when somebody criticizes you? Believe me, if I had been afraid of criticism, I never would have gotten anywhere in life. In fact, I got to where I really courted criticism because it put the fight in me; when that fight was in me, I did a much better job and I carried through better.
There are a lot of people who fail because they lack that driving force that causes them to carry through, especially when the going is hard. No matter what you’re doing, you’re going to run into that period when the going is hard. If it’s a new business, you’ll probably need finances you don’t have in the beginning. If it’s a profession, you’ll need clients you don’t have in the beginning. If it’s a new job, you’ll need recognition with your employer that you don’t have—you have to earn that recognition. You need follow-through in the beginning, when the going is always hard.
People can have a habit of negative mental attitude, a habit of keeping their mind negative all the time. Are you preponderantly negative most of the time or are you preponderantly positive? When you see a doughnut, what do you see first? Is the first thing you see the hole or the doughnut? Of course, you don’t eat the hole, you just eat the doughnut. But a lot of people who come across a problem are like the fellow who sees the hole in the doughnut and growls about it because it takes out so much cake. They don’t see the doughnut itself. This is a negative mental attitude.
What is the result of a person who has the habit of allowing his mind to become negative and remain negative? You can’t put him in jail for it. You can’t sue him for it. A negative mind repels people. A positive mind attracts . . . what? It attracts people who harmonize with your positive mental attitude and your fine character. Just like that old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” negative birds flock to the negative mind, and positive birds flock to the positive mind.
Who has control over your mind? Who determines whether it’s positive or negative? I want you to grade yourself on the extent to which you exercise that prerogative—the most precious thing you have or ever will have. The only thing you have complete unchallenged control over is the right to make your mind positive and keep it that way, or allow the circumstances of life to make it negative. You have to work to keep your mind positive. Why? With so many negative influences around you—so many people, so many circumstances—you’ll become negative if you let yourself become a part of those circumstances instead of creating your own in your mind. If you have a very clear concept of the difference between a negative mind and a positive mind, can you picture what happens in the chemistry of the brain when your mind is positive or when it’s negative? Have you noticed the difference between your achievements when you are afraid and the achievements when you are not afraid (whether in selling, teaching, lecturing, writing, or anything else)?
I first wrote Think and Grow Rich while I was working for President Roosevelt during that bad depression, which was during his first term. I wrote it in that same negative mental attitude that everybody else was in (in other words, my negative attitude was unconsciously forced upon me by the masses). Several years later when I got that book out and read it, I recognized it was not a salable book because of its being negative. A reader will pick up exactly the mental attitude that a writer is in when he writes a book, no matter what kind of language or terminology he uses. Without changing a word in the book, I sat down at my typewriter when I was in a new frame of mind. I was “up on the beam,” as we say—100 percent positive—and I typed that book in that frame of mind and that’s the thing that made that book click. You can’t afford to do anything when you’re negative. Anything you do that you expect to benefit you, anything that you expect to influence other people—if you want to get people to cooperate with you, if you want to sell people something, or if you want to make a good impression upon people, don’t come near them until you’re in a positive frame of mind.
Grade yourself accurately on this one. Grade yourself on the average state of mind that you maintain, not just on your state of mind at any given time. Here’s a good rule to go by to determine whether or not you are more positive than you are negative: observe how you feel when you wake up in the morning and get out of bed. If you’re not in a good frame of mind, I can tell you it’s because a lot of thought habits that preceded that hour (the day before, perhaps) had been negative. You can make yourself very ill by allowing your mind to become negative and it will reflect itself the next morning. When you come out of sleep, you’re just fresh from coming out of the influence of your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind had been off duty all night, and when it goes back on duty, it finds a mess there that you’ve got to clean up. But, the subconscious mind’s been stirring all night long. If you wake up full of joy and you want to get going on what you’re going to do today, chances are you’ve been pretty positive the day before, or maybe several days before.
Emotions are both negative and positive. Have you ever realized that it’s just as necessary to control your positive emotions as it is your negative ones? Why? Why in the world would I want to control the emotion of love, for instance? One woman answered, “Love can get you in hot water. It can scald you.” (She must have had some experience with that.) How about the emotional desire for financial gain? Do you need to control the desire for money? You’re not afraid of getting too much, are you? Maybe getting it the wrong way, or working your emotion up to where you want to get too much. I met a lot of people who had too much money for their own good, especially people who got it without earning it or people who inherited it.
Would you be interested in knowing why they call me Napoleon? I’m going to tell you because it makes a good point here. Since I was the eldest son (or the first child), my father named me after my great-uncle, Napoleon Hill, of Memphis, Tennessee, who was a multimillionaire cotton broker. I suppose my father hoped that when Uncle Napoleon died, I would get some of the money. Well, he died and I didn’t get any of the money, and when I found out that I was not going to get any of it, I felt very bad. After I swapped some of my youth for wisdom and observed what happened to the ones who did get it, I was thankful—eternally grateful—that I didn’t get a dime of it because I learned a better way of getting it for myself than having it given to me.
The desire for something for nothing, or the desire for something for less than its value, is actually the desire for something without being willing to give adequate compensation for it. Are you ever troubled with that tendency? Who of us hasn’t been at one time or another? You can have a lot of faults, but you want to find out what they are and start getting rid of them—that’s why we’re making this analysis. This is your chance to come face-to-face, be trial judge, defendant, and prosecutor all at one time. You get to make the final decision. Far better for you to find your faults than it would be for me to find them for you. Because if you find them, you’re not going to spend any alibis; you’re going to try get rid of them.
Do you have a habit of reaching decisions promptly and firmly? Or do you reach decisions very slowly, and after you reach them, do you allow the first person that comes along to reverse you? Do you allow circumstances to reverse your decision without a sound reason? To what extent do you stand by your decisions after you make them? What circumstances would cause you to reverse a decision you made?
You should hold an open mind on that subject at all times. Never make a decision and say, “That’s it and I’m going to stand by it forever,” because something might develop later on that would prompt you to reverse that decision. Some people are stubborn. Right or wrong, once they’ve made a decision, they die by it. I’ve seen a lot of people who would rather die than reverse themselves or have somebody reverse them on a decision. Of course you’re not like that. Not if you’re really indoctrinated with this philosophy. You may have behaved like that once, but you’re not like that now (or you’re not going to be like that after this).
This is a wonderful world we’re living in. I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad I’m doing what I am, and if unpleasant circumstances cross my path, I am very glad for that, too, because I’ll find out whether I’m stronger than the circumstances or not. As long as I can conquer them and go over them, I’m not going to worry about circumstances. I won’t worry about things that oppose me; people that don’t like me, people who say mean things about me. I’d worry if people said mean things about me and, after examining myself, found out they were telling the truth. As long as they’re not telling the truth, I can stand back and laugh at them for how foolish they are and how much damage they’re doing to themselves.
Here’s a honey: number sixteen—the wrong selection of a mate in marriage. Don’t be too quick to grade yourself on that one. If you made a 100 percent mistake on that, look around before you grade yourself and see if you can’t do something about correcting that mistake, maybe resell yourself. I’ve known of that being done, haven’t you? There are some people who believe all marriages are made in heaven, and it’d be a wonderful thing if they were, but I’ve seen some that were not made in heaven. I don’t know where else they might have been made, but they certainly weren’t made in heaven.
I’ve also seen business marriages or business relationships that were not made in heaven, and I’ve helped to correct a lot of those in which business associates weren’t working together in a spirit of harmony. Believe me, no business on the face of this earth can succeed unless the people at the top level, at least, are working in harmony.
There’s no household or home that can be a joy, or a place that you want to go, unless there is harmony at the top. That harmony starts with loyalty, dependability, and ability. That’s how I’d evaluate people. If I want to select a man or woman for a high position, the first thing I would look for is whether that person was loyal to the people to whom he owed loyalty. If they didn’t have loyalty, I wouldn’t want him or her on any terms whatsoever. The next thing I would look for would be dependability, whether or not you can depend upon him to be at the right place at the right time and to do the right thing. After that would come ability. I’ve seen a lot of people who had great ability but they were not dependable, not loyal, and, therefore, very dangerous.
Number seventeen is having overcaution in business and professional relationships. Have you seen people so cautious that they wouldn’t trust their own mother-in-law? I knew a man who was so cautious that he had a special wallet made with a little lock put on it. He hid the key in a different place every night, so that his wife couldn’t go through his trousers and take money out of his wallet. Wasn’t he a honey? I bet his wife loved him.
This is about overcaution in business and professional relationship, and lack of all forms of caution in all human relationships. Have you seen people like that? They just didn’t have any caution. Some people start their mouths going and go off and leave them. Never mind what they’re going to say, nor what the effect will be on other people. You’ve seen people like that, haven’t you? They have no caution whatsoever—no discrimination, diplomacy, or consideration of what they do to other people through their words. I’ve seen people with tongues that were sharper than an unused double-edged Gillette blade. I’ve seen people who would sign anything a salesman put in front of them, not even reading it. They wouldn’t even read the big type, let alone the little type. Have you seen people like that?
Of course you’re not like that. You know you can be overcautious and you can be under-cautious. The happy medium is found in the lesson on accurate thinking where you carefully examine things you are going to do before you do them, not afterward, and where you evaluate your words before you express them, not afterward.
It know it might be a little bit difficult for you to grade yourselves accurately on this one. To be perfectly candid with you, it would be a little difficult for me to grade myself accurately on seventeen and eighteen, because there’ve been a lot of times in my life when I wasn’t cautious at all. I think most of my troubles in my early days came through my trusting too many people. I let somebody come along and flatter me into using the name Napoleon Hill, and he’d go out and flim-flam a lot of people—all in the name of Napoleon Hill. That happened several times in my life before I tightened up and became cautious. That can happen to a lot of people you know, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t want to become so cautious that I didn’t trust anybody for anything. You’d get no joy out of living if you did that.
How many times have you heard of people getting into trouble because they were associated with the wrong kind of people? I’ve never seen a youngster in my life that became bad or went wrong, where the reason couldn’t be traced back to the influence of some other person. Not once have I ever known a youngster to go wrong or to get into bad habits unless somebody else influenced them.
Number twenty is the wrong selection of a vocation or a total neglect of a choice of a vocation. About ninety-eight people out of every hundred would grade 0 on that one. Of course, students of this philosophy who have been indoctrinated by lesson number one on definite major purpose would grade much higher than that. Give yourself a grade 0 or 100 percent on this one, not halfway. You either have a definite major purpose or you don’t have it. You can’t grade 50 or 60 or any other amount on this one, or on definiteness of purpose. You either have a major purpose or you don’t have it.
Lack of concentration of effort is like having divided interests. You don’t split your interests or divide them over a lot of different things. One person is not strong enough to do this. Life is too short to ensure your success unless you learn the art of concentrating everything you’ve got on one thing at a time. You also have to follow through on that one thing and do a good job.
It might be difficult for you to grade yourself on number twenty-two: lack of a budget, control over income and expenditures, and having a systemic way of taking care of your income and your expenditures. Do you know how the average person manages the question of a budget? He manages it by being well over on his expenditures, depending on the amount of credit that he can get from other people. When the credit shuts down on him, then he more or less slacks off, but until that happens, he’ll run wild with spending.
A good business firm would go bankrupt quickly if they didn’t have a system of control over income and expenditures. That’s what a comptroller in an organization is for. (Usually called a wet blanket, every successful business of any size has to have a wet blanket.) A man who controls the assets of the company keeps the numbers from getting away at the wrong time and the wrong way.
Time is the most precious thing that you have. Of the twenty-four hours in every day, each person generally devotes eight hours to sleep, eight hours to make a living, and another eight hours to free time.
As Americans, we have the freedom to do anything we want with those “free” eight hours. You can sin, spend, establish good habits or bad habits, reeducate yourself, and so forth. But what are you actually doing with those eight hours? That’s going to be the determining factor on how you grade yourself on this particular question. Are you budgeting the use of your time to the best advantage? Do you have a system of actually making all of your time count? The first sixteen hours is taken care of automatically, but the other eight hours is not. It’s flexible and you can do what you want with it.
Without doubt, enthusiasm is among the most valuable emotions, provided that you can turn it on and off, like a water spigot or an electric light. If you can turn on your enthusiasm when you want to and turn it off whenever you want to, you can grade yourself 100 percent on this one. Lack of the ability to do that would grade you somewhere toward that little zero.
How do you go about controlling your enthusiasm? Have you ever thought about your willpower? What it was placed there for? You have a power of will and what’s the purpose of that power of will? It’s for discipline to make your mind whatever you want it to be and form whatever habits you want.
I have never been able to determine in my own mind which is worse: no enthusiasm at all (like a cold fish), or red-hot enthusiasm (that’s out of control). They’re both bad. If somebody made me mad right now, I could turn off my enthusiasm just like that and turn on something else. That might be much more appropriate (provided that I kept bad language out of the picture, that is). But there was a time when I could turn on the anger much more quickly than I could turn on enthusiasm, and I couldn’t turn off anger nearly as easily. That’s something you will have to overcome, the ability to turn on or turn off any of your emotions.
Intolerance is a closed mind based on ignorance or prejudice, in connection with religious, racial, political, and economic ideas. How do you rate on that one? It would be a marvelous thing if you could rate 100 percent and honestly say that you have an open mind on all subjects, and toward all people, at all times. However, if you could say that, you’d probably not be human—you’d be a saint.
I suppose there are times when you can make up your mind to be open-minded on all these things, at least for a little while. I know I can, at least for a little while. However, if you can’t grade 100 percent, and can’t honestly say you are open-minded toward all people, at all times, on all subjects, what is the next best thing to do? We’re tolerant some of the time, of course. The more you try to be tolerant, you’ll eventually get to where you’ll be in the habit of tolerance instead of intolerance.
When the vast majority of people meet other people, they immediately begin to look for the things that they don’t like in the other people, and they always find things they don’t like. But there’s another type of person, and I notice that this other type of person is always much more successful, much more happy, and much more welcome when he comes around, or when he meets a person. Whether it’s an acquaintance or a stranger, the first thing he does is not only to look for things that he likes in that person, but also to compliment them, either by saying or doing something to indicate that he recognizes their good qualities (instead of the bad ones). I get a great feeling when somebody walks up to me and says, “Aren’t you Napoleon Hill?” and I say, “Yes, I’m guilty.” “Well, I want to tell you, Mr. Hill, how much good I got out of your book. I just thrive on it, I love it, and it does me a lot of good.” I enjoy it, unless of course they rub it on too thick (and you can do that too, you know). My point is, I’ve never seen the person that doesn’t respond in kind if you compliment that person. As bad natured as they are, even a pussycat will curl up his tail and begin to purr if you stroke him on the back. Cats are not very friendly, but you can make them friendly if you do what cats like.
Uncooperative means failure to cooperate with others in the spirit of harmony. I suppose there are circumstances in which failure to cooperate would be justified. Or are there? There are a lot of circumstances where you fail to cooperate. I often come into contact with people who want me to do things that I can’t possibly do for them. They want my influence, want me to write letters of recommendation, or want me to make telephone calls for them. I don’t do any of those things, or cooperate in any way, unless I’m sold on what I’m cooperating with, and with whom I’m cooperating. You might want to be like that, too.
Do you have possession of power or wealth not based on merit or what you’ve earned? I hope you won’t have any trouble grading yourself on this one.
Another reason for failure is that lack of a spirit of loyalty for those to whom it is due. If you have loyalty in your heart to those to whom loyalty is due, perhaps you can grade 100 percent. Unless you practice that all the time, you wouldn’t grade 100 percent; you would grade something lower than that.
Incidentally, if you grade yourself less than 50 percent on any of these, put a cross mark there and go back and study that particular point. You should have all of these causes of failure at least 50 percent under control. If it falls below that, you’ve reached the danger point.
Do you have the habit of forming opinions that are not based upon known facts? Grade yourself on the extent to which you do that. If you grade below 50 percent on this one, begin to work on yourself right away—stop having opinions unless you base them on facts or what you believe to be facts.
When I hear anybody expressing an opinion on something that I have reason to believe he knows nothing about, I always think of that story of two men who were discussing Einstein’s theory of relativity. They got into a hot argument about it and one of them says, “What does Einstein know about politics anyway?” He thought he understood relativity, didn’t he? There are people like that, who have opinions about everything. They could run the country better than Eisenhower’s running it. They could tell J. Edgar Hoover a few things about his job. They could always work their friends over and improve them. However, if you examine them very carefully, they’re generally not doing too well themselves.
Egotism is a wonderful thing and vanity is a wonderful thing. If you didn’t have a little vanity, you wouldn’t wash your neck, or your face, or have your hair curled, or marceled (or whatever it is that women do to their hair). You have to have a little vanity, a little pride, but you can have too much. I think lipstick is a wonderful thing, if it doesn’t get on my shirt, but there’s such a thing as too much lipstick. Rouge on the face is a wonderful thing too, but nature is a pretty good old hand at painting faces just right. When I see a sixty- or seventy-year-old woman painting her face up to look like a sixteen-year-old, I know she’s fooling herself and nobody else—because she’s certainly not fooling me.
The ego is a marvelous thing. A lot of people need a buildup in their ego, because they have allowed the circumstances of their life to whip them down until they’ve got no fight left in them, no initiative, no imagination, and no faith. Human ego is a wonderful thing when you have it under control and don’t allow it to become objectionable to other people. I have yet to see a successful person that didn’t have great confidence in his ability to do anything he started out to do. One of the purposes of this philosophy is to enable you to build your ego up to where it will do anything you want it to do, no matter what it is. Some people’s egos need to be trimmed down a little bit (and even need a little squishing, if you know what I mean), but I’d say even more need a buildup of their ego.
I have never been able to determine exactly whether this great capacity for vision and imagination is an inherited quality or an acquired quality. I think perhaps in my case it was inherited, because I had a lot of imagination back to the earliest days that I can remember. That was one of the things that got me in difficulty in other things—I had too much imagination and didn’t steer it in the right direction.
When you develop the habit of going the extra mile, you’ll get joy out of doing it, and chances are good that you’ll put a lot of people under obligations to you—willing obligations, that is—because they won’t mind being under obligations to you on that basis. If you have enough people obligated to you, there’s no reason why you can’t make legitimate use of their influence, education, ability, and whatnot to help you succeed in whatever you’re doing.
Do you know how to get anybody to do whatever it is you want him to do? Do something for him first. How easy is it to do something nice for another person, without even having to ask him? When there’s a long list of people who are standing ready as an army to help you when you need help, how do you cultivate that army before the time of need? You can’t just go the extra mile this minute, and the next minute turn right around and ask the person to whom you rendered that service to render you twice as much service. You can’t do it that way, because it won’t work that way.
You’ve got to build up something called goodwill in advance. Again, the timing has got to be right. There are a lot of people who will go the extra mile only for the sake of expediency. They do it just to put you under obligations. They don’t time it well enough to allow you to forget about it, so to speak. Then, they’ll turn right around after having done you a favor, and ask you for two or three favors. Have you ever had that experience? Have you ever seen someone make that mistake?
If I had to select one principle with which you could do the most with the most people, I’d say it was this principle: going the extra mile. That’s the one thing that anybody can control, if they want to. You don’t have to ask anybody for the privilege of going out of your way to be nice and to be of help. But, the very moment you start doing it, you’ll probably create contrast, because most people are not doing that.
Have you ever had a desire for revenge for real or imaginary grievances? Which is worse, desire for revenge for a real grievance (such as an injury somebody inflicted upon you) or for an imaginary grievance? Think that one over.
What happens to you when you have an expression of revenge, a desire for revenge for any reason whatsoever? Does it hurt the fellow? The point is that the desire for revenge hurts yourself. Revenge makes you negative and poisons your mind. It even poisons your blood if you maintain that desire long enough, because any kind of a mental attitude will get into your blood—and interfere with your sound health.
Do you know people who have a habit of producing alibis instead of satisfactory results? To what extent do you immediately begin to look for an alibi when you make a mistake, do something that doesn’t turn out right, or neglect to do the thing that you should have done? How often do you say, “It was my fault, I’ll admit my duty.” Or, do you begin to conjure a set of alibis to justify what you’ve done or neglected to do? The point is to grade yourself on the preponderance of your habits on this subject.
If you’re an average person, you look for an alibi to justify what you do, what you refrain from doing, or neglect doing. If you’re not an average person (and I’m sure you’ll not be if you become properly indoctrinated in this philosophy), you will not look for alibis. You know alibis weaken you; alibis are a crutch to lean on. Instead, you’ll face the music, acknowledge your mistakes, acknowledge your weaknesses, and acknowledge your errors. After all, self-confession does something wonderful to the soul.
When you really know what your faults are and confess them honestly, you don’t have to spread them to the whole world, but rather, confess where confession is necessary. I had a student come into my office a few days ago and make a confession that’s going to be of more use to her than anything that’s happened since she was a very small girl. Previously, this student was suffering because she had not yet learned how to distinguish between her needs for things and her rights to have them. Have you ever thought about that? She needed things very badly and she was willing to get them the wrong way, but a lot of people make that mistake. They cannot tell the difference between things they need and the things that they have a right to get.
Though this one might be hard for you to grade yourself on, generally speaking, you know whether you’re dependable, or whether your word is dependable. You know whether your performance and your occupation or your job is dependable. You know whether your relationship to your family, your wife, your husband, or your children is dependable. You know whether you’re a dependable family man or woman. You know whether you’re dependable or not with your credit relations, or with people from whom you buy things on credit.
Isn’t it wonderful to have dependability among your friends? You always know exactly where they are and where they are always going to be, regardless of what happens. Isn’t it wonderful to have dependability among your loved ones, when you know they are not going to let you down on any score, at any time, or for any reason? If you have a half dozen people like that in your life—absolutely dependable under all circumstances—how lucky you are. I’d say that if you have three people like that in an entire lifetime, you’re indeed fortunate.
With as many people as I know all over the world, I’m not so sure I can count on all ten fingers the people in my life who are dependable under all circumstances. Dependability, what a marvelous thing it is.
Lack of responsibility is an unwillingness to assume responsibilities commensurate with one’s desire for compensation. In other words, you desire the good things of life—a good income, a nice home, a nice car, and a wardrobe of nice clothes—but you’re unwilling to assume the responsibilities that entitle you to those things. How do you grade yourself on that? Are you willing to assume the necessary responsibilities to be entitled to all the things you want to get out of life? That’s what you’re grading yourself on.
How often do you fail to obey your conscience when it’s advantageous to do so? Are there times when you tell your conscience just to step aside for a few moments? You tell your conscience, “Don’t look right now,” because that little business transaction you want to attend to seems a little bit off color. Did you ever do that? I think you could do that a few times and get away with it, but if you got in the habit of it, you would convert your conscience into a conspirator that would endorse all of the mean things that you might ever want to do. And that would be bad.
Conscience was given by an all-wise Creator, so that you would always know what is right and what is wrong without having to ask anybody. If you’re on good terms with your conscience, and really respond to it under every circumstance and let it be your guide, then you are a very fortunate person and you have been using your conscience properly. But, if there are times when you waver in indecision, and make your conscience step aside, then you will grade yourself low and begin to work on that score.
I think it’s a marvelous thing that the Creator gave each individual a sort of judge advocate to sit over all of his acts, all of his needs, all of his thoughts, and tell him when he’s right and when he’s wrong.
Now, about the habit of unnecessary worrying over things one cannot control. How are you going to grade on that? If you can’t control the thing that you’re worrying over, what can you do about it? You can adjust yourself to that thing that you can’t control, and do it in a positive mental attitude so as to not let it get you down. Or you can transmute that worry into something you can control.
Do you know the difference between failure and temporary defeat? Have you ever thought about that? First of all, failure is only failure when you accept it as such, regardless of the conditions. It’s temporary defeat, perhaps, but certainly not failure. If you were selling and you took no for an answer every time you heard it, you’d never make a living selling. It’s just easier for people to say no than it is to say yes. They don’t mean it at all, they just mean that they have not yet been broken down by a good salesman. Temporary defeat and failure.
Who determines whether a circumstance is a temporary defeat or failure? Who determines that? That’s right: you’re the one who determines that.
How are you at adjusting to the varying circumstances of life? One reason for failure is a lack of flexibility of your mind.
Do you know sometimes it’s necessary for you to go along with unsavory bedfellows, people that you don’t like? You go along with them until such time as they drop out of your life. Of course, you could have it out with them right up front, but if you do that, you’ll often get the worse out of it. You can wear them out, or work them to death by going along with them for a time. If you make an incident out of everything that you do with people you dislike, why you’ll always be in difficulty. On the other hand, you can let these things, or things that are food for incidents, pass by.
Time is a wonderful cure, a wonderful agent. The greatest doctor on the face of the earth is time—Old Mother Time, or is it Father Time, whichever it is. In any case, there are a lot of things in this world that can be cured only with time.
There are people who fret themselves to death. They wear themselves out making incidents out of very silly, small, and unimportant things that come up every day in their lives. Not a day goes by for any of you that you couldn’t make an incident out of something or make an unpleasant scene with someone, if you allow yourself to do it.
As a student of this philosophy, maybe you’ll grade yourself about 80 percent on this one. In connection with flexibility, most of the time you adjust yourself to circumstances you don’t like without going down under them, and without making an incident out of them.
You might have a very peculiar cause of failure that I haven’t mentioned here at all. It would be most interesting to see what it is, if you do have one, because I have given you a pretty good catalog here of the things that cause people to fail. The most important thing about this list of forty things that causes people to fail is that you can do something about each one of them right now. Isn’t that true? What would be the use of my having you make this analysis if you couldn’t do anything about it?
You can eliminate every one of these causes almost instantaneously. Some will take a little time to develop more positive habits. For the most part, you can wipe every one of them out of your character overnight, by determining to do so, and determining to develop a more agreeable set of circumstances.
You can eliminate these causes of failure no matter what adversity you’ve had in your life. Go back over the last ten years and look at every unpleasant circumstance you’ve ever had. Search now for that seed of equivalent benefit that was there, even though you didn’t find it and didn’t use it at that time. It’s very difficult to find the seed of an equivalent benefit in an unpleasant circumstance, while a wound is still open and hurting. There again, timing is important. But, if you give it a little time, and make up your mind that you’re not going to go down under the circumstance, and then go back and evaluate it carefully, you will find that you will have learned something of benefit from it.