Hello, friends. Tonight we begin discussion of the subject of accurate thinking. There are a lot of people in this world who believe that they think accurately, but the majority of them don’t think at all; they just think that they think. Accurate thinking involves certain factors, which I’m going to explain to you. They’re not complicated, but I want to warn you in advance that if you wish to become an accurate thinker instead of a snap judgment thinker, you have to have a technique, you have to follow a system, and you have to stick to that system.
First of all, there are three important fundamentals in the business of accurate thinking, and here they are: number one is the principle of inductive reasoning based on the assumption of unknown facts or hypotheses. “Inductive reasoning” means that you do not have all of the facts, but you assume that certain facts must exist. For example, if you are going to think accurately on the subject of God, whether or not there is a God, you’ve never met him, you’ve never seen him, you never have met anybody who has met him or seen him, and yet your reasoning on the subject would have to be of the inductive nature. When you begin to look around at the marvelous organized factors in the universe, and in this little world in which we live, you would be forced to the conclusion that there is such a power as that which many call God, whether you call it by that name or some other. That would be inductive reasoning.
Number two, there is deductive reasoning based upon known facts—facts that you know to be true—or what are believed to be facts. There are a lot of people who stumble on that one, because they assume to have facts when all they are dealing with is hearsay evidence or gossip; something that “they” said, or “something that I read in the papers.” When someone starts to tell me something, and prefaces his remarks by saying “I see by the papers,” I reach up, figuratively speaking, and pull down my mental earmuffs and refuse to let anything he says register in my mind. Because having been a newspaperman once upon a time, and having known a great many newspapermen, I do know that newspapers often make mistakes. They’re not always accurate.
The third factor that enters into the business of accurate thinking is logic—that is to say, guidance by past experiences, similar to those under consideration at a given time. Logic. Ladies and gentlemen, if you will take the average circumstance where you’re trying to do some accurate thinking, and after you have reached your decision in connection with it, or perhaps before you have reached your decision, if you will submit the whole proposition to the principle of logic, to see whether it’s logical that the opinion or decision you’re about to arrive at is correct or not, you’ll save yourself an awful lot of trouble.
Those are the three factors that go into the business of accurate thinking.
There are two major steps that you must take in accurate thinking, and here they are. Two steps only. First, you must separate facts, or what you believe to be facts, from fiction or hearsay evidence. That’s the first thing you do. When you’re dealing with any subject whereby you’re going to reach a decision in connection with your thinking, you must immediately search all of the factors that enter into that and see whether they constitute facts or fiction or hearsay evidence. That’s step number one. As I go along analyzing this subject, ladies and gentlemen, it would be very beneficial to you if you would compare these rules that I am giving you with your own method of thinking, and see wherein you fall short, if at all. It might be a good idea for you to analyze some of the people you know best by these rules, to see how many of them are doing accurate thinking.
First, you separate fact from fiction or hearsay evidence. Then, after you’ve done that and you know what the facts are, or believe that you know, you’ve made that separation, you’ve thrown out the hearsay evidence, you’re dealing only with those things that you can prove, you separate those facts into two classes, and one is called “important” and the other “unimportant.”
Would you know how to go about distinguishing the difference between an important fact and an unimportant fact? How many of you would be able to make that differentiation? Show me by your hands. What? Don’t you know the difference between an important fact and an unimportant fact? Or are you just overly modest? An important fact, ladies and gentlemen, may be assumed to be any fact that can be used by you to an advantage in the attainment of your major purpose, or any of your minor desires leading toward the attainment of your major purpose. That to you is an important fact, and all other facts are relatively unimportant, and most of them are out and out worthless, so far as you’re concerned.
I could mention to you a hundred facts of things that have happened since I left my home in St. Louis this morning and drove up here to Paris, but I’ll say ninety-nine percent of them wouldn’t be of any importance one way or the other. There’s only one fact in connection with my trip up here that is important, and that is that I arrived here at this studio on time, and that I’m now fulfilling my scheduled lecture.
Now you know what an important fact is. If you will watch yourself in connection with your actions throughout the day, you will be amazed at the number of unimportant facts that take up a lot of your time, facts which, no matter how you handle them or how you relate yourself to them, mean nothing to you except a waste of time. If you’re going to be successful people in the upper brackets of success, if you’re going to learn to think accurately and use that knowledge to lift you high in the strata of success, then you have got to learn not only to separate important facts from unimportant facts, but you’ve got to form a habit of devoting most of your time to important facts—that is to say, facts that will bring you some definite, discernible benefit leading toward the object of your major purpose in life, or the attainment of some of your minor purposes.
Oh, if you’re going to follow that rule, there’ll be a number of bridge parties that you’ll have to cut out. There’ll be a number of things that you indulge in that you might just as well discontinue, because you’re only wasting time, and you’re not dealing with important facts at all.
Next, I want to call your attention to the business of having opinions. Opinions usually are without value, because they are typically based on bias, prejudice, intolerance, guesswork, or hearsay evidence. Most people have opinions about any and every subject that you might imagine, and the majority of those opinions are not worth anything at all because they are not arrived at by practical or scientific means. Two men some time ago were discussing the merits of Dr. Einstein’s theory of relativity. One of them said, “Do you really believe in Dr. Einstein’s theory of relativity?” And the other man said, “Heck, no. What does that man know about politics, anyway?” He thought the theory of relativity was a system of politics, yet he had an opinion on it.
It would be interesting to you, and perhaps beneficial, my friends, if you would study yourself carefully every time in the future that you are getting ready to express an opinion about anything. Examine yourself carefully to see how you came by the influences and circumstances that enabled you to express that opinion, to see whether they came from sound sources, from hearsay evidence, or from something that you read or something you heard from unreliable sources. Opinions. No opinion is safe unless based upon known facts, or at least what are believed to be facts, after you have exhausted all the possibilities of searching for facts. No one should express an opinion at any time about anything without a reasonable assurance that it is founded upon facts.
Had you ever thought of that, that you shouldn’t express an opinion on any subject at all unless it is based upon either known facts or what you believe to be facts? Had you ever stopped to think about it, that the vast majority of your opinions are based upon something far different from facts or known facts? You haven’t made the effort to gain the facts, but you have an opinion nevertheless. You have no right to that opinion, because there’s nothing on which to found it.
Someone asked me not long ago what my opinion of the Korean War situation was. I said, “Well, that’s a question that can’t be answered in one sentence. I have a lot of opinions about it. I have a lot of opinions about the people who started it. I have a lot of opinions about the way it’s being conducted.” I couldn’t answer with one opinion; I would have several opinions, and all of them based upon what I have seen happen since that war started. That is, they were based upon facts.
Advice, too, is often worth little or no attention. Free advice, volunteered by friends and acquaintances, usually is not worthy of consideration. Someone has said that anything in the world that you get for nothing is worth exactly the price you pay for it, and that is particularly true of free advice. It makes no difference what you want to do, what your plans are, where you’re going or what you’re doing, what your aims in life may be. The moment you begin to talk about them, you’ll find a lot of people around you with a lot of free advice, and particularly those closely related to you.
When I started to organize the world’s first philosophy of individual achievement, it’s true that eventually I had some five hundred of the most outstanding men of America who gave freely from their experiences in order to help me complete this philosophy. But all of those five hundred combined were nothing in comparison with the free advice that I got from my immediate family. Here I was, doing twenty years of research with the most intelligent brains in the world helping me out, and still, two or three members of my family thought they could tell me more about what I was doing, more about its weaknesses, than could all of those five hundred men combined. And the advice was free. Of course, I didn’t have to take it. Of course, I didn’t take it. If I had taken it, I wouldn’t be here tonight, talking to you about this business of accurate thinking. I had to learn to go on my own, to do some thinking of my own.
Accurate thinking and accurate thinkers permit no one to do their thinking for them. If you’re going to be an accurate thinker in the strict sense of that term, you have got to get into the habit of becoming responsible for your own thinking and your own opinions and your own ideas. It’s all right to seek information from other people; get all the knowledge you can, get all the facts you can. But in the final analysis, don’t let anybody make up your mind for you about anything. Is that clear enough, or shall I state it over? Pretty clear, isn’t it? Don’t let anybody make up your mind for you about anything. Reserve unto yourself the last word in your thinking. If you let others think for you, you are taking the path of least resistance, like those rivers I mentioned in a previous broadcast, and meandering without self-control, taking a crooked path.
Don’t be silly enough, though, to think that you can do accurate thinking without some help from the outside. Many times, you’ll have to have a lot of outside help. That’s why we have the mastermind principle. Mr. Edison was the most important and the most successful inventor the world has ever known. His inventions were based upon thinking. But before he could think accurately, he had to have the scientific knowledge and brains and education of men who helped him do his thinking, who supplied the facts. He put those facts together in new combinations.
It’s all right for you to seek information, but when you get that information, you must submit it to the law of logic. You must submit it to the law of evidence, and make sure that when you make a decision, the facts that you have accepted are real facts, and not merely hearsay evidence. Hearsay evidence is secondhand evidence you cannot get to the bottom of, and it is inherently unreliable.
If you follow literally what I am suggesting to you, you can see readily that you’re going to have to rearrange some of your habits. Matter of fact, you have to rearrange radically some of your habits of thinking. You’ll have to read your newspaper a little bit more carefully, you’ll have to read it with a question mark in your mind; you’ll have to question the things that you read, you’ll have to quit this business of being influenced by what the gossiping neighbors say, and do a lot more thinking on your own. It’s not safe to form opinions based upon newspaper reports. “I see by the papers” is a prefatory remark usually branding the speaker as a snap-judgment thinker. “I see by the papers,” or “I hear tell,” or “They say.” When anybody starts off volunteering information supposed to be facts based upon those prefatory remarks, just close up your ears and pay no attention unless you have some supporting evidence, and you’ll get along very much better in your thinking than you have been doing in the past.
Scandal-mongers and gossipers are not reliable sources from which to procure facts on any subject. Scandal-mongers, gossipers. Did you ever hear of any—of course, you don’t have any here in your town, but in some communities they do have them. I meet them in almost every community I go to, and among all facets of people, except my own audience. Of course, they’re above and beyond the business of passing on scandal and gossiping, small talk.
Oh, there’s a lot of fun in gossiping. I hear some gossip oftentimes that I get a great kick out of, especially when it’s about myself. Then I know more about the subject than the person doing the gossiping. But that doesn’t make any difference; the gossipers will talk. But if you’re going to be scared off of your line of duty, or off of your activities, or off of your plan or purpose in life by what the gossipers say, ladies and gentlemen, you might as well not start anything, because you won’t get anywhere.
A long time ago there was a man who passed this way, a very gentle soul who came to the world for the purpose of seeing if he could do something to soften the nature of mankind and make men live together a little bit more peacefully. He didn’t get along so very well in the face of these gossipers and scandal-mongers and small-talk people. They didn’t all accept him. They killed him. But the spirit of Jesus survived and changed the world in immeasurable ways.
You’ll not be accepted the moment your head sticks up above the crowd in any sort of undertaking. The gossipers will begin to take you apart, take you down to size, if you let them do it. But if you’re an accurate thinker, you’ll pay no attention to what is said about you. You’ll pay more attention to seeing that the unkind things said about you are not true, and that’s your entire responsibility if you’re an accurate thinker. Beyond that, you’ll pay no attention to what people say.
Wishes are often fathers to facts—did you know that? Had you ever thought about that? I wonder if you’ve ever been guilty of fathering facts through wishes. Hopeful wishing, they call it sometimes. Most people have a bad habit of assuming facts to harmonize with their desires. One of the easiest things to do upon the face of this earth is to assume facts to fit the nature of what you want to do. Wishes can only be converted to facts by taking action, not merely assuming.
I once had the experience of interviewing over an extended period of time the late gangster Al Capone. I was astounded to know that, far from him having been a criminal, offending the law and the people of this country, he believed he was a very much maligned man. He claimed Uncle Sam’s long nose had been stuck into a legitimate business that he was conducting—he said it was legitimate. He said that by selling whiskey during prohibition he was merely selling a thirst quencher to people who were thirsty. They were paying for it, they were glad to have it, and Uncle Sam should have kept his nose out of his legitimate business. He had sold himself that idea: He had convinced himself that he was being very much maligned by the law.
I have never yet met a person, a criminal, a person breaking the law, that hadn’t sold himself the idea that he was well within the law, well within his rights, and the law had no reason or right to touch him. It’s one of the easiest things in the world to justify what you’re doing in life, and if you don’t watch yourself, you’ll justify yourself beyond the point of reason if you’re not an accurate thinker.
Information is abundant, and most of it is free, but facts have an elusive nature, and generally there is a price attached to them. Somebody asked me not long ago why I didn’t just go about the country teaching this philosophy free of charge, not charging anything for it, if I didn’t need to make any money. Do you know what I said to that person? I said, “Do you belong to a church?” He said, “Why, yes, sure I do.” I said, “Do you go to church?” and he said, “Yes, sometimes.” I said, “Is your church always filled on Sunday morning?” “Oh, no, oh, no,” he said, “very few of the seats are filled.” And I said, “Do you know what’s wrong with the churches?” He said, “No, I don’t know whether there’s anything wrong with them or not.” I said, “Have you ever attended one of my lectures?” He said, “Yes, I attended all of your lectures here up to the present time.” This man, by the way, lives in this community. I said, “Did you notice that on the opening night of our radio broadcasts in Paris, Missouri, one of the worst nights of the winter, that people came from as far away as sixty-five miles? They showed up, they were all there, the room was entirely filled and overflowing; did you notice that?” He said, “Yes, I did, and I wondered about it. I wondered how you did it.” I said, “Well, I’ll tell you how I did it: I did it by charging them, that’s how. If I were running a church, I think probably I’d place a price on each pew, and make them pay.” The trouble with the churches is that they let ’em get away without paying.
Everything that’s worthwhile in this world, ladies and gentlemen, should have a price upon it, and does have a price upon it, in one way or another. The things that you give away absolutely free, people usually value about as much as they pay for them.
One question—“How do you know?”—is the favorite question of the accurate thinker. When the thinker hears somebody make a statement that he questions as being sound, he immediately says, in his mind or openly and orally to the other man, “How do you know?” If you’ll get in the habit of using that little sentence more often, you’ll be surprised at how many times you put speakers over the barrel because there are so many people that make statements about things that they can’t back up, and they can’t give you a satisfactory reason as to how they made the statement, or why. “How do you know?” We don’t ask this question often enough.
I was lecturing once on this subject, and one of my listeners who perhaps didn’t lean too much toward the religious side said, “Dr. Hill, I don’t want to embarrass you.” I said, “You go right ahead, my friend. If you can embarrass me, you’re really good, because I’ve not been embarrassed even by experts.” He said, “Suppose that I asked you that question, ‘How do you know?’ and I asked you if you believed in God, that there was a God, and asked you, ‘How do you know?’ wouldn’t you be in a fix?” I said, “My friend, if there is one thing in this universe in connection with which there is more evidence of the existence of than anything else, it is the existence of a God. I wouldn’t perhaps describe the God that you describe, I might not call him by the name that you call him by, but I’d be talking about the same thing. Because if you want evidence of a first cause, a planner, an overall plan being carried out, you’ll find it in every atom of matter, you’ll find it in every planet, in every sun that’s floating through our universe. You’ll find it in every human being and everything that grows out of the ground, all orderly, going on according to an overall plan. Overall plans, my friend, do not create themselves.”
Then I took my wristwatch off, and I said, “I have here a very accurate, dependable watch. If I took this watch apart, took the wheels apart, poured them into my hat and shook them from now until doomsday, they would never reassemble in the form of a watch that would keep time, would they?” He said, “No, they wouldn’t.” I said, “But if I took them to a watchmaker, who started out with a plan, who understood watches, he could put those wheels back and make them work again, couldn’t he?” He said, “Yes, he could.” I said, “There is no workable and working thing in the whole universe that does not have intelligence back of it, and that intelligence is what you call God. I call it infinite intelligence.” That’s my way, ladies and gentlemen, of proving to myself that there is a first cause, and there’s plenty of evidence to back it up.
Speaking of being guided by logic as one of the three factors that go into accurate thinking, I want to show you how I applied that in connection with a circumstance some years ago. One of my students came to me with a manuscript of a book, a child’s book that she had written. It was a well-written book, and she had very crudely illustrated it with cats and dogs and crows and birds and horses and chickens and things, into whose mouths she had placed the words in the book. In other words, she had these birds and cats and dogs and animals talking to one another, and she’d worked it up into a dialogue. It was really a clever thing. But she had taken these pictures—she cut them out of the Sears Roebucks’ catalog and out of the Ladies’ Home Journal and from here, there, and the other place, and they were very crude. Also, the grammar of her book was very poor. The idea was first-class. She came to me just prior to giving this book to a printer who had sold her on the idea of having a number of copies of it printed, for which he was charging her $2,500. Not having the $2,500, she borrowed $1,500 of it from her relatives, and the other thousand, she had.
When I broke the subject down, I said: “If you allow that printer to have those books printed, all you’ll have will be some books that you can store down in the basement. If you want to be an accurate thinker and use logic, you’ll go to somebody who’ll correct that grammar, an artist who will draw the right kind of drawings, and then you will take the book to an established publisher who has a market for it after the book is printed.”
Where did I get that information? I got it from experience that I’d had myself, and from observations of other people who had made the mistake of becoming their own publisher. Logic helped me to save that woman’s $2,500, and later I found her a publisher for this book, and she made a lot of money from it.
We will give the next section of this talk on accurate thinking, friends of the radio audience, in the next program, as we have run out of time tonight. Thank you for listening.