Hello again, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight we will continue our discussion of the important principle of applied faith.
I want to give you some illustrations, my friends, of how this principle of applied faith works out in the practical affairs of life. In doing my research, starting in 1908 at Andrew Carnegie’s request, I had the good fortune to be associated with the late Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the long-distance telephone; Mr. Thomas A. Edison; and Dr. Elmer R. Gates, an outstanding scientist living at the time in Chevy Chase, Maryland. These three men, for many years before I ever had the privilege of meeting them and working with them, had made extensive researches into this peculiar phenomenon known as the subconscious mind. They had made outstanding discoveries, and I want to call your attention in particular to the discoveries of Dr. Elmer R. Gates.
When I first went to see Dr. Gates his secretary said, “I’m sorry, but Dr. Gates is sitting for ideas right now and he cannot be disturbed.” I said, “I beg your pardon?” She said, “He is sitting for ideas.” I said, “What does that mean?” She said, “Well, you’ll have to wait for Dr. Gates to come out and have him tell you. It’s too much for me.” I waited for about two hours and when he came out I repeated the conversation I’d had with his secretary. He said, “Would you like to see how I go about sitting for ideas?” I said, “Certainly I would, Doctor.”
He took me back into a room, a specially built room which was soundproofed and was so designed that he could cut off practically all sound and all light. This room was about a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room. It had in it a small wooden table over which there was an electric push button and an electric light and a small chair in front of it and a large stack of paper and pencils. He explained to me that when he wanted to complete a design of a technical nature or work out a patent or work out an unknown problem of any kind, he went into this room, focused his mind upon the known factors of his problem, and demanded that his subconscious mind reveal to him the unknown solutions. He then turned off the lights and waited for results.
Sometimes he’d wait two or three minutes and the ideas would begin to flow, and he would turn on his lights and begin to write. Sometimes he’d wait for an hour or two and get no results, but he said that the results came approximately eighty-five percent of the time. On one occasion he wrote for three hours, and when he examined his notes he had the answer to a scientific problem which he had been pursuing for some ten years without success.
Dr. Gates has to his credit more patents than Mr. Edison, far and away. He was not as well publicized as Mr. Thomas A. Edison. He used to go down to the patent office in Washington to look over the patents that had been filed, and he recognized that some of them were sound on paper but wouldn’t work in the laboratory. He would take those patents and go into his silent room, concentrate his mind upon the unknown factors, and come out with the answer and an improved patent. In that way he developed over 250 patents. I think perhaps he was one of the most outstanding men that I have ever known. He recognized how possible and how practical it was to fix his mind upon the things that he wanted and to keep his mind there until infinite intelligence began to yield him up the answers.
I was lecturing to the students at the Harvard University Business School some years ago and I made the statement that the ether is so sensitive that perhaps here in this room where I’m speaking now there are other personalities present if we could only tune in on them and hear them. I didn’t get much farther than that until the students broke out into a laugh. They gave me the horse laugh because radio had not been developed at that time. Of course you and I know now that here in this room where I’m speaking I’m in competition with bands, singers, dancers, maybe Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I’m in competition with a lot of other intelligences that we know are here in this room.
Every brain is a receiving station for the vibrations of thought. That’s well established. There’s no doubt about that and many of these thoughts that you are bothered with, negative thoughts, that you find crowding upon you from day to day, do not originate from your own mind but from outside minds, and you maybe haven’t yet learned ways and means of immunizing yourself against them.
In connection with this broadcast on how to succeed using applied faith, you must learn to shut out of your mind all of these unpleasant thoughts that can do you no good and can do you a great deal of harm. You’ve got to learn to do that. You’ve got to give yourself immunity against all thoughts that are not helpful to you, because when the Creator gave you control over your mind, he intended, I am certain, that you would use that mind for constructive ends and not for destructive ends.
Mr. Edison, while he was working on the incandescent electric lightbulb, was making use all the time of applied faith, and had he not understood that principle, he would have quit a long time before he discovered the answer to his problem. As a matter of fact, as I have told you before, Mr. Edison failed over ten thousand times before he finally discovered the secret of the incandescent lightbulb.
Can you imagine anybody going at anything and failing ten thousand times over a period of years and still sticking by it? Could you do it? Do you have any idea, my friends, how many times the average person has to fail in anything before he makes up his mind that maybe in the first place he didn’t want to do that thing, but something else? Give a guess. Give a guess, anybody. How many times? Once? As a matter of fact it doesn’t average one time because fifty percent of the people or more quit before they start. They anticipate that they are going to fail and they don’t even make a beginning.
That’s how much applied faith the majority of people have. They quit before the going even commences to be hard. Mr. Edison was regarded throughout the world as a genius, and the thing that made him a genius more than everything else was his capacity to know what he wanted and to keep his mind fixed on what he wanted until he got it. That’s all there is to it, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know why he was forced to go through ten thousand failures, but I do know one thing, that that probably was the source of his greatness, because that was his first great invention. Had he not stuck by these ten thousand testing times that nature put him through, he probably never would have become one of the greatest inventors of all time.
You know everything has a price. If you want to be great in anything you must make up your mind that it has a price. You must find out what that price is and be willing to pay it. Mr. Edison knew that the principle of applied faith would eventually yield him the answer, and when he found it, just listen to this: When he found the answer, he found that it consisted in two well-known principles, both of which he was very familiar with before he started his investigations. All he had to do was to take these two principles and put them together in a new way, marry them so to speak, and lo! there was created the first incandescent electric light. What were those two principles?
First of all he learned, as other experimenters before him had learned, that you could apply electrical energy to a wire or to a piece of metal at the point of friction and you could create a heat, a white heat, and make a light. That was well known. Mr. Edison knew it, others knew it, but the trouble came in that the piece of metal would burn up almost instantly. You couldn’t control it. He needed it controlled. After he had failed over ten thousand times he flopped down on his couch in his laboratory and he said to his subconscious mind, “I want to sleep here on this couch until I get the unknown factor, the means of controlling the heat generated by electricity in making an incandescent light.”
He told me he had made similar demands upon his subconscious before without anything happening. You see, he was still going through his testing time, the price he had to pay to become a great inventor. When he got up from that nap, as he came out of his sleep, the answer came. It consisted in the charcoal principle. You know that if you take a pile of wood, put it on the ground, and set it afire and cover it over with dirt, it will smolder along until it burns away a large portion of that wood, leaving the charred stick which we call charcoal. The reason the stick doesn’t burn up entirely is that there is very little oxygen that gets to it. Where there’s no oxygen, there can be no combustion. Where there is but little oxygen, there can be but little combustion. There’s just enough oxygen percolating through the dirt to allow that stick of wood to burn to a charred condition, but not enough to burn it up.
Edison said, “There it is, that’s the thing I’ve been waiting for.” He went into his laboratory, he took this wire that he had been experimenting with, and he put it inside of a bottle. He sealed up the bottle’s neck, and with a bicycle pump he pumped out all of the air and all of the oxygen, leaving a vacuum in that bottle around the wire. He then turned on the electrical energy and lo! and behold there was born the first incandescent electric light in the world. It burned for eight and one half hours and was the beginning of this great electrical age without which these marvelous industries that we enjoy now, for example, radio, television, radar, and the automobile, could never have come into existence. They came about as the result of applied faith, applied by a man who had very little formal education, very little schooling, but a great understanding of this gift from the Creator which entitles one to make whatever use one desires of his own thoughts.
Whenever you think of Edison and his greatness, just remember that he became great only because he didn’t quit when the going was hard. Once I asked him, I said, “Mr. Edison, what would you have done if on that ten thousandth trial you hadn’t found the answer?” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I would be doing right now, I would be in my laboratory working on the solution instead of fooling away my time talking to you.” I think he meant just that. He put everything he had on the determination to find the answer through which he could give the world an incandescent electric light.
Look again, my friends, at how nature works. The very next invention that Mr. Edison went to work on after the incandescent light, after ten thousand failures, was the talking machine. Nobody had ever made a machine that would record and reproduce the sound of the voice. It never had been done, and when Mr. Edison completed that machine he gave the world a new idea. When the idea came to him he took a pencil out of his pocket and an old envelope and on the back of the envelope he drew a crude picture of the first talking machine that would ever be made to work in the world. He turned this drawing over to his pattern maker and told him to make a machine. It consisted of a little cylinder with a crank at the end of it which he could turn, and that cylinder was covered over with some sort of substance, some sort of soft substance, maybe wax. He applied a needle to this wax, a needle fixed to the end of a trumpet, one of these old-fashioned hearing-aid trumpets, and started to crank the thing up with his hand, and it worked the very first time.
In other words, nature has a way of compensating you for these defeats and failures. If you fail today, the chances are you will have acquired something that will enable you not to fail tomorrow. Nature never takes anything away from anyone or allows anything to be taken away without giving to that person something of equivalent or greater value than it took in its place.
Years ago, when I went to work for La Salle Extension University as its first advertising manager, I was faced with a problem that was quite practical and quite sizable. They had no money on which to operate, and I didn’t know that until I went to work with them. It’s a very essential thing in business to have some money. They had about eighteen thousand students throughout the United States and most of the students were mad at them because the collection manager had been sending them threatening letters. I faced the problem of satisfying eighteen thousand students and also acquiring operating capital that was at least in the neighborhood sufficient for La Salle to pay its debts and, vital to me, to pay my salary. They had so little money that when payday came and I got my check, I rushed over to the bank and had it certified before the other employees got there because I knew if I didn’t my check would bounce. That was the condition I found them in.
I remembered also that whenever a thing was just and right, that there was always a way of accomplishing it. I went to work and made a survey of La Salle students and employees and found out where the trouble was. Out of the thirty-five employees that they had at headquarters, twenty of them were working in the collections department writing nasty letters to their students. You can imagine how popular that made them.
I sat down and started writing sales letters to the students, writing them friendly letters, and then after I had made friends out of them, I sold to many of those eighteen thousand students a million dollars’ worth of eight percent preferred stock. Inside of sixty days we had a million dollars in the bank and I no longer had to rush over to the bank to have my paycheck certified. We had operating capital. That was the beginning of the great La Salle Extension University, which became and still is the most successful correspondence school in the world.
There were at the head of that school two very outstanding men, one of them a college graduate. They had some very able men there but they were dealing, ladies and gentlemen, with almost every conceivable thing except the thing that would have worked them out of the hole, and that was applied faith. They had caused these eighteen thousand students to lose confidence in them. They had lost confidence in themselves. They had set up, through the wrong use of their mental attitude there in the university, not a drawing card but a repellent force that was carrying them rapidly into bankruptcy.
How many times, oh how many times, have I been called into business institutions where I found that the very fire that was burning up their vitals was being set off by matches carried in the pockets of the men who should have been the salvation of the business, but weren’t, because they didn’t understand this principle of applied faith, of believing in themselves and other people.
When Ed Barnes went over to see Thomas A. Edison he went there to become the partner of Edison. Think of it, the partner of the great Thomas A. Edison, and Ed Barnes had so little money that he went there as a stowaway on a freight train and announced that he had come there to go into partnership with Mr. Edison. Almost an unbelievable thing, but ladies and gentlemen, he stayed there on that job for five years sweeping floors, and doing other menial jobs, until the time finally came, his big opportunity came. And he made the grade, and he did become the only partner that Thomas A. Edison ever had.
I know Ed Barnes exceedingly well. He and I have been close personal friends for over thirty-five years. I know his entire story and I know why it is that he is now a multimillionaire, why he travels all over the world, why he’s finally taking things easy. It all dates back to the time when he went to see Edison and he made up his mind that if it took five years or ten years or whatever number of years it took, he was going to stand by until he got just what he went after. He told me that when he first went there all of the other employees laughed at him, and every time they passed him they’d mockingly called him Edison Junior.
Mr. Meadowcroft, Edison’s secretary when Barnes first appeared there and said he was going into partnership, sarcastically wanted to know whether Barnes was to be the senior partner or the junior partner. Barnes said, “Well, it makes no difference where you start me. I will be on top when I’m through anyway.” That was his attitude. If you ever knew Ed Barnes, or if you ever have the good pleasure to meet him, you will recognize that his outstanding quality that differentiates him from the average man is his great capacity for faith in his ability to do whatever he makes up his mind to do. I would say to you, those of you who are close to me, and when I dare to speak in the first person, that if you want to take inventory of all the assets and all of the riches that I possess and pick out the thing that’s worth the most, I would say it’s my great enduring capacity of faith in my ability to do whatever I start out to do. I recommend it to you as being the most essential of all the success principles: the ability to believe in yourself.
During my research, I became acquainted with the principle of autosuggestion, and I commend its use to you. Start talking to yourself, don’t do it out on the street, go in the bathroom but don’t talk too loudly in there so that the members of the family understand that you really are not out of your head. Start talking to yourself just as if there was another person inside of you and you were addressing that person.
As a matter of fact, there is another person inside of you. That other self, you have another self, you have the one you see in the glass when you’re prettying up your hair or your face, and then you have the one that you never see but you feel him if you get on good terms with him. That other self is the one that I want you to become acquainted with, because he’s the one that takes over this principle of applied faith and helps you to carry it out to its logical conclusion of whatever you may undertake.
When I look back to the humble beginnings where I started, down in the mountains of Virginia in illiteracy and in poverty, and see what has been accomplished through my efforts in these past forty-odd years, I know well enough that had I not developed the capacity to believe in my own mind, and to use my own mind for ends desirable to me, that I never could have done the job that I have done. I didn’t have the educational advantages, I didn’t have the opportunities, I didn’t have anything except the mind which the Creator gave me, and the privilege of making that mind whatever I wanted it to be. And fortunately, whether by chance or otherwise, I had the good opportunity to come under the influence of my stepmother, who introduced me to my mind and taught me how to use it, slowly, step by step. Working later with other men who had risen to great stations in life, I found out that they, too, had done so solely by embracing this great factor which the Creator had given them, this ability to control their own minds and direct that ability to the ends of their own choosing.
When it comes to the business of genius, Mr. Edison said, “Perish the idea.” He said, “Genius is one tenth inspiration and nine tenths perspiration.” I really and truly think he had something there.
Applied faith is the ability to draw upon the thing that the Creator intended you to draw upon and to keep it fixed on the things that you want in life and off the things you don’t want. You may be surprised to know that the majority of people go all the way through life with the major portion of this marvelous power focused upon the things they don’t want, such as poverty, ill health, loss of love of someone, loss of friends, fear of criticism. My what a humdinger that is, that fear of criticism. Fear of what “they” will say. I better find out who “they” are, or maybe not. “They” have no effect on me, I can assure you.
If you allow your mind to dwell upon the things you don’t want, that is exactly what you get, and that is what the majority of the people are getting, the things that they don’t want. If you get a good hold on this principle of applied faith you will learn to fix your mind upon the things you do want.
I once asked Henry Ford if he’d ever wanted anything in his life real badly that he didn’t get, and with a dry little grin he said, “Only once.” He said, “I wanted to marry a redheaded girl that I used to go to high school with, but she married another man, but afterwards I was glad she did.” I said, “Was that all?” “Yes,” he said. “That was all.” I said, “Are you in a position today, Mr. Ford, where you can get anything you desire?” He said, “Anything I desire or its equivalent.” He said, “I might not be able to get the building at Forty-second and Broadway in New York, but I can get the one just across the street from it or the one on the other corner or the one on the next street which would do just as well.”
I had the privilege of working with Mr. Ford for a long period of years and I pledge you my word of honor that his personality was way below average, his beliefs sometimes were off base, and his schooling was modest. I don’t think he even finished high school. It wasn’t his education or belief system that made him a great industrial operator, it was his capacity to know what he wanted and his “stubbornness” to stick by it until he got it. I’m using the word “stubbornness” as a quotation because many of his associates said it was just pure darn stubbornness. Whatever it was, it enabled him to take possession of his own mind and to keep it fixed upon what he wanted despite all of the obstacles that he had to overcome. His faith drove him and drove him.
You in the audience are faced with a multiplicity of problems. You’re living in an age of problems more than ever before. If you don’t have a philosophy to live by you’re going to be stuck in these next one or two decades. In that philosophy, at the head of the list, the most important thing of all will be the recognition of your own personal power, your own ability to fix your minds on the circumstances and the things in life that you want and to keep your minds there until you get those things. Do not allow the circumstances of life to push you around and to cause you to quit because the going is hard. As a matter of fact I have never seen the time when the going wasn’t hard if you made up your mind that it was. I’ve never seen the time when the going wasn’t easy if I kept my mental attitude right.
I recognize that it’s very difficult for a person who is facing major problems, such as they want for money or they want for capital or they want for opportunities, to believe in his ability to do the things he wants to do. But that’s the time that you’re going through this testing that I speak of, the time that you need to turn on the full power of your imagination and to see yourself already in possession of the things you want. Press on through all obstacles; do not lose control and drift aimlessly.
Isn’t it a marvelous thing to recognize that you know what you want, you are so definitely sure that you are going to get it, that you can see yourself already in possession of it? Of course you don’t start … if you want a million dollars, you don’t start spending it until its actually in the bank balance. I hardly need to tell you that. But see yourself in possession of it because you know what you are going to give in return for it, and you know that you are entitled to it, and you are going to stand by your guns until you get what you’re entitled to.
When I wanted to start the Golden Rule Magazine I needed $100,000 and I didn’t have it, but I found ways and means of putting out the Golden Rule Magazine, and I made the idea stick because I used applied faith. I got a printer to print the magazine and we sold it on the newsstand, and when the sales returns came back I paid him for the printing and I took what was left. Something like that might be an idea for you. Find that definite major purpose, put the power of faith behind it, and you will not fail.
Thank you for listening tonight. Please join me next time when I will begin a discussion of “the other side of the coin,” the major causes of failure.