Accurate Thinking
This lesson is on accurate thinking. It’s marvelous to be able to analyze facts, think accurately, and make decisions based upon accurate thinking rather than upon emotional feelings. The majority of the decisions that you make—and I and everybody else for that matter—are based upon things that we desire or things that we feel, not necessarily upon the facts at all. When it comes to a showdown between your emotional feelings—the things you feel like doing—and the things that your head tells you have to do, which one do you think wins the most?
The feeling. What’s the matter with the head that it doesn’t get a better chance, do you suppose? Why isn’t it consulted more? Most people do not think. They just think that they think.
There are certain simple rules and regulations that you can apply. This lesson covers every one of them, and they will help you avoid the common mistakes of inaccurate thinking, snap judgments, and being pushed around by your emotions.
The truth of the matter is that your emotions are not reliable at all. Take the emotion of love, for instance: it’s the grandest of all of the emotions, and yet by the same token the most dangerous. Perhaps more difficulty in human relationships grows out of a misunderstanding of love than from all other sources combined.
Reasoning and Logic
Let’s see what accurate thinking is. First of all, there are three major fundamentals: inductive reasoning, based on assumption of unknown facts or hypotheses. Then there’s deductive reasoning based on known facts or what are believed to be known facts. There’s also logic, that is, guidance by past experiences similar to those under consideration.
Inductive reasoning is based on the assumption of unknown facts or hypotheses. You don’t know the facts, but you assume that they exist, and you base your judgment on that. When you do, you must keep your fingers crossed and be ready to change your decision readily: 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 is believed to be known facts. You have all the facts before you, and from those facts you can deduce certain things that you ought to do for your benefit or to carry out your desires. That’s supposed to be the type of thinking that the majority of people engage in, only they don’t do a very good job of it.
Fact versus Fiction
There are two major steps in accurate thinking. First of all, separate facts from fiction or hearsay. Before you do any thinking at all, you must find out whether you’re dealing with facts or fiction, real evidence or hearsay evidence. If you’re dealing with hearsay, it behooves you to be exceptionally careful to keep an open mind and not reach a final decision until you have examined those facts very carefully.
Second, separate facts into two classes: important and unimportant. You’ll be surprised when I tell you that the vast majority of facts that we deal with day in and day out—I’m talking about facts now, not hearsay evidence, not hypotheses—are relatively unimportant.
Let’s see what an important fact is. An important fact may be assumed to be any fact that can be used to 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 wouldn’t miss by very much, I suspect, if I said that the vast majority of people spend more time on irrelevant facts, which have nothing whatsoever to do with their advancement, than they do on facts that would benefit them. Curious people, people that meddle in other people’s affairs, and gossipers put in a lot of time thinking and talking about other people’s affairs, dealing with small talk and petty facts. If you consider these in the right light, they are of no benefit to you, no matter how you use them.
If you doubt what I’ve just said, take inventory of the facts you deal with for one whole day. At the end of the day, sum it up and see how many really important facts you have been dealing with. It’d be better to do this on a Sunday or on an off day, when you’re not on your occupation or any business, because that’s where an idle mind usually goes to work on unimportant facts.
Valueless Opinions
Opinions are usually without value, because they are based on bias, prejudice, intolerance, guesswork, or hearsay evidence. Practically everybody has a flock of opinions about practically everything in the world. They have an opinion about the atomic bomb, its future, and so forth. Most people know practically nothing about the atomic bomb or what may happen in the future; I’m sure I don’t. You and I have an opinion in reference to it. I have an opinion that it should never have been invented. It’s nothing but an evil in my book of rules. Beyond that, I have no opinion because I have nothing on which to base it.
It’s surprising to find out how many people have opinions that have no basis whatsoever, except from the way they feel, what somebody said to them, what they read in the newspaper, or whatever other 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, because it’s not based upon facts, or too much small talk is mixed up in it. The most desirable kind of advice is from someone who’s a specialist in the problem at hand and is paid for this service.
Don’t go after any for free advice. Speaking of free advice, I want to tell you what happened to a student of mine—a friend of mine first and then a student—out in California. For three years, he used to come over to my house every weekend and spend three or four hours, for which I ordinarily would get $50 an hour, although I didn’t get anything from him because he was a friend and acquaintance. He comes over there to get three or four hours of free counsel, and I gave it to him. I gave it to him every time he came, but he didn’t hear a single word that I said.
That went on for three years. Finally he came over one afternoon. I said, “Now look here, Elmer. I have been giving you free counsel for three years, and you haven’t heard a darn thing I’ve been saying. You will never get any value out of this counsel that I’m giving until you start paying for it. Now we’re starting our Master Course right away. Why don’t you go ahead and join that course like everybody else, and then you’ll commit to getting some value.”
He took out his checkbook and gave me a check for the Master Course. He entered the course and went through it. I want to tell you that his business affairs began to thrive from that moment on. I had 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. Free advice is just about worth what it costs; everything in this world is worth just about what it costs. Love and friendship—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. You can only get the real McCoy by giving the real McCoy. If you try to mooch and get friendship and love without giving in return, your source of supply will soon play out.
Our Most Valuable Asset
Accurate thinkers permit no one to do their thinking for them. How many people permit circumstances, influences, radio, television, newspapers, relatives, and other people to do the thinking for them? The percentage is way up there.
If I have one asset that I feel proudest of, and I do, it has nothing to do with money, bank accounts, bonds, stocks, or anything of that kind. It’s something more precious than that: I’ve learned to hear all evidence, get all of the facts I can from all of the sources, and then put them together in my own way and have the last word in making my own thinking.
That doesn’t mean that I’m a know-it-all, that I am a doubting Thomas, or that I don’t seek counsel. I certainly do seek counsel, but when I have gotten that counsel, I determine how much of it I will accept and how much of it I will reject. When I make a decision, nobody could ever say that isn’t the decision of Napoleon Hill. Albeit it might be a decision based upon a mistake, it’s still mine. I did it, and nobody influenced me.
That doesn’t mean that I’m hard-hearted or that my friends have no influence on me. They do. But I determine how much influence they have on me and what reaction I will have to their influence. Certainly 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. I would never permit that.
Why, I want to tell you that I think the angels in heaven cry out when they discover a man or woman that does his or her own thinking and doesn’t allow relatives and friends and enemies and other people to discourage their accurate thinking.
I’m emphasizing this because the majority of people never take possession of their own minds. It’s the most valuable asset that anybody has, the only thing that the Creator gave you that you have complete control over, but it’s the one thing that you generally never discover or use. Instead you allow other people to kick it around like a football.
I don’t know why our educational system hasn’t informed people that they have the greatest asset in the world, an asset sufficient unto all of their needs, and that asset consists in their privilege of using their own mind and thinking their own thoughts and directing those own thoughts to whatever objective they choose.
People don’t know they have it. There has not been the proper system of education. I want to tell you that wherever this philosophy touches, you see people blossom out as they never blossomed out before. It makes a difference, because they begin to sneak in and 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 don’t say that they all run in immediately and take possession of their own minds; rather they sneak in a little at a time. But eventually the affairs of their lives begin to change, because the people discover this great mind power and start using it.
“I See by the Papers”
It’s not safe to form opinions based upon newspaper reports. “I see by the papers” is a preparatory remark that usually brands the speaker as a snap judgment thinker. “I see by the papers” or “I hear tell” or “they say”—how often have you heard those terms? “They say so-and-so”: when I hear anybody start off with that, immediately I pull down my earmuffs and don’t hear a doggone thing that they say, because I know it’s not worth hearing. If anybody starts to give me information and identifies this source by saying, “I see by the papers” or “they say” or “I hear tell,” I don’t pay the slightest attention to what is said. Not that what they are saying might not be accurate, but I know that the source is faulty and therefore the chances are that the statement is faulty also. The scandalmongers and the gossip cruisers are not reliable sources from which to procure information on any subject whatsoever. They’re not reliable, and they’re biased. When you hear anybody speak in a derogatory way of anybody else—whether you know them or not—the very fact that one speaks in a derogatory way of another person puts you on guard. It gives you the responsibility of studying and analyzing very closely everything that’s said, because you know you’re listening to a biased person.
The human brain is a wonderful thing. I marvel at how smart the Creator was in giving a human being all of the equipment and machinery with which to detect lies and falsehood from truth.
There is something ever present in the falsehood that alerts the listener to it. It’s there. You can tell it, you can feel it. The same is true when someone is speaking the truth. The most finished actor in the world couldn’t deceive you if you used your innate intelligence in reference to statements that are made.
By the same token, you should study the remarks of a complimentary nature just as closely as you study the others. For instance, if I send somebody to you for a job with a very laudatory letter, or get you on the telephone and give you a sales pitch about what a marvelous person this is, if you are an accurate thinker, you’re going to know that I’m rubbing it on pretty thick, and you’d better be careful how much of it you accept. You’d better do a little outside investigating.
I’m not trying to make doubting Thomases or cynics out of you, but I am trying to bring to your attention the necessity of using your God-given brain to think accurately and search for the facts, even though they may not be what you’re looking for.
Confidence Games
A lot of people fool themselves, and there is no worse fooling in this world than the fooling that one does to himself. As the Chinese proverb says, “Fool me once, shame on the man. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
I know people that have been fooled over and over again—by the same trick, so old that it has whiskers on it. Confidence games, for instance: somebody rushes up to a woman in a department store and says, “Here, I’ve got $500; I’ve just found this. Now you put up $500. Show me that you’ve got that much, and I’ll give you half of it.” By some hocus-pocus, the woman gets her $500, and they put it in the package, and she thinks she’s got the two amounts of money. When she gets home, she found she has two packages of paper. The other person, the gyp artist, has gone with the money. That’s been going on for years.
You’d think that bankers, for instance, would be so shrewd that a confidence man couldn’t come in and take them. I heard one of the most outstanding con men in the world, Barney Birch—I don’t know whatever happened to him, but he used to operate 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. “Why,” he said, “bankers, because they think they’re so damn smart.”
Wishes often are furthest from facts, and most people have a bad habit of assuming that facts harmonize with their desires. Therefore 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, haven’t you? Because if you wish a thing to be true, oftentimes you will assume it is true and you will act as if it were.
We all like to meet and associate with people who agree with us. That’s human nature. Oftentimes people you associate with and who agree with you and are very nice and lovely come to the point where they can take advantage of you, and they do.
If you love a person, you will overlook his faults. We need to watch ourselves in connection with those we admire most until they have proved themselves entirely, because I have admired a great many people who turned out to be very dangerous indeed.
As a matter of fact, I think most of my troubles back in my early days came from trusting people too much and letting them use my name, and sometimes they wouldn’t use it wisely. That’s happened five or six times in my life. I trusted them because I knew them, and 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. He may be the most important friend you’ve ever had—the person who may irritate you, but causes you to examine yourself carefully.
Information is abundant. Most of it is free, but facts have a habit of being elusive, and generally there is a price attached to them: the price of painstaking labor in examining them for accuracy. That’s the least of the prices that you have to pay for facts.
“How Do You Know?”
This question, “How do you know?” is the favorite question of the thinker. When a thinker hears a statement that he can’t accept, immediately he says to the speaker, “How do you know? What is your source of information?”
If you have the slightest doubt and ask someone to identify his source of knowledge, you will put the person out on a limb; he won’t be able to do it. If you ask him how he knows, he’ll tell you, “Well, I believe so.” What right have you to believe anything unless you have based it upon something, unless you can give some background for it?
I believe there’s a God. A lot of people do, but a lot of people who say they believe in a God couldn’t give you the slightest evidence of it if you backed them into a corner. I can give you evidence. When I say that I believe in a God and you say, “How do you even know?” I can give you all of the evidence. I don’t have as much evidence in connection with anything else in this world as I do with the existence of a Creator, because the orderliness of this universe couldn’t go on and on to the end of time without a first cause, without a plan in back of it. You know that’s absolutely true. Yet a lot of people undertake to prove the presence of God in devious ways that in my book of rules wouldn’t be 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 nothing exists.
Logic is a wonderful thing. 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.
There are times when you have a hunch; you have a feeling that certain things are true or not true. You’d better be careful to pay respect to that hunch, because that’s probably infinite intelligence trying to break through the outer shell.
If one of you got up and said, “My definite major aim is to make a million dollars this coming year,” what would I say if you did that? What would be the first question I would ask you, do you think?
How are you going to do it? I want to hear your plan, and then what you are going to do about it. First of all, I’m going to weigh your ability to get a million dollars and to find out what you’re going to give for it. Then my logic will tell me whether or not your plan for doing it is provable, workable, and practical. It doesn’t take an awful lot of intelligent thinking, but it’s a very important thing to do.
I believe in my students, I love them, I have great respect for them. If one of them got up and told me that he was going to make a million dollars next year, would I say, “Atta boy. Now you’re talking. Now you can do it”? You’d know right away I was a liar. If I said that, you’d know that I didn’t know what I was talking about, or I was not telling the truth.
Let’s say I said, “Well, now, fine. I hope you’re right. Now let’s see how you’re going to do it. Sit down and tell me your plan.” I’d go over your plan, I’d analyze it, I’d analyze you, I’d analyze your capabilities, I’d analyze your past experience, your past achievements. I’d analyze the people that you’re going to get to help you make those million dollars. When we got through analyzing, I would be able to tell you, “Well, probably you can do it,” or I’d be able to point out to you that probably it’d take longer than the year that you said—maybe two years, maybe three.
Then again, I might tell you that you wouldn’t be able to do it all. If my reasoning taught me that that was the answer, I’d give it to you just that way. I’ve had some of my students put propositions before me which I’ve had to turn down; I had to tell them just to forget about it because they were wasting their time. I’ve also had some come out with ideas that were marvelous; one of them is sitting right in this audience tonight. I was able to send him over to one of the most distinguished consulting engineers in the country, and that engineer’s giving him the answers. I didn’t just pass haphazard judgment on his ideas. I sent him to an expert where he’d get the real lowdown and who could possibly help in carrying out his ideas.
That’s the way an accurate thinker perceives. He doesn’t allow his emotions to run away with him. If I allowed my emotions to do my thinking for me, anything that one of my students undertook to do, I’d tell him he could do it.
Now let me jump to this famous motto or epigram that you’ve seen quoted a lot of times. You’ve heard it in my lessons: “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, your mind can achieve.”
I don’t want anybody to misread that statement by reading into it whatever your mind can conceive and believe, your mind will achieve. I said, “It can achieve.” Do you get the difference there 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 own your own mind, the extent to which you intensity your faith, the soundness of your judgments and your plans—all of these factors, everything translates into how well you fulfill that epigram, “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, your mind can achieve.”
Separating Fact from Fiction
Now for my acid test in separating facts from information. Let’s see how we go about it. First of all, scrutinize with unusual care everything you read in the newspapers or hear over the radio, and form the habit of never accepting any statement as a fact merely because you read it or heard it expressed by someone. Statements containing some proportion of fact often are, carelessly or intentionally, colored to give them an erroneous meaning. A half-truth is more dangerous than an out-and-out lie, because the half-truth part is likely to deceive somebody who thinks the whole of it is true.
Scrutinize carefully everything you read in books, regardless of who wrote them, and never accept the works of any writer without asking the following questions and satisfying yourself as to the answers. These rules also apply to lectures, statements, speeches, conversations, or anything else.
First of all, is the writer, speaker, teacher, or the one making the statement a recognized authority on the subject on which he’s speaking or writing?
That’s the first question that you ask. Suppose you apply that to me. You’re taking the course, you’re paying a substantial sum for it, and you’re putting in a substantial amount of time in taking it, which is worth money. It would be too bad if, after you had taken the course, you were to find that I was not an authority, wouldn’t it? It would be too bad if you found that this philosophy was not sound and wouldn’t work. It’d be a big disappointment to you, wouldn’t it? It would be a mighty big disappointment to me too if you found that out.
Let’s put myself under the microscope and see how would you go about testing whether or not my science of success is sound and you can depend upon it. What proof has been given that it does work?
In the first place, it’s very easy to determine if this philosophy has spread all over the world. It’s published and distributed widely in practically every civilized country on earth, and it has been accepted and passed upon as sound by the shrewdest brains that this world has ever created—not just a few hundred but a few thousand of them. No one at anytime, anywhere, has ever found any weakness in connection with it.
You know very well that, people being what they are, if there had been any weakness in this philosophy, they would have found it. They found a lot of weaknesses in Napoleon Hill, and they didn’t hesitate to point them out, but they didn’t find any in the philosophy. Therefore Napoleon Hill is an authority, because going on forty years now, he’s devoted his time to presenting the know-how gained by five hundred or more of the outstanding men of the world. That’s where the information came from. It came from men who got it by experience, by the trial and error method.
The very fact that it has been accepted and the fact that it has made thousands and thousands of successful people—both moneywise and otherwise—all over the world is evidence that Napoleon Hill, as an author of The Science of Success, is an authority.
That’s how you would determine it. You wouldn’t determine it by how well you think of me, by whether you like me or don’t like me, because that has very little to do with it. You determine it by examining the works themselves and the effects they’ve had on people.
Ulterior Motives
Next, did the writer or the speaker have an ulterior motive or a motive of self-interest other than that of imparting accurate information? The motive that prompts a man to write a book, make a speech, or to make a statement, in public or in private, is very important. If you can get at a man’s motive when he’s talking, you can tell pretty well how truthful he is in what he’s saying.
For instance, last week I allowed a man to talk to me for two hours, mostly about himself. He was giving himself a very good recommendation. I don’t think he thought I suspected that he was trying to sell himself into our organization, but that’s exactly what he was trying to do. He had the hook pretty cleverly baited. He started off by telling me that he had all the books I’d ever written, he had memorized some of them, and he was one of my great admirers. That didn’t hurt his case at the start. As time went on, he began to rub it on thicker and thicker, and he swung over into what I suspected he was going to say all the time, for he began to tell me how clever he was at applying this philosophy and how clever he would be at teaching it.
Then I put on the brakes. I asked him a few questions. I asked him if he’d ever taught the philosophy. No, he hadn’t taught it, but he knew very well he could, because he knew so much about it. He had an ulterior motive, and therefore I discounted a lot of the things that he said about himself. At least I held them in abeyance. I didn’t accept them hook, line, bait, and sinker, because he was a biased witness; he was selling himself.
Next, is the writer a paid propagandist whose profession is that of organizing public opinion? In these days it behooves us to be eternally on the outlook for propaganda. With these organizations, especially those with big-sounding names like “the organization of who and what’s-it for America,” it behooves us to look into them, because many have proved to be propagandists, not to support the American way of life, but to undermine it. The Russians have turned loose in the world a clever set of fifth columnists and propagandists; the world has never known anything equal. That’s why they’ve taken one country after another under submission until they control probably two-thirds of this world without firing a gun, and the rest of the world seems paralyzed to do anything about it.
You can see the effect of allowing propaganda to spread unchecked. Has the writer an interest, of profit or any other kind, in the subject on which he writes or speaks? When you find out about a man’s motive, whatever he’s doing, it’ll be impossible for him to fool you in the least, because you’ll be able to smell him out. Is the writer a person of sound judgment and not a fanatic on the subject of which he writes? I have seen a lot of people who are overzealous about to the point of fanaticism, like Karl Marx, or Lenin or Trotsky or any of that group in back of communism. They’re overzealous. I have no doubt that they think that we’re wrong and they’re right; I have no doubt that they believe supremely in what they’re doing. They would have to, to carry on the way they do. Before I’m going to believe in their doctrines, I’m going to reserve my own judgment, and I’m going to examine them, not by what they say, but by what they do to people who come under their subjection.
You wouldn’t judge me on account of the kind of tie I wear, the kind of suit I wear, how I cut my hair, or how well I speak. You’d judge me by how much influence I’m having for good or evil on people. That’s the way you judge me. That’s the way you would judge anybody else.
You might not like a man’s brand of religion or politics, but if he’s doing a good job in his field and helping a lot of people and doing no damage, never mind about his brand. Don’t condemn him if he’s doing preponderantly more good than harm.
Before accepting statements by others as facts, ascertain the motive which prompted the statements. Ascertain also 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 the 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.
Expert Advice
What do you do if you can’t trust your own judgment? Is there an answer in this philosophy for that?
There certainly is. A lot of times an individual can’t trust his own judgment, because he doesn’t know enough about the circumstances that he’s faced with. He’s got to turn to somebody with broader experience or a different education or a keener mind for analysis.
For instance, can you imagine a business succeeding that is all made up of master salesmen? Can you imagine that? Did you ever know such a business? You need a wet blanket man in every organization: a man who controls the assets of the company and keeps them from getting away at the wrong time and the wrong way. You also need a hatchet man—a man who will cut through the red tape and everything else that gets in his way and let the chips fall wherever they may. I wouldn’t want to be a hatchet man. I wouldn’t want to be a wet blanket man, but certainly I’d want those two in my organization if it was very extensive.
In seeking facts from others, do not disclose to them the facts you expect to find. If I say to you, “By the way, you used to employ a 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’ll certainly not get them with that kind of question, will I? If I really wanted to find out about someone who used to work for you, I wouldn’t get it from you at all in the first place. I’d have a commercial credit company get an unbiased report on him from you. You’d probably give out facts to the credit rating company that you wouldn’t give out to me or anybody else. It’s surprising how much information you can get if you know the right commercial agencies through which to get it. Oftentimes when you go directly for information about a man, the chances are you won’t get the real facts; you’ll get a varnished or watered-down set of facts.
Most people are lazy: they don’t want to go to too much trouble in explaining. If you ask a man a question and you give him the slightest idea of what you expect the answer to be, he’ll just give you the answer he knows you want. You’re tickled to death, you go on with it, and then fall on it later on.
Smart people have ways and means of getting information from others very cleverly without disclosing to the others exactly how they get it.
Science is the art of organizing and classifying facts. That’s what science means. When you wish to make sure you’re dealing with facts, seek scientific sources for testing where possible. A man of science has neither the reason nor the inclination to modify or to change facts in order to misrepresent. If they had that inclination, they would not be scientists, would they? They’d be pseudoscientists or fakes, and there are a lot of pseudoscientists and fakes in this world who assume they 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 being influenced too far by your feelings, give your head a chance to pass judgment on the business at hand. The head is more dependable than the heart, but balancing them so both have an equal say makes the best combination. If you do that, you’ll come up with the right answer. The person who forgets this generally regrets his neglect.
Of the major enemies of sound thinking, the emotion of love stands at the head of the list. How in the world could love interfere with anybody’s thinking? If you said that, I’d know right away you hadn’t had very many love experiences. If you’ve ever had an experience with love at all, you know very well how dangerous it is, like playing around TNT with a match in your hand. When it starts to explode, it doesn’t give any notice.
Hatred, anger, jealousy, fear, revenge, greed, vanity, egotism, the desire for something for nothing, and procrastination—all of these are enemies of thinking. You have to be constantly on the lookout to be free of them, provided that the thinking at hand is of importance to you. Maybe your whole future destiny depends upon your thinking accurately, and in fact it does. If that were not true, then what would be the use of giving you complete control of your mind?
The answer is that mind is absolutely sufficient to fulfill all of your needs, at least in this lifespan. I don’t know about the preceding plane, where you came from, or 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 right now. I’ve found out a great deal about how to influence my destiny here. I also get a lot of pleasure out of it, so I can give joy, make myself useful, and justify my having passed this way.
I have discovered how to manipulate my own mind and keep it under control, make it do the things I want it to do, throw out the circumstances I don’t want, and accept the ones that I do want. If I don’t find the circumstances I want, what do I do? Create them, of course. That’s what definiteness of purpose and imagination are for.
The Dangers of Fanaticism
There’s also religious and political fanaticism. My, oh my, the useless time and energy that’s wasted on those two forms of fanaticism—fighting over what’s going to happen hereafter, when as a matter fact none of us know what’s going to happen hereafter. We may think we do, but we don’t actually know. (It’s just as well that some of us don’t know where we’re going hereafter; it might be very unhappy.)
Fighting over politics—do you know what the difference between a Republican and a Democrat is? The difference depends on who’s in and who’s out. That’s all. I mean that seriously, not facetiously. If I asked you to describe the difference between a Democrat and a Republican, you’d be hard put to it to give me a real, practical, intelligent sense of that difference. The only difference I’ve ever found is that sometimes the Democrats are in, and they misuse their power, and sometimes the Republicans are in, and they misuse their power. Yet look at the furor and hatred that they stir.
You hardly believe anything that’s coming out of Washington, because you wonder whether it isn’t some political trick to tear somebody down or build somebody up politically. It’s a difficult matter to get at the truth, because you know how dangerous, tricky, and dishonest politics are. It used to be an honor to call a man a congressman or a senator. Nowadays you’re likely to be sued for damages if you do. To call a man a politician—you’d better be ready to fight when you do that. In certain circles today, a man doesn’t want to be called a politician, because politicians have sunk to an all-time low of disgrace and dishonesty.
I’m not talking politics, you understand. I’m just giving you a little information on accurate thinking, but we happen to know that’s true. That’s one reason we’re in such a mess in the United States: we don’t have honesty at the source of our government. I don’t mean that we don’t have some honest individuals, but the preponderance of power at the source is dishonest and has been ever since—well, I won’t tell you how long.
The Eternal Question Mark
Now 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, and avoid being known as a doubting Thomas. Don’t come out and question people orally—that’s not going to get you anywhere—but question them silently.
If you’re too outspoken in your questioning, it puts people on notice, they’ll cover up, and you won’t get the information you want. Quietly go about seeking for information and doing some accurate thinking, and you’ll probably come up with it.
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 listener? I don’t know of any quality that would help an individual to get along in the world better than to be an effective, enthusiastic speaker. Yet I would follow that statement immediately by saying that it’s far more profitable to be a good, analytical listener, because when you’re listening, you’re getting information, but when you’re speaking, you’re only expressing what’s in your mind. You’re not acquiring anything at all, unless it’s self-confidence or something of that sort.
Let your mind be an eternal question mark. I don’t mean that you should become a cynic or a doubting Thomas, but rather that no matter whom you’re dealing with, in every relationship you have, deal with them on the basis of thinking accurately. You’ll get a lot of satisfaction out of that. You’ll also be more successful.
If you’re tactful and diplomatic as you go along, you’ll have a lot more substantial friends than you would 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, particularly social heredity. Through physical heredity, you get everything that you are physically: the stature of your body, the texture of your skin, the color of your eyes and hair. You’re the sum total of all of your ancestors back further than you can ever remember, and you’ve inherited a few of their good qualities and a few of their bad. There’s nothing you can do about that. That’s static; it’s fixed at birth.
By far the most important part of what you are is the result of your social heredity—your environmental influences, the things that you have allowed to go into your mind and that you’ve accepted as a part of character.
I had an experience once that made me very angry, but I got a great lesson out of it. The man who employed me to write stories about successful men, which led to my meeting Mr. Carnegie, was Robert Love Taylor, the former governor and senator for Tennessee.
When I was talking to him, he was a senator in Washington, and I was dining with him in the Senate dining room. We were talking about politics. He being from Tennessee and I being from the adjoining State of Virginia, both of us were Democrats. We were building ourselves up big. I was selling democracy, and he was selling me the same thing. Finally he said, “By the way, Hill, how did you come to be a Democrat?”
“Because my grandfather was a Democrat, my father was a Democrat, my uncles are all Democrats, and my great-grandfather was a Democrat.”
He said, “Now isn’t that grand. Wouldn’t it have been unhappy for you if your ancestors had been horse thieves?”
I got mad. I didn’t see the point. I wasn’t old enough, and I didn’t have enough experience at that time, but he put me to thinking. In asking that question, he told me that you have no right to be anything just because your dad or your uncle or somebody else is.
I learned a great lesson from that. Later on, I wasn’t a Democrat anymore. I’m not a Republican either. I’m an accurate thinker. I take a little of the good out of both the Republican idea and out of the Democrats’ idea. When voting, I’ve never voted a straight ticket in my whole life. I’d think it’d be an insult to my intelligence to vote a straight ticket. I study the men that are on that ticket and try to pick out the man that I think will do the best job, and I don’t give a continental whether he’s a Republican or a Democrat. I’ve always voted for the man that I think will do a good job for the people, and I believe any accurate thinker would do it that way.
Conscience as a Guide
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. A lot of people use their conscience as a conspirator instead of as a guide. In other words, they sell their conscience on the idea that what they’re doing is right. Eventually the conscience falls in line and becomes a conspirator.
When I first interviewed Al Capone, I was astounded to know what a mean deal he’d gotten from the people of the United States through their government and what a mean, nasty long-nosed man it was that had persecuted—not prosecuted, but persecuted—him for carrying on a perfectly legitimate business. He was supplying people a service that they wanted and paid for. What business did Uncle Sam have sticking his long nose into a legitimate business like that?
Now that was Al’s story. That’s the way he told it to me, and he believed it, because he had long since choked off his conscience or converted it to aiding and abetting. You can do that if you don’t listen to your conscience in the beginning. It will become a conspirator, and it’ll back you up in everything that you’re doing.
The Price You Must Pay
If you sincerely wish to think accurately, there’s a price that you must pay, a price that is not measurable in money. First, you must learn to examine carefully 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 and first to make sure they lead you to the attainment of the object that you want.
I knew a fellow once who wanted to marry a certain girl more than anything else in the world. It became his obsession, his definite major purpose. She turned him down time after time. Finally he was so persistent that in order to get rid of him, she married him. They both lived to regret it afterward, especially the man, because she never ceased throwing it up to him. Don’t get any false notions: I was not the man; I was just the observer.
Be careful about the thing that you set your heart upon, because when you get it, sometimes you find out it’s not what you wanted at all. I’ve already told you about Bing Crosby, who set his heart on making his first $50,000. When he and his brother, who was his manager, got it, they found out they wanted another $50,000. When they got up to $100,000, they said, “Gosh, it’s come so easy. Let’s make it a million and then stop.” He first got the million, and the million got him. A lovely character, but he got ensnared in his own desires, and now he doesn’t know when to stop.
I can multiply that by a thousand illustrations: the men who paid too much for what they got, who wanted something too badly, who tried to get too much out of it and did get too much of it, but didn’t get peace of mind and balancing of their lives along with it.
I think the saddest thing that ever came out of my research in building this philosophy was what I learned about the wealthy men that collaborated in the building of this philosophy. They didn’t get success along with their money, because they became too obsessed with the importance of money and the power that money would give them. I don’t know why anybody would want a million dollars—so help me, I don’t—unless it’d be somebody like myself, who wants it to spread this philosophy all over the world so that a lot of other people can get it. I want many millions of dollars, and I’m going to have them in quick order. Not for myself; I don’t need that kind of money. It’s all going to be plowed back into this business of helping people all over this world. I don’t think that’s going to hurt me or anybody else; I don’t see how anybody can be hurt that way.
Avoid Expressing Opinions
You must curb the habit of expressing opinions which are not based upon facts or what you believe to be facts. Did you know that you didn’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? I bet you wouldn’t admit that that’s true. I bet you won’t admit that you have no right whatsoever to have an opinion about anything at any time unless it’s based upon what you believe to be facts or actual provable facts.
Why do I say you don’t have a right to this? You have a right, of course, but 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.
A lot of people go all the way through life fooling themselves by opinions that have no basis for existence. You must master the habit of being influenced by people in any manner whatsoever merely because you like them or they are related to you or they may have done you a favor.
When you’ve gone the extra mile, you’re going to put a lot of people under obligations to you, and I want you to do that. Nobody can find any fault with that, but be careful. Be careful about being influenced by people just because they have done you a favor. I’m talking now about the people for whom you’ve gone the extra mile. And you may be in that position sometimes too, where somebody puts you under obligations to an extent that you don’t want.
I have one friend, Ed Barnes, who is the only partner that Thomas Edison ever had. I’ve been going out to lunch with Ed for the last forty years everywhere from the Waldorf Astoria down to restaurants where we’d have a cup of coffee and a sandwich.
I never was able to pick up the check but once in my life. Last time when he was up here, he, Mike Ritt, and I and went out for the ball game. I’d sent Mike ahead to buy the tickets, and we already had them and there’s nothing he could do about it.
One day I asked him, “Why won’t you let me pick up the check?”
“Well, to be candid with you,” he said, “I’ll tell you the truth. I want you to always be under obligations to me, because I am under obligations to you from a way back, and I want to pay that off a little over time, so you won’t be throwing it up to me that you helped me make my first million.”
There was a whole lot of logic to what he was saying. He didn’t want to be under too much obligation to me, so just to show me that he was independent himself, he insisted on always picking up the check. Of course, I could have reached faster if I had wanted to. On one occasion when he and I had a dinner together, if I had reached for the check and gotten it, I would have been wrecked, because it was more money than I had in my pocket.
You must form the habit of examining the motives of people who seek some benefit from or through your influence. You must 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.
Don’t Make Decisions When Angry
No man ought to make an important decision while he’s angry. For instance, it’s a bad mistake to discipline children when you’re angry, because nine times out of ten, you’ll do and say the wrong thing and do more harm than good. That applies to a lot of grownups too. If you’re really angry, don’t make decisions. Don’t make statements to people while you’re mad, because they can come back on you and do you a lot of injury.
You can see why we have a lesson on self-discipline. It plays right along with this lesson. A lot of times, if you’re going to be an accurate thinker, you’ve got to have a lot of self-discipline, and you’ve got to refrain from saying and doing a lot of things you’d like to say and do. Bide your time. There’s always a time for you to say and do everything properly.
Accurate thinkers don’t fly off the handle, start their mouths going and leave them going, unlike some people. They carefully study the effect on the listener of every word they utter even before they utter it.
Recently I made a statement over at the Club Success Unlimited. I told about an incident in our organization when Mr. Stone had to discipline somebody we considered disloyal. I did not tell about it because I was in any malicious spirit that night; I was putting this class on notice that there was fifth-column activity going on, and I want to put you on notice so that if it showed up, you would be able to defend yourself against it. That’s why I did it, and the only reason why. I’m pleased to tell you now that the circumstance has been entirely corrected, and there’s no more fifth-column activity.
The thing was handled the way it should have been handled. There was no maliciousness in it, there was no mentioning of names, and the only one that heard it that could possibly have been hurt would have been the guilty person. The innocent ones, who didn’t know anything about it, certainly couldn’t have been hurt one way or another.
That was my way of taking care of a situation that might well have torn asunder this marvelous organization. It’s just one of those things that had to be handled, yet I handled it in such a way that it got the right results. Everybody was satisfied, and there’s no more trouble.
I could have called names. I could have engaged in personalities. I could have done what any person who is not engaged in accurate thinking would have done, but I didn’t.
When you get this philosophy down properly and apply it, it makes no difference how disagreeable the circumstances are that come up in your life; you’ll always be able to handle them right. By handling them right, I mean with justice to yourself and to everybody else that your decisions or actions may influence. I wouldn’t want under any circumstance to engage in any transactions that would offend or hurt anybody if I could possibly get out of it. I would never hurt anybody except in self-defense or in defense of my profession, which I know benefits millions of people.
If they threatened my organization, this philosophy, and my ability to take it to the people, I would be in there fighting like a demon if necessary. This philosophy we’re engaged in is bigger than me, it’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than all of us combined.
In Sum
In appropriating the habits and characteristics of other people, you must learn to adopt only those which fit into the pattern of your major purpose in life. Don’t take over the pattern of another person just because you admire that person. Take only so much out of the other fellow’s pattern as will fit into your purpose in life. You must learn to make decisions promptly, but never make them until you have carefully weighed their possible effects on your future plans and on other people.
I can think of a lot of things I could do that would benefit me but wouldn’t benefit you; they might even injure you. I can think of a lot of things I could do to someone, but I wouldn’t engage in them, because eventually I’d have to pay the price, because whatever you do to or for another person, you do to or for yourself. It comes back to you greatly multiplied.
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—not to say anything, not to do anything that you don’t want to come back to you later on in life.
Before accepting as facts the statements of other people, it may be beneficial if you ask them how they came by the so-called facts. When they express opinions, ask them how they know their opinion is sound. For someone to come along and say, “It’s my opinion,” would not influence me in the slightest, because I don’t want an opinion. I want some facts; then I’ll form my own opinion. “You give me the facts, and I’ll put them together in my own way,” says the accurate thinker.
You must learn to examine with extraordinary care all statements of a derogatory nature made by one person against others, because the very nature of those statements brand them as being not without bias (and that’s putting it very politely).
You must overcome the habit of trying to justify a decision you have made that turns out to have been unsound. Accurate thinkers don’t do that. If they find they’re wrong, they reverse themselves just as quickly as they made the decisions.
Excuses and alibis and accurate thinking are never friendly bedfellows. Most people are very adept at creating alibis for their faults and omissions, but they don’t amount to a thing unless there’s something back of them that’s sound, that you can depend upon.
If you are an accurate thinker, you will never use the expressions, “They say” or “I heard.” Accurate thinkers, in repeating things they have heard, identify the source and attempt to establish its dependability. If I told you that I knew that God exists and why I know he exists, I would proceed to give you the source of my information and lay it out in terms that you could understand. If I told you that I was a Democrat or a Republican, and it was important that you know why, I’d give you sound reasons. (I’m not either one, because I don’t have any sound reasons for being either one.)
It’s not an easy matter to be an accurate thinker. Have you reached that conclusion already? There’s quite a little bit you have to pay in order to have it but it’s worth it. If you’re not an accurate thinker, people are going to take advantage of you. You’re not going to get as much out of life as you’d like to. You’re not going to be satisfied. You’ll never be a well-balanced person without accurate thinking.
In order to think accurately, you’ve got to have a set of rules to go by, and you will find them in this lesson. Go over this lesson and study it carefully, add some notes to it of your own, and start now to do some thinking. Start putting into practice some of these principles of separating facts from information and separating the facts themselves into two classes, important and unimportant.
This lesson will very much more than have justified itself, and could well be worth a thousand times as much as you have put into the entire course, if it teaches you to do those simple things. Start separating fact from information. Be sure that you’re dealing with facts. Then take the facts and break them down. Throw off the unimportant facts on which you’ve been wasting so much time.