Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude

On one occasion this old customer ordered a cord of wood, but was away when it was delivered. On arriving home he discovered that most of the wood was larger than the specified size. He called the woodcutter and asked him to have the oversized logs exchanged or split.

"I can't do that!" said the wood dealer. "It would cost more than the whole load is worth." With that he hung up.

So the homeowner was left with the job of splitting the logs himself. He rolled up his sleeves and set to work. About halfway through the job he noticed that one particular log had a very large knothole which someone had plugged up. The homeowner lifted the log. It seemed unusually light and appeared to be hollow. With a hefty swing of the axe he split the log.

A blackened roll of tin foil fell out. The homeowner stooped down, picked up the roll and unwrapped it. To his amazement it contained very old $50 and $100 bills. Slowly he counted them. They amounted to exactly $2,250. The bills had evidently been in the tree for many years, as the paper was very brittle. The homeowner had PMA. His only thought was to get the money back to its rightful owner. He picked up the telephone, called the wood dealer again, and asked him where he had cut this load. Again the woodcutter's NMA asserted its repelling power. That's nobody's business but mine," he said. "If you give away your secrets, people will cheat you every time." Despite many efforts, the homeowner never learned where the logs came from or who had sealed the money inside.

Now, the point of this story does not lie in irony. It is true that the man with PMA found the money while the man with NMA had not. But it is also true that good breaks do occur in everyone's life. However, the man who lives with NMA will prevent life's lucky breaks from benefiting him. And the man with PMA will so arrange his attitudes that he will turn even the bad breaks into advantages.

On the sales staff of the Combined Insurance Company of America there was a salesman named Al Allen. Al wanted to be the company's star salesman. He tried to apply the PMA

principles found in the inspirational books and magazines he read. He read an editorial in Success Unlimited magazine entitled "Develop Inspirational Dissatisfaction." It wasn't long after that he had an opportunity to put into practice what he had read. He had a bad break. This gave him the opportunity to arrange his attitudes so that he could use the PMA side of his talisman effectively.

He developed inspirational dissatisfaction. One icy winter day Al "cold-canvassed" every store in a city block in Wisconsin; he walked in unannounced, and tried to sell insurance. On that day, Al did not make a single sale. Of course, he was dissatisfied. But Al's PMA turned this dissatisfaction into "inspirational dissatisfaction."

Why?

He remembered the editorial he had read. He applied the principle. The next day before setting out from the local office, he told his fellow salesmen about his failures the day before. He said, "Wait and see. Today I'm going back to call on those same prospects and I'll sell more insurance than all the rest of you combined!"

And the remarkable thing is that Al did it. He went back to that same city block and again called on every person he had talked to the day before. He sold 66 new accident contracts!

Now, this was an unusual achievement. And it happened because of the "bad breaks" when Al trudged through the sleet and wind for eight hours without selling a single policy. Al Allen was able to rearrange his attitudes. He was able to convert the negative kind of dissatisfaction that most of us would feel in similar circumstances of failure on one day into inspirational dissatisfaction, which resulted in success the next day. Al did

become the company's best salesman and was promoted to a sales manager. This ability to turn the invisible talisman over and use the side which has the force of PMA rather than the side which has the force of NMA is characteristic of so many of our really successful people. Most of us are inclined to look upon success as coming in some mysterious way through advantage that we do not have. Perhaps because we do have them, we don't see them. The obvious is often unseen. Every man's PMA is his advantage, and there is nothing mysterious about it.