by Napoleon Hill
Available in 122 free installments
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So this is the formula for getting rid of your guilt feelings. If you are having trouble with temptation, and if subsequent guilt is keeping you from using your energy in a constructive direction, learn the pattern for freedom from guilt Relate it to your own life. Apply it. And step away toward success.
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude urges you to use the powers of your conscious and subconscious mind to:
? Seek the truth.
? Motivate you to take constructive action.
? Cause you to strive to achieve the highest ideals you can conceive, consistent with good physical and mental health.
? Live intelligently in your society.
? Help you abstain from that which will cause unnecessary injury.
? Start you from where you are and get you to where you want to be regardless of what you are or what you have been.
Anything which deters you from noble achievements in life should be cast aside. And this places upon you the burden to know or find out what is right or wrong, and to know what is good or evil under a given circumstance and at a given time.
You are acquainted with the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and other standards of good in the society in which you live. And it is for you to determine the standards which will guide you to your desired goals.
"It is one thing to know the goal, and quite another thing to work toward it," writes Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in Life Is Worth Living. Choose your goals! Work toward them! Direct your thoughts, control your emotions, get into action and you ordain your destiny. You can find the answer if you keep seeking it. How? One important aid is to "catch character."
Catch. "Character is something that is caught, not taught," was a thought-provoking quotation of Arthur Burger, former Executive Director of the Boys Clubs of Boston. It appeared in a Reader's Digest article entitled "400,000 Boys Are Members of the Club."
Catch has two distinct meanings: (1) "affected by exposure to environment" (often subconscious reaction); and (2) "seize and hold" (conscious action).
One effective way to catch character is to place yourself or your children in an environment that will develop desirable thoughts, motives, and habits. If your selected environment it is not sufficiently effective after a reasonable time, make substitutions and changes.
But character can also be taught. And if parents would devote more time to teaching character, both by precept and example, their children would catch and learn this admirable quality so necessary for success.
What makes a delinquent? E. E. Bauermeister, former Supervisor of Education at the California Institution for Men at Chino, California, says: "Our youngsters need the guidance in
choosing right from wrong which they should receive at home... when we start talking about juvenile delinquency, we should rename it and put the responsibility where it belongs. We have a case of parent delinquency in America today. Parents are not assuming the obligations and responsibilities that are theirs.
"Everyone has been born with a potential of good character... "
J. Edgar Hoover made this statement: "You can read volumes upon volumes as to the cause of crime, but crime is literally caused by the lack of one thing, a feeling of moral responsibility on the part of people."
And the reason the people lack a feeling of moral responsibility is because they lack a guilt feeling. Thus they do not develop their own characters, for their conscience is dulled and doesn't guide them. And from their faulty unmoral and amoral characters their children can neither catch nor learn character.
When one virtue is in conflict with another. Sometimes it is not so easy to decide whether one should say yes or no. For the question to be resolved may involve a conflict between virtues. And every person at some time is faced with such a conflict and must make a decision. He must choose: between what he wishes to do and what he ought to do; or between what he wants and what society expects of him.
And such a choice must necessarily be made between virtues, such as: love, duty, and loyalty. As examples: (a) love and duty to a parent in conflict with the love and duty to a husband or wife; (b) loyalty to an individual in conflict with loyalty to another individual; or (c) loyalty to an individual in conflict with loyalty to an organization or society.
Let's Illustrate with the story of the salesmen who worked with George Johnson. For they were faced with a conflict between loyalty to an individual and loyalty to another Individual and the organization he represented.
