by Napoleon Hill
Available in 122 free installments
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These 17 success principles are no creation of the authors. They were extracted from the lifetime experiences of hundreds of the most successful persons our nation has known during the past century.
As long as you live, from this day forward, you can analyze your every success and every failure ? that is, if you imprint these 17 principles indelibly in your memory.
You may develop and maintain a permanent Positive Mental Attitude by making it your responsibility to adopt and apply these 17 principles in your daily living.
There is no other known method by which you may keep your mind positive.
Analyze yourself courageously, now, and learn which of these 17 principles you have been using and which of them you have been neglecting.
In the future analyze both your successes and your allures, using the 17 principles as a measuring device, and very soon you will be able to lay your finger on what has been holding you back.
If you have PMA and don't succeed, then what? If you use PMA and don't succeed, it may be because you are not using each of the principles that are necessary in the combination for success to attain your specific goal.
You may wish to check the stories of S. B. Fuller, Tom Dempsey, Henry J. Kaiser, the woodcutter, Al Allen, and Henry Ford, to recognize which of the 17 success principles each person applied or neglected to apply. You might analyze someone you know who is a has-been in real life. As you read the case histories in the chapters which follow, do the same thing. Ask yourself: Which of
the 17 success principles are used? Which are omitted? At first it may be difficult to understand and apply the principles. But as you continue to read Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, each of these principles will become more clear to you. You will then be able to use them. When you get to Chapter 20, you will be able to check yourself accurately by the 17 success principles. There you will find a self-analysis chart under the heading "Success Quotient Analysis."
Has the world given you a raw deal? The students who have enrolled in the PMA Science of Success course have often been people who considered themselves failures in some area of their lives. The very first question such a person might be asked when he enters the class is: Why? Why are you taking this course? Why haven't you had the success you would like to have? And the reasons which they give tell us a tragic story about the causes of failure.
"I never really had a chance to get ahead. My father was an alcoholic, you know."
"I was raised in the slums and that's something you can never get out of your system."
"I only had a grammar school education."
These people are all saying, in essence, that the world has given them a raw deal. They are blaming the world and circumstances outside themselves for their failures. They blame their heredity or their environment. They start out with a negative mental attitude. And, of course, with that attitude, they are handicapped But it is NMA that is holding them down, not the external handicap which they give as the cause of their failure.
A lesson learned from a child. There is a wonderful little story about a minister who, one Saturday morning, was trying to prepare his sermon under difficult conditions. His wife was out shopping. It was a rainy day and his young son was restless and bored, with nothing to do. Finally, in desperation, the minister picked up an old magazine and thumbed through it until he came to a large brightly colored picture. It showed a map of the world. He tore the page from the magazine, ripped it into little bits and threw the scraps all over the living room floor with the words:
"Johnny, if you can put this all together, I'll give you a quarter".
The preacher thought this would take Johnny most of the morning. But within ten minutes there was a knock on his study door. It was his son with the completed puzzle. The minister was amazed to see Johnny finished so soon, with the pieces of paper neatly arranged and the nap of the world back in order. 'Son, how did you get that done so fast?" the preacher asked.
"Oh," said Johnny, "it was easy. On the other side, there was a picture of a man. I just put a piece of paper on the bottom, put the picture of the man together, put a piece of paper on top, and then turned it over. I figured that if got the man right, the world would be right."
The minister smiled, and handed his son a quarter. "And you've given me my sermon for tomorrow, too," he said. "If a man is right, his world will be right."
