Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude

There's a great lesson in this idea. If you are unhappy with your world and want to change it, the place to start is with yourself. If you are right, your world will be right. This is what PMA is all about. When you have a Positive Mental Attitude, the problems of your world tend to bow before you.

You were born a champion. Have you ever thought about the battles you won before you were born? "Stop and think about yourself," says Amram Scheinfeld, an expert on genetics. "In all the history of the world there was never anyone else exactly like you, and in all the infinity of time to come, there will never be another."

You are a very special person. And many struggles took place that had to be successfully concluded in order to produce you. Just think: tens of millions of sperm cells participated in a great battle, yet only one of them won ? the one that made you! It was a great race to reach a single object: a precious egg containing a tiny nucleus. This goal for which the sperms were competing was smaller in size than the point of a needle. And each sperm was so small that it would have to be magnified thousands of times before it could be seen by the human eye. Yet it is on this microscopic level that your life's most decisive battle was fought.

The head of each of the millions of sperms contained a precious cargo of 24 chromosomes, just as there were 24 in the tiny nucleus of the egg. Each chromosome was composed of jelly-like beads closely strung together. Each bead contained hundreds of genes to which scientists attribute all the factors of your heredity.

The chromosomes in the sperm comprised aft the hereditary material and tendencies contributed by your father and his ancestors; those in the egg-nucleus the inheritable traits of your mother and her ancestors. Your mother and father themselves represented the culmination of over two billion years of victory in the battle to survive. And then one particular sperm ? the fastest, the healthiest, the winner ? united with the waiting egg to form one, tiny living cell.

The life of the most important living person had begun. You had become a champion over the most staggering odds you will ever

have to face. For all practical purpose you had inherited from the vast reservoir of the past all the potential abilities and powers you need to achieve you objectives.

You were born to be a champion, and no matter what obstacles and difficulties lie in your way, they are not one tenth so great as the ones that have already been overcome at the moment of your conception. Victory is built in to every living person. Take the case of Irving Ben Cooper who was one of America's most respected judges. But this was very far from the way young Ben Cooper thought of himself as a young boy.

How a frightened boy developed PMA. Ben grew up in a near-slum neighborhood in St. Joseph, Missouri. His father was an immigrant tailor who earned little money. Many days there simply wasn't enough to eat. To heal their small home, Ben used to take a coal scuttle, and walk down to the railroad tracks that ran nearby. There he would pick up pieces of coal. It embarrassed Ben to have to do it. He'd often try to sneak through the bad streets so children from school wouldn't see him.

But they often did. There was one gang of boys in particular who found great sport in ambushing Ben on his way home from the tracks and beating him up. They would scatter his coal all over the street and send him home with tears streaming from his eyes. Thus it was that Ben lived in a more or less permanent state of fear and self-despising.

Something happened, as it always must when we break the pattern of defeat. The victory within us does not assert itself until we are ready. Ben was inspired to positive action because he read a book. It was Robert Coverdale 's Struggle by Horatio Alger.

In it Ben read the adventures of a youngster like himself who was faced with great odds, but who overcame these odds with the courage and moral strength which Ben wished to possess.

The boy read every one of the Horatio Alger books he could borrow. As he read, he lived the part of the hero. All winter he sat in the cold kitchen reading stories of courage and success, unconsciously absorbing a Positive Mental Attitude.

Some months after he had read his first Horatio Alger book, Ben Cooper was again making a trip down to the railroad tracks. Off in the distance he saw three figures dart behind a building. His first thought was to turn and run. Then he remembered the courage that he had admired in his book heroes, and, instead of turning, his hand gripped the coal scuttle more tightly and he marched straight ahead, as if he were one of the Alger heroes.