by Napoleon Hill
Available in 122 free installments
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achieve them. Have you thought about the high goals you would like to achieve?
2. Imprint the 17 success principles indelibly in your memory. Have you memorized them?
3. Do you tend to "blame the world"? If you do, memorize the self-motivator: If the man is right, his world will be right. Is your immediate world right?
4. You were born to be a champion. For all practical purposes, you have inherited from the vast reservoir of the past all the potential abilities and powers you need to achieve your objectives. Are you willing to pay the price to develop your abilities and use the powers within you?
5. Identify yourself with a successful image, as Irving Ben Cooper did. Who will you select?
6. Ask yourself an important question: What will your picture say to you? Listen for the answer.
7. Definiteness of purpose with PMA is the starting point of all worthwhile achievement. Have you selected some definite, specific, desirable goal? Will you keep it in mind daily?
8. When you determine your definite aims, there is a tendency for several additional success principles to begin to operate automatically to help you achieve them.
9. Everyone has many talents for surmounting his special problems. What special talents do you think you have that you can develop?
10. Here is a formula that has helped many to change their world: What the mind of man can conceive and believe the mind of man can achieve with PMA. Have you memorized this formula?
A POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE AND
DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE IS THE
STARTING POINT TOWARD ALL
WORTHWHILE ACHIEVEMENT!
CHAPTER 3 Clear the Cobwebs from Your Thinking
You are what you think. But what do you think? How orderly are your thought processes? How straight is your thinking?
And how clean are your thoughts?
There are certain mental cobwebs that clutter up the thinking of almost everyone, even the most brilliant minds. Negative: feelings, emotions, passions ? habits, beliefs and prejudices. Our thoughts become entangled in these webs.
Sometimes we have undesirable habits and we want to correct them. And there are times when we are strongly tempted to do wrong. Then, like an insect caught in a spider's web, we struggle to get free. Our conscious will is in conflict with our imagination and the will of our subconscious mind. The more we struggle, the more we become entrapped.
Some persons give up and experience the mental conflicts of a living hell. Others learn how to tap and use the powers of the subconscious through the conscious mind. They are victorious. And success through a positive mental attitude teaches you how to tap and use these powers.
An insect may not be able to avoid being caught in the spider's web. And when once trapped, it is unable to free itself. There is one thing, however, over which each person has absolute, inherent control, and that is his mental attitude. We can avoid mental cobwebs. We can clear them. And we can sweep them away as they begin to develop. We can free ourselves when once enmeshed. And we can remain free.
You do this by accurate thinking with PMA. Accurate thinking is one of the 17 success principles revealed in Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.
To think accurately you must use reason. The science of reasoning or accurate thinking is called logic. One can learn it from books written specifically on this subject, such as: The Art of Clear Thinking, by Rudolf Flesch; Your Most Enchanted Listener, by Wendell Johnson; Introduction to Logic, by Irving Copi; and The Art of Straight Thinking, by Edwin Leavitt Clarke. These books can be of immense practical help.
But we don't act from reason alone. And action based on common sense is the result of more than just reason. It depends upon habits of thought and action, intuitions, experiences and other influences such as tendencies and environment.
One of the cobwebs of our thinking is to assume that we act from reason alone when in reality every conscious act is the result of doing what we want to do. We make decisions. There is a tendency, when reasoning, to draw conclusions favorable to the strong inner urges of our subconscious mind. And this tendency exists in everyone ? even the great thinkers and philosophers.
