Recently I have been thinking about the things we think about and how powerful our mind is vital when we are feeling good and when we are feeling low. Otherwise the hour of adversity, poverty or defeat. The other is in the hour of success, when a person begins to feel superior to others because of his material possessions.
At the first danger point, it may be helpful to remember that it seems to be the nature of people to withhold assistance from those who need it most. When you are on the way up, struggling to gain recognition in your chosen field of service, you often feel that no one wishes to give you a helping hand. But once you arrive, everyone wishes to do something to help you - when you don't need it!
"For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." (Matthew 25:29.)
This strange paradox reflects the nature of the law of harmonious attraction through which like attracts like--success brings more success, failure more failure. Whatever you accept from life, good or bad, will surely become a part of you.
Which is only another way of saying that the pictures you form in your imagination, the mental attitude you allow to dominate your mind, translate themselves into their material equivalent through every means that may be available.
Successful people safeguard their mental attitude so carefully that they do not accept from life anything they do not desire. They may meet with unpleasant circumstances which lead to temporary defeat, but they accept these only as temporary means of inspiration to greater effort.
The successful person has learned that "whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe the mind of man can achieve." And this person keeps on keeping on until he converts his stumbling blocks into stepping stones. He knows that with every adversity comes the seed of an equivalent benefit.
At the second danger point it may be helpful to remember that riches of the purse, without the softening influence of gratitude, may become more of a curse than a blessing.
"Remove far from me vanity and lies; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me. Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in Vain." (Proverbs 30:8-9.)
Of the two danger points, the second is by far the most treacherous. Most men can manage somehow to live with poverty, defeat and failure. But few men ever learn how to live graciously with success and overabundance of material riches.
Nearly everyone fears poverty and shuns it as best he can unless he learns that poverty can become a great and powerful incentive for personal achievement.
It should be encouraging to the poverty-stricken to remember that most of those whom the world has recognized as truly great, began in poverty, mastered it and converted it into inspiration for personal initiative.
Out of Thomas A. Edison's poverty came the greatest inventor of all times.
Out of Charles Dickens' poverty came masterpieces of literature that have enriched the world.
Out of Abraham Lincoln's poverty came what most Americans believe to have been our greatest president.
Somewhere, between the extremes of too much and too little, there is a safety point at which one may find peace of mind and a labor of love that will provide the necessities of life.
All my experience and observations of others have proved to me that this desirable half-way point is attained by those who extend the space they occupy in the hearts of others by rendering more service and better service than is expected of them.
This habit of "going the extra mile" is the one sure way by which poverty may be converted into riches, failure into success. And it is the one method which has no unpleasant repercussions.
Lastly, it may be helpful if the person who has accumulated great material riches would learn to express to the proper source, his gratitude for his good fortune, through this daily habit:
"O, Infinite Intelligence, I ask not for more riches, but for more wisdom with which to make better use of the riches I already possess in the exclusive privilege of directing my own mind to ends of my own choice."
Remember to watch what you think
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