purpose of this book, therefore, is to help you understand this values or principles and how you can immediately apply them to your own life for a triumphant change and advancement in your life.
In fact this book is fundamentally aimed at pulling you, the reader, out of any shackles of limitation, fear, and despair facing you right now. In your journey through this book, you will uncover twelve profound laws on how to provoke success in any area of your life.
I wrote this book out of my dissatisfaction on how poorly individuals perform in life without realizing and utilizing the powers, potentials, skills, and ideals given to them by God. Oftentimes these problems are caused by what I call self-limiting beliefs, a mind-set of unworthiness, fear, low self-esteem, etc. This book is a wake-up call to the twenty-first-century youth that there is more to their life than they are currently expressing.
By the inspiration given to me by God seven years ago, today I am confident to assure you that if you will sincerely and thoughtfully read this book, you will see self-achieving, greater results with less effort, and this will ultimately lead you to experiencing a more positive and productive life. The Bible recorded in the Book of Hosea (4:6), “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher in the seventeenth century, opined that knowledge is power. This book, therefore, will be, to the reader, an invaluable source of uncommon knowledge on how to leave and prosper mostly in this time of high competition and rapid change. Hence the more you align your life to the principles and values that you will discover in the pages of this book, the more happiness and success you will begin to experience.
And you will ultimately come to the realization that there is no limit to what you can achieve in life. Your heavenly Father has wired you with unlimited potentials and greatness, so welcome on board as I take you on a step-by-step approach on how you can start unleashing every greatness that is within you, not minding how life has treated you in the past or how many times you have failed. I believe that if you can look up, you can stand up. Say yes to life.
Principle One
Picture, Venture, and Capture (PVC)
Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
—Napoleon Hill
The questions what do I really want in life, who do I want to be, what on earth am here to accomplish, why was I born at a particular time like this, etc. are some of the most fundamental questions that has been asked by some of the greatest philosophers and scientist over the years. Which has led to many theories and discoveries that has continually advance the course of humanity and will continue to be the guiding light to future inventions and discoveries. That is why I believe that problem and challenges are very vital in the prosperity of humankind. What this means is that we cannot have a problem-free life, we are either running toward something or something is running toward us.
Therefore facing and overcoming your challenges on a daily basis is a proof that you are still worthy to be here. Hence anyone who will tell you that he has never experience pain or failure in their life, may have not really tried anything worthwhile in his or her life before. So the problem of humanity is never going to be exhaustive, it is a continual working process. This book, however, is a way to give or recommend some proven principles on how to thrive successfully through this challenges and limitations on a one-at-a-time basis. In other words while the search for how, what, when, and the why of human problems possess a limitation to the progress of humankind, it is also a necessary ingredient in the advancement of ideas and imaginations that will lead to more and more simplified ways on how to solve future challenges that lies ahead. It is never exhaustive.
Hence on this chapter, we will be looking at the concept of PVC, which simply means picture, venture, and capture, as one the key ways to give answers to this dilemma. Firstly, what is a picture? I simply define a picture as a visual representation of an object past, present, or future. In other words, it matters what kind of mental representation you have in your mind, that is negative or positive. All worthwhile achievement begins from your mental representations of things whether past, present, or future. That is why the Bible teaches in the Book of Romans 12:2 saying, “Be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind.” This means an active participation in changing your thoughts and mental representation of things in your heart. In other words, fill your heart with positive thoughts because whatever you see in your heart is what you will eventually have in material reality. One of my favorite English quotes says, “If you can change a man’s thought pattern, you have unconsciously change his entire approach to life” (Anonymous).
So many of us are stuck and stagnated in life not because of our location, past experiences, or economic policies of the government of our countries but because of our mental representation of what is possible for us. We have limited ourselves with what I may call self-impose limitation, a feeling of unworthiness, negative presuppositions, and lack of courage to venture into our dreams.
I write this book to submit to you that you have greatness within you. There is literally nothing you cannot accomplish if you put your potentials, energy, and focus on it, but you must begin to develop and create the right mental picture for your preferable future. I may not know the level of your challenges or uncertainties that you are facing right now in your life, but one thing I’m certain about is that you can stop focusing your mind on what is wrong and who is wrong and start looking ahead with a positive mind-set coupled with taking courageous decisions toward your objectives with the help of the supreme being who is the creator of the universe, God.
You will begin to accomplish more with less effort, and soon your lost happiness will be restored. Time and time again we fail in life because we make poor evaluation of the challenges that we face on daily basis. In other words, poor evaluation leads to a poor life, thoughtful and proper evaluation leads to a rich life; learn to look at any challenge facing you right now with a possibility mind-set because if you can see beyond it, you can leave above it. It all starts in your mind; a positive mental state of mind is the beginning of all worthwhile achievements.
You have to wake up every morning with the mind-set of positivity, say to yourself that it’s possible. Rephrase words like, it’s possible that I can leave my dreams, it’s possible that I can start my own business, it’s possible that I can get to the top of my field, and before long your heart will be obsessed with the positive vibes required to pull you beyond limits. It was Napoleon Hill that said, “There are no limitations to the mind except those that we acknowledge.”
Now here is my point. Begin to develop the mental pictures of what you want to be, do, have, and accomplish in the years to come because if you can picture it and venture in to it, you will capture it. Put in another way, conceive it, believe it, and you will accomplish it. It makes no difference how big or impossible your dreams and objective are, it depends in your ability to believe in yourself. The fact is that you are smarter, more powerful, and intelligent than you are currently expressing right now. All you need to do is to push beyond limits, step out of your comfort zone.
It was William J. H. Boetcker, who said, “You can succeed if nobody else believes it, but you will never succeed if you don’t believe in yourself.” All worthwhile achievements spring up from self-belief, a belief that I can make it happen for me. We live in a very fast-paced and competitive world. There are a lot of discoveries and inventions coming up. The world as we have it today has become a global village, people are learning and developing new skills in order to remain relevant in their various field of endeavors.
If we must, therefore, compete favorably with our peers today, we must consciously begin to develop some kind of attitude, goals, visions, and the needed courage required to venture in to the pictures in our heart. The term picture, venture, and capture (PVC) was a concept I developed so
