just barely making a living; no money in it; I wish I could sell out; I made a great mistake in going into this line of business; I would have been a great deal better off on salary.” This man has formed such a habit of talking his business down that even when business is good, he still calls it poor. He radiates a discouraging atmosphere, he flings out discouraging suggestions, and makes you feel tired and disgusted that a young man of such promise and such possibilities should so drown his prospects and strangle his ambition.
This habit is especially unfortunate in an employer, because it is contagious; it destroys the confidence of the employees in him and in the business. People do not like to work for a pessimist. They thrive in a cheerful, optimistic atmosphere, and will do more and better work there than in one of discouragement and depression. The man who talks his business down cannot possibly do so well as the man who talks his business up. The habit of talking everything down sets the mind toward the negative side, the destructive side, instead of toward the positive and creative, and is fatal to achievement. It creates a discordant environment. No man can live upward when he is talking downward.
The imagination, wrongly used, is one of our worst foes. I know people who live in perpetual unhappiness and discomfort because they imagine they are being abused, slighted, neglected, and talked about. They think themselves the target for all sorts of evils, the object of envy, jealousy, and all kinds of ill will. The fact is, most such ideas are delusions and have no reality whatever.
Now this is a most unfortunate state of mind to get into. It kills happiness, it demoralizes usefulness, it throws the mind out of harmony, and life itself becomes unsatisfactory.
People who think such thoughts make themselves perpetually wretched by surrounding themselves with an atmosphere reeking with pessimism. They always wear black glasses, which make everything around them seem draped in mourning; they see nothing but black. All the music of their lives is set to the minor key; there is nothing cheerful or bright in their world.
These people have talked poverty, failure, hard luck, fate, and hard times so long that their entire being is imbued with pessimism. The cheerful qualities of the mind have atrophied from neglect and disuse, while their pessimistic tendencies have been so overdeveloped that their minds cannot regain a normal, healthy, cheerful balance.
These people carry a gloomy, disagreeable, uncomfortable influence with them wherever they go. Nobody likes to converse with them, because they are always telling their stories of hard luck and misfortune. With them, times are always hard, money scarce, and society “going to the bad.” After a while they become pessimistic cranks, with morbid minds, really partially unbalanced, and people avoid them as they would miasmatic swamps, full of chills and fever.
Sometimes a whole household becomes infected by the presence of one morose, discontented member, and its peace is ruined. Such a contrary person is always out of harmony with his environment, has no pleasure himself, and, as far as he is able, prevents others from having any. Such states of mind not only induce disease, but also prevent benefit from ordinary curative processes. George C. Tenney, from experience in a sanatorium, writes:
“To help a person who is at ‘outs’ with everything and everybody is like trying to save a drowning man who is determined to drown. Some people spend most of their time in hunting themselves over for some new ailment, and when they have found it they are the most happy that they ever are. Immediately they hang it about their necks, where it becomes an additional millstone to drag them down. Nothing does so much to obstruct the work of restoring normal conditions as for the individual to wage continual war with his situation and surroundings. Giving medicine or treatment to a person whose mind is in the turmoil of discontent is like pouring water into heated oil. Irritation and disturbance is the consequence. Healing is the work of divine power, and in the use of divinely appointed means for the recovery of health it is as necessary to be in harmony with the application of those means as though the Divine Master were himself applying the means. A good and wise Providence is seeking to work out for us a noble end; and contentment means being in harmony with the work that is being done for us, whether that work be agreeable to our feelings or not.”
“It matters not what may be the cause of the trouble in the anxious mind,” says Dr. A. J. Sanderson, “the results upon the body are the same. Every function is weakened, and under the continual influence of a depressed state of mind, they degenerate. Especially is this true if any organ of the body is handicapped by weakness from any other cause. The combination of the two influences will soon lead to actual disease.
“The greatest barrier in the way of the healing process, especially if the malady be one that is accompanied by severe pain, is the mental depression that is associated with it and often becomes a factor of the disease. It stands in the way of recovery sometimes more than do the physical causes, and obliterates from the consciousness of the individual the wonderful healing power of nature, so essential to recovery.”
A most injurious and unpleasant way of looking for trouble is fault-finding, continual criticism of other persons. Some people are never generous, never magnanimous toward others. They are stingy of their praise, showing always an unhealthy parsimony in their recognition of merit in others, and critical of their every act
Don’t go through life looking for trouble, for faults, for failures, for the crooked, the ugly, and the deformed; don't see the distorted man—see the man that God made. Just make up your mind firmly at the very outset in life that you will not criticise or condemn others, or find fault with their mistakes and shortcomings. Fault-finding, indulging in sarcasm and irony, picking flaws in everything and everybody, looking for things to condemn instead of to praise, is a very dangerous habit to oneself. It is like a deadly worm which gnaws at the heart of the rosebud or fruit, and will make your own life gnarled, distorted, and bitter.
No life can be harmonious and happy after this blighting habit is once formed. Those who always look for something to condemn ruin their own characters and destroy their normal integrity.
We all like sunshiny, bright, cheerful, hopeful people; nobody likes the grumbler, the fault-finder, the backbiter, the slanderer. The world likes Emerson, not Nordau; likes the man who sees longevity in his cause and good in the future, who believes the best and not the worst of people. Idle gossipers, serpent tongues, people who give vent to their tempers, get only momentary satisfaction, and ever afterward they are tormented by their own ugly natures and then wonder why another person enjoys his life and they do not enjoy theirs.
It is just as easy to go through life looking for the good and the beautiful, instead of the ugly; for the noble instead of the ignoble; for the bright and cheerful instead of the dark and gloomy; the hopeful instead of the despairing; to see the bright side instead of the dark side. To set your face always toward the sunlight is just as easy as to see always the shadows, and it makes all the difference in your character between content and discontent, between happiness and misery, and in your life, between prosperity and adversity, between success and failure.
Learn to look for the light, then. Positively refuse to harbor shadows and blots, and the deformed, the disfigured, the discordant. Hold to those things that give pleasure, that are helpful and inspiring, and you will change your whole way of looking at things, will transform your character in a very short time.
A great many people think they would be happy if they were only in different circumstances, when the fact is that circumstances have little, if anything, to do with one’s temperament or disposition to enjoy the world.
I know people who have lost their best friends, who have all their lives been apparently unfortunate, have struggled against odds and have themselves been invalids, and yet they have borne up bravely through it all, and have been cheerful, hopeful, inspiring to all who knew them.
You who are always unhappy, who are always grumbling about your circumstances, hard luck, and poverty, must remember
