him, and neutralizes all of his endeavor.
Constructive thought abandons the man who is always thinking destructively, and using destructive language, for he has nothing kindred with the positive, nothing to attract it. The creative principles cannot live in a negative, destructive atmosphere, and no signal achievement can take place there. So negative people are always on the down grade, always turning out failures. They lose the power of affirmation, and drift, unable to get ahead.
Negatives will paralyze your ambition, my young friend, if you indulge in them. They will poison your life. They will rob you of power. They will kill your self-confidence until you are a victim of your situation instead of a master of it. The power to do is largely a question of self-faith, self-confidence. No matter what you undertake, you will never do it until you think you can. You will never master it until you first feel the mastery and do the deed in your mind. It must be thought out or it can never be wrought out. It must be a mind accomplishment before it can be a material one.
There is no science in the world which will bring a thing to you while your thought repels it, while doubt and suspicion linger in the mind. No man can pass his self-imposed bounds or limitations. The man who would get up in the world must learn to deny his belief in limitation. He must throw all negative suggestions to the wind. He must think success before he can achieve it. He must affirm continually with decision and vigor that which he wishes to accomplish or be.
Suppose a boy some morning should say, “I can't get up, I can't get up; what’s the use of trying?” It is perfectly sure that he never could get out of bed until he thought he could, until he had confidence in his ability to get up.
How can a boy expect to rise in the world when he is all the time saying to himself: “I can't do this thing. It is useless to try, I know I can't do it. Other boys may do it, but I know I can't." The boy who thinks he can’t get his lessons, who decides that he can't solve his problems, who is sure he can't go through college, can never do any of these things. Very soon he becomes the victim of chronic “can't” Negation has mastered him. “I can't” has become the habit of his life. All self-respect and self-confidence, all consciousness of ability, have been undermined and destroyed. His achievement cannot rise higher than his thoughts.
Contrast this with the boy who always says, “I will.” No matter what obstacles confront him, he says, “I will do the thing I have undertaken.” It is the constant affirmation of his determination to do the thing which increases his confidence in himself, and the power to do the thing, until he actually does it.
It would be impossible for a lawyer to make a reputation in his profession while continually thinking about medicine or engineering. He must think about law, he must study and become thoroughly imbued with its principles. It is absolutely unscientific to expect to attain excellence or ability enough to gain distinction in any particular line while holding the mind open and continually contemplating something radically different. Is it not, therefore, more than foolish, even ridiculous, to expect to develop a strong, vigorous mentality, while acknowledging or contemplating weakness or deficiency?
As long as you contemplate any personal defect—mental, moral, or physical—you will fall below your possible attainment; you cannot approach your ideal, your standard.
As long as you allow negative, destructive, tearing-down processes to exist in your mind, you cannot create anything, and you will be a weakling.
Most people go through life crippled and handicapped by thinking weak thoughts, diseased thoughts, failure thoughts. It would be just as sensible for a girl to try to develop the highest type of beauty of physique and character by holding in her mind the ugliest ideals and thinking of herself as hideous. If she wishes to be beautiful, she must hold steadily the beauty ideal in her mind and try to measure up to it; then not only the physical but also the moral nature responds to this effort to attain the aesthetic ideal; but if she goes through life thinking she is ugly and deformed, and lamenting the fact, beauty will never respond.
What a misfortune to see bright young men or young women hampered and kept back in their careers because of holding the sickly ideal, the confession of weakness and defect. Banish these ghosts, these unrealities, these enemies of your success and happiness, forever from your mind. Rise up out of the valley of despair and despondency, out of the miasma which has poisoned the air around you, out of the foulness which has suffocated you all these years, into the atmosphere of excellence, of power, of beauty; then you will begin to accomplish something in life, to be somebody.
If people could only once realize the demoralizing influence of holding the sickly ideal, the failure ideal, in the mind until the standards of excellence are all dragged down to the level of mediocrity or commonness, they would never again be content to dwell in the valley of failure, to live in the basements of their lives.
How can a man be free, prosperous, and happy while he is imprisoned and enslaved by the poverty thought, the conviction that he is poor and unlucky, and that he can never accumulate money as others do?
In what condition is a man to fight for prosperity when he has lost confidence in his ability, and is convinced that opportunity is for others and not for him? He cannot make a strenuous, energetic effort to release himself from this condition while he holds this failure thought. He does not believe he can push away the limitations which hedge him in. He sees no way to regain his confidence and self-trust, to get a foothold. So he still thinks poverty, talks poverty, acts poverty, dreams poverty, and then wonders why he is unlucky.
He has made himself a negative magnet, he repels all the success qualities, and attracts only those of failure. He has lost his magnetic power to attract the forces which can extricate him from sickly, deadly environment.
How many people drag through weary years of self-imposed invalidism. They can never rise into the health atmosphere while they are contemplating the sickly ideal in the mind. Deep-rooted convictions of disease actually produce their physical counterparts.
The conviction, for example, that you have inherited the seeds of some terrible disease, such as cancer, and the fact that your physician has told you it is liable to show itself soon after the age of forty, keep you expectantly looking for the symptoms of this disease, and may develop an ordinary sore into an ulcer.
A young girl, delicate, sensitive to cold, has been told from her early childhood that she must exercise the greatest possible care because she has surely inherited a consumptive tendency from her mother, who died of consumption. This black picture of consumption and its fearful ravages in the system stamps itself indelibly upon the young life, and prevents healthful, buoyant growth or prompt physical reaction.
Dwelling upon these conditions ruins the appetite, disturbs digestion, cuts off the assimilation of food, until emaciation sets in as a result, and, as if this were not enough to discourage and dishearten the victim, everybody has to tell her how bad she looks, how she is growing thinner and thinner every day. Very often they say: “Now be careful, you know your mother went just by taking cold, by exposure to a draught.” They stuff her with cod-liver oil and tonics, but these are sorry compensations for the resisting power of the mind, of which they have cruelly robbed her; a poor substitute for the God-given power of self-protection, granted to every human being. They have disturbed the child's beautiful natural feeling that it is protected by the Almighty arm, that it is made in God's image, and hence God-defended, and that nothing can injure its reality. Many a beautiful life has been stifled by such inculcated fears and depressing influences.
What a pitiable sight to see a large proportion of the human race dogged through life by such hideous pictures, dragging this terrible load of expectation of being run down, overcome, crushed by some cruel fate, attacked by some awful disease, the consequences of the sins of our ancestors. This would be like sending a boy to prison or to the gallows because his father committed robbery
