people wonder that bad men, wicked men, vicious men are successful in business, at money making, in amassing a fortune, while the good man, the upright man, doesn't seem to be able to make any headway.
They haven't the knack of accumulation in the way of making money. Good things do not seem to come to them. If they make an investment they almost always lose; they buy in the wrong market, or sell in the wrong market.
Now, a man's morals do not have anything specially to do with his money-making faculties, except that honesty is always and everywhere the best business policy. It is just a question of obeying the law of accumulation, the law that like attracts like.
A very bad man may obey the law of accumulation, the law of attraction, and accumulate a vast fortune. If he is honest, his other defects and immoralities, his viciousness, will not hinder the working of the law. The law is unmoral — it is neither moral nor immoral.
Multitudes of people are attracting the wrong things because they do not know the law. They have never learned that the great secret of health, happiness, and success lies in holding the mental attitude which builds, which constructs, the mental attitude which draws to us the good things we desire.
They have never learned the difference between building and tearing down thoughts; the difference between success and failure thoughts; in fact, they do not know that whatever comes to us in life, in our undertakings, great or small, is largely a question of the kind of thoughts we hold in the mind.
We can attract the thing we desire as easily as we can attract the thing we hate and despise and long to get rid of. It is simply a matter of holding the image of the thing in the mind.
That is the model which the life processes will build into our environment and which we will objectify.
Like attracts like, failure more failure, poverty more poverty. Hatred attracts more hatred, envy more envy, jealousy more jealousy, and malice more malice.
Everything has power to attract its kind. The feeling of jealousy or hatred is a seed sown in the great cosmic soil all about us, and the eternal laws return to us a harvest the same in kind. What we sow we reap, just as the soil will return to us exactly what we put into it.
Nothing has the power to reproduce anything but itself.
There is no exception to this law. The law cannot pity or help you if you break a bone, or are injured, any more than the law of electricity can help you when you abuse it. It will kill you if you break the law.
To think about and worry about the things we do not want, or to fear that they will come to us, is but to invite them; because every impression becomes an expression, or tends to become so unless the impression is neutralized by its opposite.
If we think too much about our losses, too much about our possible failure, all these things will tend to bring to us the very thing we are trying to get away from.
On every hand we see this law of like attracting like exemplified in the lives of the poverty-stricken multitudes, who, through ignorance of the law, keep themselves in their unfortunate condition by saturating their minds with the poverty idea; thinking and acting and talking poverty; living in the belief in its permanency; fearing, dreading, and worrying about it.
They do not realize, no one has ever told them, that as long as people mentally see the hunger wolf at the door and the poorhouse ahead of them; as long as they expect nothing but lack and poverty and hard conditions, they are headed toward these things; they are making it impossible for prosperity to come in their direction.
The way to attract prosperity and drive poverty out of the life is to work in harmony with the law instead of against it.
To expect prosperity, to believe with all your heart, no matter how present conditions may seem to contradict, that you are going to become prosperous, that you are already so, is the very first condition of the law of attaining what you desire.
You cannot get it by doubting or fearing. Whatever we visualize and work for we will get.
What we most frequently visualize, what we think most about, is constantly weaving itself into the fabric of our lives, becoming a part of ourselves, increasing the power of our mental magnet to attract those things to us.
It doesn't matter whether they are things we fear and try to avoid or things that are good for us, that we long to get. Keeping them in mind increases our affinity for them and inevitably tends to bring them into our lives.
It is a curious fact that many people seem to think that one must spend years as an apprentice to become an expert in any line of endeavor, in business or in a profession, but that in regard to prosperity it is largely a matter of chance, of fate, something which cannot be affected very much by anything they may be able to do.
They say, "Well, I was not built that way. I am not a natural money-maker, and never can be." Or they excuse themselves on the ground that their parents and those before them were never money-makers, and never did anything more than make a bare living.
There is nothing at all peculiar about prosperity any more than there is about legal efficiency or expertness in law or medicine.
Its realization is purely a matter of concentration and of preparation; a matter of focusing all our powers upon the prosperity law in order to attract prosperity and to make ourselves expert in attaining it.
The law of prosperity, of opulence, is just as definite as the law of gravitation, and it works just as unerringly. Its first principle is mental. Wealth is created mentally first; it is thought out before it becomes a reality.
If you would attract success, keep your mind saturated with the success idea. Develop an attitude of mind that will attract success. When you think success, when you act it, when you live it, when you talk it, when it is in your bearing, then you are attracting it.
When we once get this law of attraction thoroughly fixed in our minds we will be careful about attracting our enemies, contacting with them through our mind, thinking about them, worrying about them, fearing, and dreading them.
We will hold the sort of thoughts that will attract the things we long for and are seeking, not the things we dread, and despise, and are trying to avoid.
It is just as easy to attract what you want as to attract what you don't want. It is just a question of holding the right thought, and making the right effort.
There is no exception to the law of attraction, any more than there is to the law of gravitation, or the laws of mathematics.
Chapter III.
Driving Away Prosperity
As long as you hold the poorhouse thought you are heading toward the poorhouse. A pinched, stingy thought means a pinched, stingy supply.
The man who sows failure thoughts, poverty thoughts, can no more reap success, prosperity harvests, than a farmer can get a wheat crop from sowing thistles.
No matter how hard you may work, if you keep your mind saturated with poverty thoughts, poverty pictures, you are driving away the very thing you are pursuing.
Stop thinking trouble if you want
