Napoleon Hill and Wallace Wattles

Napoleon Hill ends the author’s preface of Think and Grow Rich with the idea above.  Why?

Wallace Wattles in Chapter 11 of  The Science of Getting Rich says:

“By thought, the thing you want is brought to you; by action you receive it.”

If you read Think and Grow Rich you will find a system of cultivating the idea until it becomes a white hot desire and you begin to act on it.

If you read The Science of Getting Rich, likewise you will find techniques to enhance your desire for the idea until you begin to act on it.

What do you do or don’t do with your idea is what causes most people to fail.  How do you nourish the idea and make it come alive, how do you get it to bring the results you want into your life?

Along the way, the desire creates an awareness of things around you that are related to the idea.  This will be things you see, ideas you notice, and other manifestations.  The bottom line is you are noticing and attracting this information.  If you don’t discount it, if you respect your own thoughts and desires – then you will automatically begin to act on it to produce a result.

Unless you are sleepwalking through life you will begin to compare what you are seeing with your new sensitivity to where you are and where you want to go.  This will cause other ideas and other observations and you must pick and choose your way through to your goal.  Some of the ideas will tell you to give up, maybe they’ll tell you to go to the casino and bet your capital – these are the weeds that you must root out of your thinking.  The other ideas, the ones congruent with your desire you continue to cultivate.

So how do you weed out an idea and how do you cultivate one?

Ideas that you want to keep and cultivate you need to write down and review.  Then begin to weave them into your vision, see how they fit in to the direction you want to go and continue with them.  Notice that if they are good ideas but are not with your desired end you should just write them down for possible use later.

Ideas that you don’t want, thoughts such as: “this is a waste of time” you must cast down.  The best way I have found to do this is to just replace them with another thought.  This is a place where some quotes you may know will be useful.

When you find a counter-productive thought replace it.   The thought response to “this is not good enough” might be “I’d rather see a crooked furrow than an un-plowed field.”  After all if this is some new thing you are doing you are not out of the box going to be doing it as well as those who have been in the field for years.  The important thing is to begin, to get something going.

The often given example of if your young child tries to walk for the first time and falls down do you declare, “he’ll never walk” and then buy him a wheel chair.  No, you cheer his effort, you encourage him, and help him whenever he wants to try.  So he tries more and everyday he gets better and better.  It will be the same with you and the thing you are trying to do.

“I’d rather see a crooked furrow than a field un-plowed” -  I’d rather see my child try to walk than just crawl around for his whole life.

Trying leads to the first unstable steps and those lead to walking across from mommy to daddy which leads to running around the house and having the fun of great motion never before possible for that child – and his world opens a little more.

Your trying leads to successful action and the new things you can see from this new range of motion that you have achieved and your world opens a little more.

Your issue in getting to your desired end comes with being shut down by your thoughts.  The same mind that thought the thoughts to get you going can shut you down unless you are cultivating your thoughts all the time.

Norman Vincent Peale

Norman Vincent Peale in “The Power of Positive Thinking” goes deeply into the idea of cultivating your thoughts.  Putting good thoughts in and replacing the dis-empowering thoughts with good ones.  Many may have passed up Peale’s books because of their religious roots.  This is a mistake.  Peale teaches when the bad thoughts come replace with a thought you have ready.  Discouraging thoughts can be replace with: “I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.”  A Bible quote and if you are a believer a good one to use.  If you are not a believer then find something to encourage you that you can substitute.  Peale himself says that the ideas that he presents in his books will work for Christians and non-Christians alike.  It is The Power of Positive Thinking.

If we cultivate our thoughts this way we can have a huge success crop.  If we fail to do that we just may find ourselves gleaning the left overs in another mans field.

Peale also has a book about visualization, Positive Imaging, which is a gem.  Like Hill and Wattles, Peale teaches you to see your desired results without shooting it down with negative thoughts.  See the vision and cultivate the thoughts it generates.  Then become inspired to action because you will receive actionable ideas.

And so it goes, these are timeless mental technologies that will work for you.  The thing is recognize where your thoughts are coming from and pick the ones with your desired outcome.  Cultivate the thoughts that come with the visions and begin to take action.  Each action will raise you a little higher and you will see a little farther.

See your vision as if it is here now.  Feel the feelings that you will feel when it is real.  Cultivate your thoughts – think the thoughts that serve you.  This will help keep the desire hot until by your actions you receive it.

Other Wealth Building Resources

Learn to internalize the mindset, learn to create the visions and make them plain so you can take the action you need to bring the results  into your life: discover The Science of Getting Rich.

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“The more you think about this law, the deeper you will see it goes. It literally hands you a blank check, signed by the Maker of Universal Law, and leaves you to fill in the amount—and the kind—of payment you want!” –Robert Collier

This morning I read a post on the Zen Habits blog (btw, a great blog) about the law of attraction: Why the Law of Attraction is Wrong, But Why It Still Works. The bottom line of the post is that the steps that the law of attraction spells out work but the law itself is wrong. If you state what you want, keep it in mind, and take action it works but, he says, the law of attraction is wrong. Well, OK.

But… those steps are the law of attraction plain and simple, no more, no less.

What the author is really taking issue with is all of the theory’s that have grown up around the law as to what is causing it to work – not the law. Confusion of the theory with the law. Let me say this: had confusion of the theory of electricity occurred with the electric light then maybe you would be sitting in the dark just as many who are trying to use the law of attraction may be. More on this later.

The big theory at the moment involves quantum physics and our thoughts actually affecting matter. And I say: “Interesting I like the idea of the theory, but who really knows?” Ultimately does it matter about a theory? The rules work, that is the law works so we use it.

Wallace Wattles in 1910 wrote The Science of Getting Rich. The book details the law of attraction, doesn’t even call it the law of attraction and yet every word tells you exactly what you should be doing to bring important changes to your life by attracting the things you want in.

How can you ever have something other than what everyone else has if you don’t know what it is? So you visualize it, you turn it round in your minds eye and begin to think about exactly how you want it. As you go through your day you allow the idea into mind to encourage you on but obviously you are working and you need your prime focus on the activities at hand.

These first steps will begin to activate subconscious thinking and according to Wattles and most LOA writers actually cause it’s formation (it doesn’t matter what you believe is causing the formation). The third part is the kicker. Ideas will begin to enter your consciousness about how to go about getting your thing — as you get them take action. That is what Wattles describes, those are the core ideas of the law of attraction, that is the law of attraction and every other writer has said so.

The problem is we fill up the pages with all sorts of reasons why things are the way they are to help others relate. It can distract from the main idea.

Here is the same thing again: a girl sees boy she likes and thinks about him. She has the vision and her mind begins to work, perhaps she gets ideas from friends on how to get him, maybe she reads a book, but her mind automatically starts gathering ideas…it’s how we humans work. She gets the idea that she should make her self as pretty as she can and begin to talk to him. So she primps, begins to smile at him, and says hi.

And there it is: vision, the action ideas come, action taken. If she doesn’t get that boy, another boy will find her because she is more attractive and it stemmed from the vision.

The law of attraction is basic, simple, we use it intuitively and yet we miss it for the big areas of our lives because so much crap gets in the way of our clear thinking and belief .

Break it down for yourself very simply and begin to believe. If a particular theory helps you believe then that theory is great, I consider theories more like analogy’s they help me understand but may or may not be the truth.

Merriam-Webster says that a theory is: a hypothesis assumed for the sake of argument or investigation b: an unproved assumption : conjecture c: a body of theorems presenting a concise systematic view of a subject.

So enjoy the discussion but don’t be put off anything by the theory behind it. Theories are just tools.

My background is in electronics. Electronics is built on theory and when I started learning – I had the worst trouble because all of the discussions of how circuits worked involved these long discussions of the theory behind it, very confusing. Later I learned to set the theory aside and just note what happens – do this and get this effect. When you apply voltage to a light bulb it comes on*. Do I really care about electrons (invisible particles that flow through solid matter) and the atomic theory of conductors and insulators? No, just give me cause and effect and maybe I’ll come back for the other stuff later. So it is with the law of attraction, just use it.

The steps that Wattles discussed, that Rhonda Byrne put into The Secret, that Ester Hicks channels with Abraham and reveals… All of these boil down to vision, idea formation, action. Just get it. Set the theory aside, set the part about getting a boost from the universe aside if you want … This stuff is part of you … it works … just get it, just use it.

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*Even Thomas Edison had things wrong about the most basic laws of electricity, he said current flowed from the positive terminal of a battery and through the circuit to the negative terminal. Now, “We Know,” (wink, wink) that the invisible electron current flow really goes from the negative terminal to the positive. Even if this is true, does it really matter to most people? It didn’t matter to Edison and he was the most successful inventor of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Do you think Edison practiced the law of attraction? Just read Think And Grow Rich.

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