Table of Contents
Your mind is an amazing mechanism. When your mind functions in a certain manner, it might propel you ahead to extraordinary accomplishment. However, the same mind acting in a different way might result in complete failure. The mind is the most sensitive and fragile tool in all of creation. Now let’s examine what influences how the mind thinks. Many individuals are concerned about their diets. We spend a huge amount of money on dietary supplements like vitamins and minerals. And we all understand the reason. We’ve discovered via nutritional studies that the body reflects the diet that was fed to it. What we consume has a direct impact on our physical endurance, health-related resistance, body size, and even how long we live.
The body is what the body is fed. Similarly, the mind is what the mind is fed. Mind food, of course, doesn’t come in packages, and you can’t buy it at the store. Mind food is your environment—all the countless things that influence your conscious and subconscious thought. The kind of mind food we consume determines our habits, attitudes, and personality. The mind reflects what its environment feeds it just as surely as the body reflects the food you feed it.
“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
If You Were Born in Another Country
Have you ever wondered what type of person you would be if you had grown up in another country? What kinds of foods would you prefer? Would your preferences for clothing be the same? What sort of entertainment would you like the most? What kind of work would you be doing? And what would your religion be?
You can’t, of course, be sure of the answers to these questions. But chances are you would be a materially different person had you grown up in another country. Why? Because you would have been influenced by a different environment. As the saying goes, you are a product of your environment.
Mark it well. Environment shapes us and makes us think the way we do. Try to name just one habit or one manner you have that you did not pick up from other people. Relatively minor things, like the way we walk, cough, and hold a cup; our preferences for music, literature, entertainment, and clothing—all stem in very large part from the environment. More important, the size of your thinking, your goals, your attitudes, and your very personality are formed by your environment.
Long-term contact with negative people causes us to think negatively, and frequent interaction with small-minded people affects our habits. On the bright side, companionship with people with big ideas raises the level of our thinking; close contact with ambitious people gives us ambition.
Experts agree that the person you are today, your personality, ambitions, and present status in life, are largely the result of your psychological environment. The person you will be one, five, ten, or twenty years from now depends almost entirely on your future environment, the mind food you feed yourself. Let’s look now at what we can do to make our future environment pay off in satisfaction and prosperity.
The Barrier to Your Goals
The number one obstacle on the road to high-level success is the feeling that major accomplishment is beyond reach. This attitude is the result of many, many suppressive forces that direct our thinking toward mediocre levels.
To understand these suppressive forces, let’s go back to the time we were children. As children, all of us set high goals. At a surprisingly young age, we made plans to conquer the unknown, to be leaders, to attain positions of high importance, to do exciting and stimulating things, to become wealthy and famous—in short, to be first, biggest, and best. And in our blessed ignorance, we saw our way clearly to accomplish these goals.
But what happened? Long before we reached the age when we could begin to work toward our great objectives, a multitude of suppressive influences went to work.
From all sides we heard “It’s foolish to be a dreamer” and that our ideas were “impractical, immature, or foolish,” that you have “got to have money to go places,” that “luck determines who gets ahead or you’ve got to have important friends,” or you’re “too old or too young.”
Three Groups of People
As a result of being bombarded with the “you-can’t-get-ahead-so-don’t-bother-to-try” propaganda, most people you know can be classified into three groups:
First group: Those who surrendered completely. The majority of people are convinced deep down inside that they haven’t got what it takes, that real success, real accomplishment, is for others who are lucky or fortunate in some special respect. You can easily spot these people because they go to great lengths to rationalize their status and explain how “happy” they really are.
A very intelligent man, age thirty-two, who has dead-ended himself in a safe but mediocre position, recently spent hours telling me why he was so satisfied with his job. He did a good job of rationalizing, but he was only kidding himself and he knew it. What he really wanted was to work in a challenging situation where he could grow and develop. But that “multitude of suppressive influences” had convinced him that he was inadequate for big things.
Second group: Those who surrendered partially. A second but much smaller group enters adult life with considerable hope for success. These people prepare themselves. They work. They plan. But, after a decade or so, resistance begins to build up, and competition for top-level jobs looks tough. This group then decides that greater success is not worth the effort.
They rationalize, “We’re earning more than the average and we live better than the average. Why should we knock ourselves out?”
Actually, this group has developed a set of fears: fear of failure, fear of social disapproval, fear of insecurity, and fear of losing what they already have. These people aren’t satisfied because deep down they know they have surrendered. This group includes many talented, intelligent people who elect to crawl through life because they are afraid to stand up and run.
Third group: Those who never surrender. This group, maybe 2 or 3 percent of the total, doesn’t let pessimism dictate, doesn’t believe in surrendering to suppressive forces, and doesn’t believe in crawling. Instead, these people live and breathe success. This group is the happiest because it accomplishes the most. These people become top salesmen, top executives, top leaders, and top businessmen in their respective fields. These people find life stimulating, rewarding, and worthwhile. And these people look forward to each new day, each new encounter with other people, as adventures to be lived fully.
Recondition Yourself for Success
Let’s be honest. All of us would like to be in the third group, the one that finds greater success each year, the one that does things and gets results. To get—and stay—in this group, however, we must fight off the suppressive influences of our environment. To understand how persons in the first and second groups will unconsciously try to hold you back, study this example:
Suppose you tell several of your “average” friends, with the greatest sincerity: “Someday I’m going to be vice president of this company.”
What will happen? Your friends will probably think you are joking. And if they should believe you mean it, chances are they will say, “You poor guy, you sure have a lot to learn.” Behind your back, they may even question whether you have all your marbles.
Now, assume you repeat the same statement with equal sincerity to the president of your company. How will he react? One thing is certain: he will not laugh. He will look at you intently and ask himself:
“Does this fellow really mean this?”
But he will not, I repeat, laugh. Because big men do not laugh at big ideas.
Or suppose you tell some average people you plan to own an expensive home, and they may laugh at you because they think it’s impossible. But tell your plan to a person already living in an expensive home, and he won’t be surprised. He knows it isn’t impossible, because he’s already done it.
Remember!
People who tell you it cannot be done almost always are unsuccessful people, are strictly average or mediocre at best in terms of accomplishment. The opinions of these people can be poison.
Develop a defense against people who want to convince you that you can’t do it. Accept negative advice only as a challenge to prove that you can do it. Be extra, extra cautious about this: don’t let negative-thinking people—”negators”—destroy your plan to think yourself to success. Negators are everywhere, and they seem to delight in disrupting the positive progress of others. (Excerpt from ‘The Magic of Thinking Big’ by David J. Schwartz.)
