All history shows that while experience increases wisdom, it does not always increase faith. The inexperienced youth will often undertake things which stagger the older and more experienced. Confidence is characteristic of youth; but after a few setbacks and disappointments, many begin to wonder whether, after all, their first confidence was based upon good judgment, whether their enthusiasm and faith were not the result of lack of experience, and then they begin to doubt and to fear that this voice of ambition which is ever beckoning them on and upward is not reliable. They say to themselves: "What if this should be merely a mirage to lure me on the rocks," and before they realize it they are weaving doubts and fears and over-caution into a habit that has ruined mult.i.tudes of careers, a habit that is responsible for a larger percentage of unused ability, of locked-up powers than any other one thing.
Have _you_ done the biggest thing you are capable of doing? Is it not possible that there is something within you, some unworked mental territory which, if cultivated, would lead you out into that wider field you dreamed of when a youth? Why do you go on year after year in the same old rut, expressing nothing, doing the same old thing in the same old way because doubt whispers it would be rash to try new ways, new ideas? How long have you been just an ordinary employee? Do you realize that habit is getting a tremendous grip upon you, and that before you realize it you may be a "perpetual clerk"?
The longer you remain in one position, doing the same thing without promotion, the stronger the inertia habit will grip you, the bigger will grow your doubt as to the wisdom of making a change. It is a dangerous thing to get into a rut. Bestir yourself before it is too late and begin to put into operation that plan which has so long haunted you, but which doubt has been telling you is not feasible, is not practicable.
If every human being to-day were doing what he has at least some time thoroughly believed he could do our whole civilization would be revolutionized. What has been accomplished is but a t.i.the of what might have been accomplished if every one had been true to his vision, had not allowed it to be blotted out by doubt. If I believed in a real devil I think it would be that unseen monitor, that mysterious something within us which whispers doubt, which tells us to hold on, to be careful, to go slow; which pulls us back when we are attempting to reach out, trying to do the thing we long to do.
Are you not tired of having your plans thwarted, your efforts blighted by the traitor, doubt? Has it not dwarfed your life long enough, has it not kept you out of your own long enough by forcing you to live on the husks when you might have had the kernel? Are you not about tired of being defrauded by this thief of the blessings and the good things which the Creator intended we all should have? Why not turn it out of your mental house? Neutralize it with a great splendid faith in yourself, in your mission, faith in your possible contribution to the world. Doubt has very little influence with the Saint Paul type of man, with the masterful type. It is only the weakling that doubt strangles, paralyzes.
Be a man and not a weakling, a mere apology of a man.
You know that the devil which has followed you through life, which has blocked your progress, put out the lights in your path, tortured you and undermined your confidence in yourself, has been the devil of doubt. It has been the whispering fiend which told you that you could not do this and you could not do that, which stepped in and killed your initiative when you were about to begin to do that which your ambition had hoped to accomplish.
Don"t let this enemy thwart and baffle you any longer. Have a good heart to heart talk with yourself and break the habit chain of unbelief in self with which it has bound you. Say to yourself, "I will not listen any longer to the voice of this fiend. I will not allow it to spoil G.o.d"s plan for me. There is something inside of me which insists that I was planned for victory, not for defeat, for happiness, not for misery, for peace of mind, not for a life of worry, anxiety, and fear. I do not believe that I was placed here to be a mere puppet of circ.u.mstances.
Faith, hope and confidence are my helpers. Doubt is a child of fear, and fear has the great majority of human beings hypnotized, so that they do not dare to forge ahead, do not dare to undertake the things they are perfectly capable of accomplishing. From henceforth it has no power over me. I will not listen to its treacherous voice."
If you would succeed, you must avoid rashness as well as over-caution.
But when you have fully considered in all its bearings whatever project you are about to undertake, and have decided on your course, don"t let any fears or doubts enter your mind. Commit yourself to your undertaking, and don"t look back to see if you could have done something else, or started in some other way. Push on, and don"t be afraid.
After we have launched out in an enterprise, have committed ourselves before the world, pride steps into the situation and pushes us on through hardships which would have discouraged and turned us aside before we had fully committed ourselves. But when we have taken the plunge, made the venture, we have practically said to the world, "Now, watch me make good. I have made up my mind to put this thing through, and I am not going to turn back." Our confidence grows as we advance and then it is comparatively easy, even under difficulties, to keep forging ahead.
Every child, every youth should be taught the danger of this fatal human enemy, doubt. They should be so imbued with the philosophy of expecting success instead of failure that doubt would never get sufficient grip on them to strangle their capabilities and blight the fulfillment of their dreams. If every child were reared with the conviction that he was born for happiness, that it was intended he should realize his vision, his mind would be turned towards the light, his whole mentality would be so firmly set toward success and happiness that doubt could not get hold of him. As it is the lives of mult.i.tudes of people are constantly filled with doubts and fears and uncertainty in regard to the future. Young impressionable minds are often stamped with the failure suggestion before they are out of their teens. Most of us are born with the doubt germ implanted in our brain.
There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country to-day who have splendid ambitions, who have made resolutions to carry out those ambitions, but who are cowering victims of doubt, which keeps them from making a start. They are just waiting. They are unable to make a beginning while this monster stands at the door of their resolution.
They are afraid to burn their bridges behind them, to commit themselves to their purpose.
At the very outset of your career make up your mind that you are going to be a conqueror in life, that you are going to be the king of your mental realm, and not a slave to any treacherous enemy, that you will choose the wisest course, no matter how forbidding or formidable the difficulties in the way, that you will take the turning which points toward the goal of your ambition, no matter who or what may bar your onward path. Don"t let doubt balk your efforts. Don"t let it paralyze your beginning and make you a pigmy so that you will not half try to make good when you have a waiting giant in you. Confidence, self-a.s.surance, self-faith--these are the great friends which will kill the traitor doubt.
CHAPTER IV
MAKING DREAMS COME TRUE
"Every great soul of man has had its vision and pondered it, until the pa.s.sion to make the dream come true has dominated his life."
"You will be _what you will to be_; Let failure find its false content In that poor world "environment,"
But spirit scorns it, and is free.
"The human Will, that force unseen, The offspring of a deathless Soul, Can hew a way to any goal, Though walls of granite intervene."
Washington, in a letter written when he was but twelve years old, said: "I shall marry a beautiful woman; I shall be one of the wealthiest men in the land; I shall lead the army of my colony; I shall rule the nation which I help to create."
General Grant, in his "Memoirs," says that as a boy at West Point, he saw General Scott seated on his horse, reviewing the cadets, and something within him said, "Ulysses, some day you will ride in his place and be general of the army."
Every one knows how those boyish visions were realized by the mature men.
The late J. Pierpont Morgan"s fortune was built largely by the dynamic forcefulness of his thought, of his mental visualizing, the nursing of his youthful visions. He was a man of varied and aesthetic tastes, but he concentrated upon finance and he became the world"s master in its science.
Ancient Greece concentrated on beauty and art, and she became the great beauty model and art teacher of the world. The Roman Empire concentrated upon power--and became mistress of the world. England concentrated on the control of the seas and commerce, and she has become the ruler of the seas and the greatest commercial nation in the world. We are a nation of money-makers because Americans have concentrated largely upon the dollar. They think in its terms; they dream dollars; they hate poverty and they long for wealth.
Whatever an individual or a people concentrates upon it tends to get, because concentration is just as much of a force as is electricity. The youth who concentrates upon law, thinks law, dreams law, reads everything he can get hold of relating to law, steals into courts, listens to trials at every chance he gets, is sure to become a lawyer.
It is the same with any other vocation or art,--medicine, engineering, literature, music; any of the arts or sciences. Those who concentrate upon an idea, who continue to visualize their dreams, to nurse them, who never lose sight of their goal, no matter how dark or forbidding the way, get what they concentrate on. They make their minds powerful magnets to attract the thing on which they have concentrated. Sooner or later they realize their dreams.
What could have kept Ole Bull from becoming a master musician? Who or what could keep back a boy who would brave his father"s displeasure, steal out of his bed at night, and go into the attic to play his "little red violin," which haunted his dreams and would not let him sleep? What could keep a Faraday or an Edison, whom no hardships frightened, from realizing the wonderful visions of boyhood?
If you can concentrate your thought and hold it persistently, work with it along the line of your greatest ambition, nothing can keep you from its realization. But spasmodic concentration, spasmodic enthusiasm, however intense, will peter out. Dreaming without effort will only waste your power. It is holding your vision, together with persistent, concentrated endeavor on the material plane, that wins.
There are thousands of devices in the patent office in Washington which have never been of any use to the world, simply because the inventors did not cling to their vision long enough to materialize it in perfection. They became discouraged. They ceased their efforts. They let their visions fade, and so became demagnetized and lost the power to realize them. Other inventors have taken up many such "near" successes, added the missing links in their completion and have made them real successes.
"Get thy spindle and distaff ready, and G.o.d will send the flax," saith the proverb. If we would only take G.o.d"s promises to heart, and do our necessary part for their fulfillment no one would be unsuccessful or unhappy. If we were to send out our desires intensely; to visualize them until our very mentalities vibrated with the things we long for, and to work persistently in their direction, we would attract them.
Everywhere there are disappointed men and women who have soured on life because they could not get what they longed for,--a musical or art education, the necessary training for authorship, for law or medicine, for engineering, or for some other vocation to which they felt they had been called. They are struggling along in an uncongenial environment, railing at the fate which has robbed them of their own. They feel that life has cheated them, when the truth is they have cheated themselves.
They never got the spindle and distaff ready that would have drawn to them the flax for the spinning of a happy and complete life web. They did not insistently and persistently send out their desires and longings; they did not nurse them and positively refuse to give them up; above all, they did not put forth their best efforts for their realization.
Three things we must do to make our dreams come true. Visualize our desire. Concentrate on our vision. Work to bring it into the actual. The implements necessary for this are inside of us, not outside. No matter what the accidents of birth or fortune, there is only one force by which we can fashion our life material--mind.
The bee and the snake draw material from the same plant. The one trans.m.u.tes it into deadly poison; the other into delicious honey. The power that changes the stuff into a new substance is within the bee and the snake.
Of two boys or two girls in the same wretched environment, one picks up an education, trains himself or herself for place and power, while the other grows up a n.o.body. It is all in the boy or the girl. Each has similar material to work in. One trans.m.u.tes it into gold; the other into lead.
Two sailors force the same breeze to send their boats in opposite directions. It is not the wind, but the set of the sail that determines the port.
The power that makes our desire, our vision, a reality is not in our environment or in any condition outside of us; it is within us.
There is some unseen, unknown, magnetic force developed by a long-continued concentration of the mind upon a cherished desire that draws to itself the reality which matches the desire. We cannot tell just what this force is that brings the thing we long for out of the cosmic ether and objectifies it, shapes it to correspond with our longing. We only know that it exists. The cosmic ether everywhere surrounding us is full of undreamed of potencies and the strong, concentrated mind reaches out into this ether, this sea of intelligence, attracts to it its own, and objectifies the desire.
All human achievements have been pulled out of the unseen by the brain, through the mind reaching out and fashioning the wealth of material at its disposal into the shapes which matched the wishes, the desires, of the achievers.
All the great discoveries, great inventions, great deeds that have lifted man up from his animal existence have been wrought out of the actual by the perpetual thinking of and visualizing these things by their authors. These grand characters clung to their vision, nursed it until they became mighty magnets that attracted out of the universal intelligence the realization of their dreams.
Most revolutionary inventions have evolved from a flash of thought. The sewing machine, for example, started with a simple idea, which the inventor held persistently in his mind until through his efforts the idea materialized into the concrete reality. Elias Howe used to watch his wife making garments, sewing, sewing far into the night, and it set him thinking, questioning whether such drudgery was really necessary. As he watched her busy needle fly back and forth, he began to wonder if this same work which it took his wife so long to do could not be done with less labor and in half the time by some sort of mechanical contrivance. He kept nursing his idea, thinking what a splendid thing it would be if some one could relieve millions of women from this toil, which frequently had to be done at night after a day of hard work. He began to experiment with crude devices, clinging to his vision through poverty and the denunciation of friends, who thought the man must be crazy to spend his time on "such a fool idea." But at last his vision materialized into a marvelous reality, a perfected machine which has emanc.i.p.ated the women of the world from infinite drudgery.
The idea of the telephone was flashed into the mind of Professor Alexander Bell by the drawing of a string through a hole in the bottom of a tin can, by means of which he found that the voice could be transmitted. The idea took such complete possession of the inventor that it robbed him of sleep and, for a time, made him poor. But nothing could rob him of his vision or prevent him from struggling to work it out of the visionary stage into the actual.
I lived near Professor Bell, in the next room, indeed, while he worked on his invention. I saw much of his struggle with poverty, heard the criticisms and denunciations of his friends, as he persisted in his visionary work until the telephone became a reality,--a reality without which modern business could not be conducted.
All of Edison"s inventions, those of every inventor, have been wrought out on the same principle that gave us the sewing machine and the telephone. They all started in simple ideas, in dream visions which were nursed and worked into actualities.
According to Darwin, the desire to ascend into the heavens preceded the appearance and development of the eagle"s wings. It is said our different organs and functions have been developed from a sense of need of them, just as the wings of the eagle developed from a desire to fly.
The brain cells grow in response to desire. Where there is no desire there is no growth. The brain develops most in the direction of the leading ambition, where the mental activities are the most p.r.o.nounced.
The desire for a musical career, for instance, develops the musical brain cells. Business ambition develops that part of the brain which has to do with business, the cells which are brought into action in executive management, in administering affairs, in money making.
Wherever we make our demand upon the brain by desire that part responds in growth.