Visualization, thoughts, cultivation, and action equal big time success

Napoleon Hill and Wallace Wattles

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

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 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. These 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 them 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, are 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 into 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 wheelchair. 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.