A person might as well expect to become healthy and strong by always thinking and talking about his poor health, saying that he never expects to be robust, as to expect the executive faculties to be strong and vigorous while he is perpetually doubting his ability to do what he undertakes. Nothing so weakens the mind and renders it totally unfit for effective thinking as the constant acknowledgment of weakness, or doubt of one's ability to accomplish.
The majority of persons who fail begin by doubting their ability to do the things they attempt. The moment a young man starting out on a career admits doubt into his mind, he is letting an enemy into his camp, a spy who will betray him. Doubt belongs to the failure family, and once admitted and not expelled will introduce “Mr. Take-it-Easy," “Mr. Let-up-a-Little," “Mr. Let-Go-When-It-Gets-Hard,” “Mr. Wait," and other members of the failure family. When these once get into the mind, they attract other qualities like themselves, and there is an end of ambition. Your longing for prosperity and yearning for achievement will all be vain while you are entertaining the idlers, the losers, the failures. They will exhaust your energy, destroy your power for attracting success. Failure will soon be in the ascendancy in your mind and in your actions.
The moment you admit weakness, the moment you confess defeat, you are gone. There is no hope for a man who has lost his stamina, who has given up the struggle; you can’t do anything with him. If there is anything despicable in the world, it is a human being who has lain down, who has given up, who says “I can’t,” “It’s no use,” “The world’s against me,” “I am down on my luck.” To hold perpetually the thought that you are down, that you cannot rise, that success is for others, but not for you, is to adjust yourself to your thought, and to make any other condition impossible. How can you expect to be lucky when you are always talking about your ill luck? As long as you think you are a poor miserable worm of the dust you will be that. You cannot rise above your thought; you cannot be different from your conception of yourself. If you really believe you are unhappy, unlucky, and miserable, you will be so. There are no drugs, or patent medicines, or influences in the world that can get you out of this condition until you change your thought; and a reversal of thought will bring about a reversal of conditions in the body, as surely as the sun and the rain unfold the petals of a rosebud. There is no mystery about it; it is purely scientific.
People who do great things are powerful in their affirmations. They have tremendous positive ability; they do not know the meaning of negatives. Their power of assertion and their conviction of ability to do are so strong that the opposites do not trouble them. When they make up their minds to do a thing, they take it for granted that they can do it. They are not filled with doubts and fears, no matter how people may scoff, and cry “Crank.” In fact nearly all the great men and women who have pushed progress along have been called cranks. The world said they had “wheels in their heads.” We owe the blessings of modem civilization to the sublime confidence of such men and women in themselves, that indomitable faith in their mission which nothing could shake. The history of all great forward movements is contained in their biographies.
What if Copernicus and Galileo had given up when they were denounced as cranks and insane? Science of to-day is built on their unshaken confidence that the world is round and that the earth moves around the sun instead of the sun around it! Suppose Columbus had given up and lost confidence in himself when Europe was laughing at him as a crank! Suppose Cyrus W. Field had lain down after a dozen years of fruitless endeavor to span the sea, when cable after cable had parted in mid-ocean! Suppose he had listened to his relatives, who said he was wasting his fortune, and would die in poverty! Suppose Fulton had given up under ridicule when a book was written to prove that a ship could not carry coal enough to force its way across the ocean! He lived to see that very book brought across the sea in a steamship. What if Alexander Graham Bell had lost faith in himself when he had expended his last dollar in experimenting on the principle of the telephone, and when the world called him a crank?
When Savonarola entered Florence as a poor, obscure priest, and saw the abject misery on every hand—brought about by unreasonable luxury and fawning on wealth—he immediately determined that he would uplift the standard of living. Although constantly approached with bribes, money never influenced him. He kept his ideal always in sight. He found Lorenzo di Medici at the height of his power. At that time the worldly Alexander VI., who sympathized with the wealthy and the powerful, was at the head of the papacy. This did not discourage the sanguine reformer, and, fighting almost single-handed against overwhelming odds, believing that justice would triumph, he finally did succeed in overthrowing the Medici despotism, and established what he desired, a state “wherein justice shall rule.” Savonarola died a martyr to the Church, lifting its ideal high above the commonplace by helping to bring about the Protestant reformation.
When Wolfe was called before a committee of Parliament and told that he had been selected to lead the British in Canada, he was asked if he thought he could end the war. He brandished his sword about the room, struck the table with it, and exhibited such extreme vainglory and egotism that the committee was disgusted, and regretted its choice. But when young Wolfe was leading his forces up to the Plains of Abraham, this same confidence enabled him to vanquish the French forces under Montcalm.
Napoleon, Bismarck, Hugo, and many other great men have had such colossal faith in themselves that they have excited antagonism and even ridicule, but this quality is essential to all great achievement. It has doubled, trebled, quadrupled, the ordinary power of these men. How else can we account for the achievement of a Luther, a Wesley, a Savonarola? Without this sublime faith, this confidence in her mission, how could the fragile village maiden, Jeanne Dare, have led and controlled a French army? Without this power how could she have led those thousands of stalwart men as if they were children? This divine confidence multiplied her power a thousandfold, until even the king obeyed her.
When our nation was threatened with civil war, the apparently modest and unassuming Lincoln told some politicians that if they would nominate him for President, he could be elected, and that he could run the Government. Think of this self-confidence of a man born in a log cabin, with almost no advantages of education or culture. Think of the sublime self-confidence of Grant—who two years before had been an obscure merchant, almost unknown outside of his own little community—when he told Lincoln that he could end the Civil War. He did end it, in spite of as severe public condemnation as a man ever received. Where would the United States be to-day had Lincoln and Grant lost confidence in themselves when denounced by the press?
The generals who had preceded Grant never had unreserved faith in their ability, as he had in his. Grant was the complete master of the situation because there was no interrogation point in his self-confidence. He knew he could conquer the enemy, if only he had the men and the opportunity. The others, always more or less in doubt, won only partial victories.
It was this grand self-confidence and faith in a just cause that led Jackson, with a handful of men, to administer a most crushing defeat to an army of trained English soldiers at New Orleans. It was such faith that enabled General Taylor at Buena Vista, with 5,000 American soldiers, to defeat Santa Anna, who had 20,000 men.
Confidence, absolute trust, if a creative force which generates, produces, and achieves, while distrust tears down, annihilates, and destroys.
A strong self-faith, by eliminating doubt and uncertainty, wonderfully increases the power of concentration, because it withdraws distracting motives. It makes possible a steady pushing forward, with no side-pulls and scattering energy.
Discoverers, inventors, reformers, generals, all have this spirit of invincible affirmation, while if we analyze failures we shall find that most of them are weak in their self-faith, that they lack the abounding confidence in themselves that marks successful persons. We cannot read the sealed orders which the Creator has placed in the