Never allow yourself or any one else to shake your confidence in yourself, to destroy your self-reliance, for this is the very foundation of all great achievement. When that is gone, your whole structure falls; as long as you have it, there is hope for you. Confidence, unbounded, unshaken faith in yourself, which even amounts to boldness at times, is absolutely necessary in all great undertakings.
Self-faith helps inferior men to accomplish results by eliminating fear, doubt, and uncertainty, the great enemies of most men’s achievement. The mind cannot act with vigor in the presence of doubt. Wavering in the mind makes wavering execution. There must be certainty, or there is no efficiency. The ignorant man who believes in himself, who has the faith that he can do the thing he undertakes, often puts to shame the college-bred man whose overculture and wider outlook have brought with increased sensitiveness a lessening of self-confidence, and whose decision is weakened by constant weighing of conflicting theories, whose prejudices are always open to conviction.
The ignorant man with great self-confidence, strong, vigorous self-assertion, lacks the finer sentiments, but is spared the finer suffering of a more sensitive, cultured mind. His brain powers have not been weakened by theories or by the knowledge of how much he does not know. He simply plunges ahead where a cultured man would hesitate.
The weakening of self-confidence, the development of timidity, is often an unfortunate result of a liberal education. I have known boys to enter college with unbounded confidence in what they could accomplish, with strong powers of self-assertion, who have been graduated with those qualities almost eliminated. They have been replaced by the gradual development of timidity, and a shrinking from positive statement of fact which seriously crippled the men’s executive faculties.
Great scholars are proverbially retiring, shrinking, timid natures, often lacking almost entirely the executive faculty. Their self-assertion has disappeared, giving place to self-effacement. Unassuming humbleness, patience, and tolerance are very desirable qualities in their right places, but very unfortunate when they are not subordinated to vigorous self-faith and an aggressive self-assertion. These lovable qualities make the scholar more companionable, but less practical and less successful. The aggressive, executive faculties should be preserved intact at all hazards, or the career will be cramped and limited.
Chapter XIV.
Power Of Self-Faith Over Others
You conquer Fate by thought. If you think the fatal thought of men and institutions, you need never pull the trigger. The consequences of thinking inevitably follow.—Carlyle.
SUCCESS is not dependent solely on our earnest affirmation, on our self-confidence, but also on the confidence of others in us; but this confidence is very largely a reflection of our own, the effect of our own personality on them. Our own attitude of mind is therefore the means to produce this confidence in others. Your earnest affirmation is contagious. It affects every one with whom you come in contact, especially those whom you must master, whether as a teacher, as an orator, as an attorney, as salesman, as merchant, as possible employee, or in some other way. There is something that seems almost magical in the way a confident air influences other people. If you adopt or acquire it, you will be surprised to see how soon it will radiate to others, increasing their confidence in your ability to do the thing you undertake. This is what makes reputation and establishes credit.
The men who possess conviction of ability to accomplish what they undertake are positive, strong characters. When a man feels a sense of mastery, of having risen to his dominion, he talks confidence, he radiates faith and conviction, and overcomes doubts in others, who catch the contagion of his constant affirmation of assurance and confidence, and believe this to be proof of ability to succeed. People believe in the man with a programme, the man who knows what he wants, who does not waver, but does things. Everything seems to stand aside for him. People who would oppose a man with weak self-confidence readily fall into line with his plans. Things which would trip and dishearten a man with little self-faith seem to favor the confident man’s progress. It is human nature to help a man along the way he is going; if he is going up, the world will boost him; if he is going down, the world will kick him. If a man lacks faith in himself, the world will lack faith in him also.
We cannot help admiring a man who believes in himself. He cannot be laughed down, talked down, or written down. Poverty cannot dishearten him; misfortune deter him; hardship turn him a hair’s breadth from his course. Whatever comes, he keeps his eye to the goal and pushes on. A determined face and an iron will win half the battles before a blow is struck. The writer knows a man who pushes everything he undertakes to completion, and has been remarkably successful because he never hesitates, he never has any doubt of his ability to do a thing. His self-faith, amounting to egotism at times, repels some people, but even they give way before him. While other people of finer texture or make-up are discussing the possibility or feasibility of doing something, doubting and wavering, this man does it. Such a man compels his opponents to believe in his ability in spite of real reasons against such faith. Average ability, coupled with such aggressive self-confidence, cuts a larger figure in the world, and gets more done, than superlative ability with the timid and shrinking nature that often goes with it. A teacher with a smattering of learning often succeeds better than one ten times as learned, but unable to pass it on to others or assert his mastery of the subject. This is not poetic justice, and often seems very unjust, but it is the actual state of affairs, and the remedy is for the really able to cultivate and assume the conviction that will impress other people.
In every kind of work and business we are dependent on the belief of others that we can make or carry out plans, can produce superior goods, can manage employees, can do any of the thousand things demanded by employers or by the public. Life is too short and the world too busy to allow minute investigation of another's ability to achieve the thing he professes to be able to do; therefore the world accepts, very largely, a man’s own estimate of himself until he forfeits its confidence. If a young man hangs out his law shingle, the world will take it for granted that he is a lawyer, that he is fitted for his profession, until he proves otherwise. A physician does not have to prove to each patient that he has followed certain courses and passed certain examinations.
Therefore to acknowledge any inability, to give way to a temporary doubt, is to give failure so much advantage. We never should allow our self-faith to waver for a moment, no matter how dark the way may seem. Nothing will destroy confidence of others so quickly as doubt in our own minds, which those about us will soon feel. Many people fail because they radiate their discouraged moods, and project them into the minds of those about them.
If you are an employer, your employees can easily tell whether you come to your day’s work as a conqueror, with a sense of victory, of confidence, or as a beaten man, in doubt and despair. They can tell whether you are going to win or lose during the day by your countenance, your manner.
In no business is the imparting of one’s own confidence more potent than in salesmanship, whether it be in the agent, the commercial traveller, or the store clerk.
In all these kinds of selling, a species of hypnotism, of mental influence, is practised by great salesmen. An undecided customer—and most customers are hesitating between two opinions—can be brought to a decision by a skilful statement of the salesman’s opinion, by narrowing down the articles considered from several to two, by an assumption that the decision is made and a move to cut off the goods or wrap up the article, in any one of a hundred ways that every good salesman practises continually. But with all these “tricks of the trade” must go the firm, decided, confident manner of the salesman, which is communicated to the purchaser. If a travelling agent lets doubt of a sale manifest itself in the slightest degree, the purchaser jumps at the chance to escape, and, after that, argument and persuasion are often useless.
No one has need of radiating