Passport to Success

Do you want to succeed in life? Do you want to be mediocre or do you want to be the top? When your children write your epitaph, do you want them to say “Here lies the greatest of them all.?” If so, read on.

What I am going to share with you is partly from my experience and partly from gleanings from the life stories of successful people. They will give us clues and encourage us to follow their footsteps.

Success is the prosperous termination of any enterprise. Therefore, success can only be appraised at the end, not at the beginning. However, to reach the end, one has to start. Many people are unable to start an enterprise because of fear. Fear that they will fail, fear that they do not have the stamina, fear that they do not have the resources, the education, the finance, the right age, and so on. Therefore, the first thing they have to do is to overcome fear.

How do we overcome fear? When I was training to take a private pilot’s licence, the first time my trainer stalled the engine the plane suddenly dropped a few feet and I was horror stricken. I wanted to quit but my instructor encouraged me and convinced me that after a few more times, I would overcome the fear of stalling and I did. I had to have the confidence and with that confidence had to go through the experience. This is what we all have to do.. Confidence that we will eventually succeed, confidence in our potential and a determination to go through the experience.

We have to decide what we want. In other words, what is our goal? It should be precise and should remain unchanging until it is reached. The goal should be written down and looked at frequently to reinforce in our minds.

What do we have to do to reach the goal? We have to plan out in detail from the very beginning. Set goals for each day, each month, and year. At the end of each period, check to see if the goal has been reached. If the goal has not been reached, we should not give up, we should reset the goal and complete it during the next interval. Our plan must be followed passionately. We must have a burning desire to follow the plan and to reach our goal.

Napoleon Hill gives us a few additional suggestions in his book “Think and Grow Rich.”
He writes that to achieve success one should have:”

a. Faith. Faith is the head chemist of the mind. Faith, love and sex are the most powerful of all major positive emotions. When faith is blended with emotional thought and word, it will materialize. Faith is a state of mind which may be created by affirmations. Repetition of affirmations is one way to order the subconscious to act. The subconscious is that part of the Universal Mind in us which is responsible for materialization of thought. “Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man.
But soon or late, the man who wins,
Is the one who thinks he can.”

B. Persistence. There is no better example for persistence than Thomas Edison. According to his son, Charles, Edison patented 1093 inventions and is said to have tested 4000 fibers before he found that white cotton thread rolled in lamp black (soot) can be used as a filament for the electric light bulb.

Once, Edison told a co-worker who was disappointed in a series of experimental failures, “Schultz, we haven’t failed. We know 1000 things that won’t work so we are much closer to finding what will.”

At the age of 80, he decided to find a native source of rubber. After testing and classifying 17,000 varieties of plants, he succeeded in devising a method to extract latex.

No man can succeed in any enterprise all by himself. All successful people were able to gather others around them and motivate them. To succeed in motivating others, we can take a few words of advice from Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” I would like to quote a few points.

1. Learn to remember names. The sweetest music is one’s own name. How to remember a name? The best method is by association. I could not remember the name of my friend Dukowski. Then I questioned the fact “Do cows ski?” And I had no more difficulty.

2. Ask questions or talk about the topics he/she is interested in. Be a good listener and they will love you.

3. Don’t criticize. On this topic, I would like to say a few words about a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to General Meade.

After three days of battle at Gettysburg where six thousand were killed, twenty-seven thousand were wounded and ten thousand were missing, Robert Lee retreated to the south and found the Potomac River in flood and impassable. The victorious Union army was behind him.

Lincoln, finding the opportunity to end the war immediately ordered Meade to press the attack. Meade disobeyed the commander in chief and stayed back. Within a few days, the flood subsided and Lee escaped to the south were he had more support. Lincoln was furious and wrote “My Dear General. I do not think you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within our easy grasp and to have closed upon him would have ended the war.

If you could not attack Lee last Monday, how can you attack him south of the river when you can take with you no more than two thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect that you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”

What do suppose that Mead did when he read that letter?

Mead never read that letter. Lincoln never sent it. The letter was found among Lincoln’s papers after his death.

Probably Lincoln reconsidered and realized that it was too late to do anything and such a letter would only make Mead justify his actions. It would make his effectiveness still less. Lincoln probably thought like this, “If I had seen the carnage at Gettysburg, perhaps I too would have been reluctant to press on the attack and kill more people.”

So, avoid criticism because criticism invokes justification.

4. Talk about your own mistake before correcting the other.

5. Ask questions instead of giving orders. Instead of saying “do it” say “Don’t you think that this will be a better way to do it?”

Charles, son of Thomas Edison, said of his father, “Father could and often did give orders, but he preferred to inspire people so that they may suggest to him what he in the first place wanted to do. This was one of the secrets of his success.”

6. Be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.

We can divide successful people into two groups: those who underestimated their successful career and thought they had done very little worthwhile in life. Leonardo DaVinci, a man two centuries ahead of his time, the great architect of many inventions, the creator of the Mona Lisa, just before his death at the age of 67 went about scribbling on pieces of paper “Tell me if anything every was done.” Tycho Brahe, the great Danish astronomer who measured so accurately the motions of the planets as no one ever had done before said at his death bed, “Tell me what have I achieved?”

Why did they lament their lack of accomplishments? Not because of their lack of awareness of their own achievement but because of the awareness of the immensity of projects yet to be carried out.

There are others who are confident about having accomplished their assignment. St. Paul in his second epistle to Timothy says “I have run my race. I have finished my course and there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.”

What is the secret of reaching the goal and enjoying the satisfaction of having reached the goal? When we look through the life stories of great men and women, we will find the secret. The secret is listening. Listen to the inner voice. Sit in silence and listen to the inner voice. We may call it communion, introspection or cogitation.

There are many systems to develop this communion. The easiest is what Myrtle Fillmore, co-founder of Unity Church, did. In her private room, she placed two chairs. She sat on one and invited Jesus to come and sit on the other. In silence, she asked questions and in silence she received her answers. She received the answers with infinite faith as God given and acted on them and was successful.

Edison used to sit with marbles in his hand on a chair placed on a metal tray. During deep thinking, he used to enter into a hypnogogic state. Just at the point of entering into sleep, he would get solutions for his problems. The marbles would slip out of his hand, drop into the metal tray and make a noise to wake him up. At that moment, if he did not wake up, the solutions he got would fade away as dreams.

Sir Isaac Newton also got his ideas during deep meditation. He himself wondered how he happened to get all these ideas.

Joan of Arc testified to hearing voices. Socrates when he was condemned to die said” What happened to me is good. If it was otherwise the oracle would have opposed me . Hitherto the familiar oracle within me has constantly been in the habit of opposing me if I was going to make a slip or error about anything. The oracle made no sign or opposition either as I was leaving the house or when I was going up to this court.” Here Socrates was talking about a constantly present inner voice or a feeling.

Virginia Dryden says that as we observe the soundness and dependability of this new voice we come to trust it more and more.

Some people receive their answers through the bible as St. Augustine did. He heard a voice say “ Take up and read. He opened the bible which he carried in his pocket and saw the words “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, . . . “ Romans 13:13.
This was an apt message to him.

When my mother in Travencore went to the forest and sat in a cave to find strength to overcome the effects of witchcraft, her in-laws had set upon her, and to escape the assassins they were hiring to kill her, she opened the bible and her eyes fell upon the words “God... hath sent his angel and delivered his servants who have trusted in him.... that they might not serve nor worship any God except their own God.” This was a very apt message for her at the time. This made a drastic change in her. Thereafter, witchcraft had no effect on her. She escaped many attempts on her life.

For me, the voice is not really a voice. It is an idea coming into my awareness. Sometimes the ideas I received were not to my liking. However, I acted on them with positive results. Sometimes no ideas came.

Bishop George Berkeley after whom Berkeley in California is named said “The only things we ever experience are perceptions, thoughts and feelings within our own minds.

However, not always do we find the answers we are seeking. Newton struggled lifelong but never did find solutions to problems such as transmutation of metals, finding the philosopher’s stone or discovering the secret of the universe from the Book of Revelations.

The answer to Paul the Apostle for his prayer to remove the thorn from his flesh was “My Grace is sufficient unto thee.” We are granted not we request in short sightedness but what is good for us in the long run. So, sometimes we have to accept some situations as they are. Though they may appear to be calamities at the moment, they turn out to be blessings after a little while. This is what happened to me when my house burned down. I thought it was a great calamity. The house was under insured. I could not understand why such a thing should happen to me but I knew nothing bad would happen. Therefore, it must be for some good and I said so to my friends. I went through the struggle of building a house, fighting city hall at every stage and when it was completed, I called my underwriter to come and insure my new house. He told me then “Dr. Simon, when I came here to see the burned down house, I thought it was a great calamity but now I can see that it was a blessing as you said then. You have three beautiful apartments where one old house existed. Things do not happen without hard work and persistence. The harder you work, the luckier you get.

Listen to the inner voice and accept its dictates as communication from the universal being. Then you will not only be a success but you will also have peace of mind in all situations. A passport to success is also a passport to peace of mind.

There is a potential in each one of us and it is up to us to develop that potential. A begonia with beautiful yellow flowers does not have to grow like a redwood to attain its full stature and beauty. One foot height is enough for the begonia whereas for the redwood tree it is 300 feet. Each one in its place is fully successful.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote “It is the set of the sails and not the gales which tells us the way to go.” We have to set our sail to develop our potential. Developing full potential is true success.