The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

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 æsthetic 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 God will send the flax," saith the proverb. If we would only take God'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.