The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

Some one has said that no one ever went to the poorhouse who did not attract the poorhouse by his poorhouse mental attitude. Observation and long study of the question have convinced me that, as a rule, people who make miserable failures of their lives expected to do so. They had such a horror of the poorhouse, they lived in such terror of coming to want, that they shut off the very source of their supply. They had so warped their minds that they could see nothing ahead but poverty. They wasted the precious energy which might have been utilized in happiness and prosperity building, in expecting, dreading and preparing for the dire things that might come upon them, and, according to the law, they got what they dreaded and feared.

Thinking war, talking war, anticipating it, getting ready for it, in other words, preparedness for war, the perpetual war suggestion, was largely responsible for the outbreak of the greatest war in history. If all the nations involved had talked peace, thought peace, expected it, prepared for it, there would have been peace, not war.

So long as people talk poverty, think poverty, expect it, get ready for it, they will have poverty. Preparedness for poverty, expecting it, attracts it, confirms poverty conditions.

We are constantly drawing to ourselves that which we expect. If you are sending out a perpetual poverty thought current, a doubt current, a discouragement current, no matter how hard you may be working in the opposite direction, you will never get away from the current you set in motion. The sort of thought current you generate will flow back to you.

Everywhere we see people trying hard to get on, struggling early and late to better their condition, and yet never expecting, or even hoping to be prosperous. They do not believe they are going to get what they are working for, and they do not.

A typical example of those who keep themselves in the poverty current is a woman I know who is constantly affirming her inability to better her condition. She answers her better-off friends who tell her that she ought to have this and that by saying, "Oh, it is all very well for you rich folks to talk this way, but these things are not for me. We have always been poor and I suppose we always shall be; we can only have the bare necessities of life, and are fortunate if we get these. Of course I might indulge in a little treat for myself and the children now and then, but that would be extravagant, and I must save for a rainy day."

Now, I have no quarrel with people who save for a rainy day. It is the part of prudence to be prepared for all emergencies. It is a splendid thing to save for spending, for enjoyment in our later years, but people who begin early to provide for the "rainy day," and who deny themselves every little pleasure and enjoyment for the sake of adding to this provision, fall into the habit of pinching themselves, and usually continue to do so through life.

This woman limits her supply by her conviction that every cent she can spare must go to the rainy day fund because she is always going to be poor. She assures herself and others that she is never going to have the things she would like to have, because of her poverty, and so she starves the lives of herself and her boy and girl in anticipating a day of possible want. She is a type of a multitude of men and women who settle down to their poverty, become half reconciled to its limitations, and do not make a strenuous effort to get away from it. That is, they never dream of exercising their creative, positive thought, but continue to live and to realize in their conditions the negative, destructive, poverty thought.

These are the people who are always saying they "cannot afford" things. They cannot afford to send the boy or girl to school or college this year. They cannot afford the necessary clothes or the needed vacation because of the rainy day, which, like a specter, rises at every feast, on every occasion when they try to get some enjoyment or satisfaction out of the present. They are always postponing things till next year. But this "next year" never comes, and the children never go to the academy or college, and they themselves never take the needed vacation, the travel in one's own country or the long promised trip abroad. They keep forever postponing the enjoyment of the good things of life until they can "afford it;" and that time never comes for people of this apprehensive habit of mind, because they always want to lay up a little more for the future.

I know a number of people well along in years who are still pinching themselves not only on the comforts but even on the necessities of life in anticipation of the possible rainy day, for which they are always planning. They make life one long continuous rainy day, and little realize that they often tend to create the need for which they are perpetually saving.