The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

No man can become prosperous as long as he holds in his mind the picture of limitation, of lack and want. We do not get things in this world which we do not believe we can get. We do not accomplish what we doubt we can do, even though we have the ability to do it.

I knew a boy in college who always felt certain he was going to fail in his examinations, and he did fail invariably. Yet it was due more to his fear, his terror, of failure than to a lack of ability or preparation in his studies. He had formed a habit of expecting failure, of predicting misfortunes, of looking and preparing for them, and so far as I know they have followed him through life.

In every community, in every occupation and profession, there are able, conscientious men and women who try very hard, so far as their actual labor is concerned, to get on in the world, but who don't expect to get on. It is pitiful to see them toiling day after day, but always facing in the wrong direction. They are working for success in their vocations, working for a competence for themselves and their families, but all the time expecting failure, anticipating poverty, living in an atmosphere of mental penury.

There is no law of philosophy by which you can possibly produce just the opposite of what you are holding in your mind, what you are concentrating on. If you are thinking down, if you are afraid, are worried, if you have fears and doubts, if you keep visualizing, thinking, talking hard times, panics and financial crises, your business will shrink and shrivel accordingly. If, on the other hand, you have confidence, expectation of better things, if you are convinced that conditions are going to improve, you set in motion a thought current that will back your efforts with an irresistible force. But a thought current saturated with the fear of failure, with doubts and discouragement will neutralize your most strenuous efforts.

Instead of starting on their active careers with the victorious attitude, with the idea that their careers are to be a triumphal march, many, if not the majority of youths, begin with the impression that they are not victory organized. This is because they have lived in a failure atmosphere, and have absorbed the poverty idea. They have been reared with the fear of failure in their minds, a dread of poverty, a terror of coming to want.

Write it in your heart that a beneficent Creator, who planned a universe full of good things for our use and enjoyment, never meant that we should starve or be miserable. If we are unsuccessful, unhappy, it is because of our attitude toward God and life. Most of us assume the position of beggars instead of that of children of an all-powerful Father, and we remain beggars to the end.

One of the worst things about being very poor is the danger of becoming reconciled to penury, expecting it, holding the conviction that we shall always be poor, that there is no help for it. The habit of thinking we must remain poor because we are so is a paralyzing habit.

Whatever we have accustomed ourselves to for any length of time tends to become a fixed mode of life. Multitudes of people have become so accustomed to their poverty environment, so used to taking it for granted that they are going to remain poor, that they do not take the necessary steps to get away from poverty; and they do not even know that the first step must be a mental one. Instead of this they are all the time affirming their poverty, getting more and more deeply imbedded in the poverty condition by their poverty thoughts and convictions.

The early years of multitudes of children are saturated with the poverty suggestion. They breathe a poverty atmosphere. They hear poverty talk perpetually. They acquire a poverty vocabulary. Their fathers and mothers are always talking poverty, bemoaning their hard conditions, complaining that they were born poor, and must die poor. Children reared in such a mental environment get a sort of poverty habit from which it is very difficult to get away.

The facing toward poverty and despair, heading toward hopelessness and failure, is the worst thing about poverty. The fixity of their conviction that they cannot get away from poverty, their resignation to it, their firm belief that they can never rise into prosperity,—these are the most distressing things about the very poor. There is a tremendous difference between the prospects as well as the mental attitude and the facial expression of a poor boy on a farm who dreams of the day when he can go to college, who pictures himself there, who believes with all his heart that his dream will be realized, and the prospects, the mental attitude and face of another boy similarly situated, who also longs for an education, but has abandoned all hope of ever going to college, or ever getting away from the grinding drudgery and monotony of the farm which he hates.