The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

We must change our thought before we can change our conditions. The thought always leads in any achievement. It would be as impossible for the great mass of poor people to improve their position materially while holding their present mental attitude, the persistent belief that they are always going to be poor, and that they never can do what others have done to get out of their rut, as it would be for the boy who longs to go to college, but who has made up his mind that it is impossible, to get a higher education. While they think that all others are lucky and they are unlucky, while they continue talking about their hard fate and thinking that the rich are getting all the good things of the world and that they are getting only the dregs and never will get anything else, why, of course they will never get anything else.

Most poor people have about the same attitude toward poverty that those who are constantly ailing have toward health. Habitual invalids never expect to be really well. They are always anticipating the development of some disease, looking for the symptoms, imagining that they are going to have this or that physical disability or disease. The way to have health is to think it, to expect it, to visualize it, to realize that health is a positive everlasting fact, and disease only negation, the absence of health, which is brought about largely by a wrong mental attitude, by self-thought poisoning, by disobeying the laws of health. If we are going to be well, we must think vigorous, robust, cheerful, health thoughts, and we must observe the laws of health. We shall have the same degree of health that we give to our mental health model. It is our visualizing of health that brings the expected condition. It is the same with poverty.

Not long ago a poor man told me he would be perfectly satisfied if he could be assured that he would never have to go to the poorhouse, that he would have enough to provide the bare necessities for his little family. He said he never expected to have anything better. He was satisfied that it was not intended for him to have any luxuries. He had always been a poor man, and he always expected to be poor.

Now, this is just the thing that kept this man poor, for he was a hard worker. He always expected to be poor. He did not expect anything better. He merely worked for the bare necessities of life, did not expect anything else, and of course he only just managed to squeeze along, making but a bare subsistence. This attitude of the poor toward poverty tends to increase it, to aggravate their disease. So long as one holds the poverty thought he is making himself a poverty magnet, and continually drawing to himself unfortunate conditions.

We have a good illustration of this, a real object lesson, in the grayhaired men everywhere seeking a job. I have watched these desperate men on their rounds looking for work. They are poverty stricken in appearance; their expression is one of utter hopelessness. They look like men who are going downhill, men who have reached the period of diminishing returns, and they feel exactly as they look. Their appearance is the reflex of their thought. Their dress, their manner, their gait, the look in their eyes, everything about them corresponds to their mental attitude, and all point downgrade.

If these men would only brace up, look up, dress up, before they seek a job, there would be some hope for them. If they can't get better clothes they can brush the old ones, blacken their shoes, have a bath and shave, and above all a mental clean-up, and their chances will be ten to one compared with what they were before their physical and mental clean-up.

A man has got to radiate confidence in himself, the expectation of success, before he can get a job. He has got to show that he has reserve power, that there is a lot of good blood in him, working material, success possibilities, or nobody will want him. The man who goes to an employer in a discouraged attitude and begs for work on the ground that he needs it very much; who whines and complains how hard it is for any one who shows the signs of age to get a job, is not going to get one.

If you are in the clutches of a poverty so dire that it robs you even of the desire to get away from it, you are cursed with self-thought poisoning. This is what mars and embitters so many lives, drives away happiness, health and prosperity.

Poverty is usually a disease. It is just as much a disease as is smallpox or tuberculosis. It is just as abnormal to the human being as any disease of the flesh. So is failure. Fear, worry, anxiety, these are all mental diseases, from which few human beings seem to escape. But we are gradually finding an antitoxin for the virus of those diseases so fatal to efficiency, health, happiness and prosperity.

The Bible tells us "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." Every investigator of slum life in our big cities, every record of the lives of the unfortunate poor in our midst proves that this is an absolute truth.