Dynamic Thinking: The Technique For Achieving Self-Confidence And Success

Melvin Powers

• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786256263
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Dynamic Thinking will teach you simple truths that are the basis of all success and will provide effective techniques for putting them to work in your life. You will learn how to harness the power of your conscious and subconscious minds and use that power to accomplish whatever you want.Melvin Powers' classic book Dynamic Thinking is your blueprint to dynamic living. It provides you with an opportunity to build the life you've wanted but never dared to believe you could have.—Wilshire Book Company

CHAPTER I—OPPORTUNITY UNLIMITED

THERE IS PERHAPS no greater contradiction to truth nor denunciation of fact than that embodied in the oft-quoted “axiom” which would have us believe that opportunity knocks but once. Were this distressing cliché factual, rather than legendary, it might be well for most of us to subordinate all inspiration, ingenuity and application to the inevitable course of defeat and self-pity. For how many of us have failed to heed that first subtle inkling of opportunity and, subsequently, the knock on the door which proclaimed its arrival. How often has opportunity eluded us, despite our eager determination to herald its first approach, simply because we were not equipped to recognize it as such, and then much later discovered our misconception? How often has opportunity confronted us in the form of a routine incident without the slightest semblance of being a pretentious phenomenon, and then, eventually, through unpredictable circumstances, evolved lamentably, as a mighty potent weapon for accomplishment?

How often, even though we have accurately diagnosed the early symptoms as those belonging to opportunity, have we, after a careful clinical appraisal of their potential resourcefulness, concluded that it would be a matter of good judgment to forfeit this in favor of a future opportunity more suitably attuned to our particular talents or inclinations?

Should all ambition, initiative, and inspiration be condemned to the grim reaper of frustration by one blatant decree of fate which caused us to ignore that first nebulous signal of opportunity? Definitely not!

On the other hand, opportunity will not condone a policy of perpetual rejection. One cannot, through indolence, lack of initiative, doubt, skepticism, fear of innovation, disillusionment, and, above all, negative thinking, reap the benefits of opportunity. The implication is not that opportunity is a jealous, sensitive mistress who will withdraw her favor from an unresponsive suitor, for opportunity is insensitive, indiscriminate, and recurrent. The faculties of the individual for availing himself of the fruits of opportunity will become dull and ineffective with disuse. Though the fertile soil around him become laden with a rich harvest of opportunity, his equipment, dull and rusty, through destructive idleness, will fail to reap the harvest. As does nothing succeed like success, so does nothing fail like failure nurtured from the insidious bosom of negative thought and lack of action.

Do not permit this to happen to you. Be alert to your next big chance for success; be equipped to meet the challenge. I am going to furnish you the necessary tools.

Opportunity is always knocking at our door. American markets are constantly receptive to new products. Companies constantly alert to the highly competitive nature of the industrial scene, are eager for new ideas which might enable them to step ahead of the field. Industry is always eager to entertain new ideas, for which millions of dollars are paid each year. New businesses based on a single idea are always starting. These businesses, as a rule, do not require a special skill. They require only an idea. As I write this, I am thinking of the new game, “Scrabble.” At this point over one million games have been sold at three dollars apiece followed by the sale of thousands of copies of the book “How To Win At Scrabble.” Anyone could have thought of the game. It is a simple idea; just another form of a crossword puzzle. The game, “Monopoly,” too, has sold over a million sets, and here again the idea was simple.

Having the basic idea is not quite all that is necessary. You must sell yourself on the potential of your idea and then formulate your plan to merchandise it. Will you do it overnight? Usually the answer will be no. Many people may try to discourage you. There is latent in human nature a strange quality which repels any suggestion or operation that deviates from the norm. In psychiatric terminology, this is known as neophobia. Generally speaking, people are conservative and addicted to standards of practice which conform to the conventions they have come to regard as standard and workable. By their very existence, these standards are regarded as superior, admitting little by way of modification or improvement. The imagination must be jolted out of its complacency, and enthusiasm must be generated by your own invasive confidence and enthusiasm for what you are attempting to inaugurate.

The important thing to remember is that if you yourself are sold on the merit of your idea you must pursue it to its final conclusion. Submit to your own intuition. Above all, bear in mind this important fact: Apart from matters which require the utmost in technical skill and knowledge, your judgment is as good as the next man’s. Believe that it is, know that it is, and take from it the confidence and drive that is so uniquely the byproduct of deep, honest conviction in your own resolutions.

Naturally, you, as a layman, or even a specialist in an unrelated field of endeavor, would not presume to contradict an accredited physician by insisting that what he diagnosed as appendicitis was, in fact, a hyper-acidity of the stomach, merely because you entertained a certain enthusiasm for hyper-acidity.

It is not only experience, but years of highly skilled training and academic knowledge that you are seeking to contravert here. However, eliminate the skilled training and the academics. Reduce the situation to one wherein you are pitting your judgment only against the matter of experience, and you should be far less reticent about venturing an opinion on the subject. To refute the advantages of experience would be more than a little ridiculous. To submit as inviolate the theory that experience precludes the validity of contradictory opinion predicated on lack of experience, would be equally ridiculous. Do not allow yourself to become discouraged merely because you feel the person discounting your views is fortified with more experience than you possess. Respect it, of course. But do not become awed by it to the extent that it stifles your own imagination and opinions. If, after making proper allowance for the other’s advantage of experience, you are still favorably inclined toward your own opinion, by all means place full reliance on your own judgment. Should you ultimately find that you are wrong, your decision will at least have been the mistake of your own honest judgment. There is enormously more consolation in this than in the realization that your error was the result of faith in the miscalculated judgment of another.

In support of the premise that experience is not an irrefutable advantage, and should not be permitted to restrict independence of thought and deed, you need only to look in any direction around you to find situations wherein aggressive, positive thinking men capable of sound judgment and decision have forged ahead of men of considerably more experience, who have become smugly complacent in the assumed invulnerability of their greater experience.

Too often does the assurance that stems from long experience fail to yield to modification required by changing conditions and circumstances, and in these instances its effectiveness is considerably reduced sometimes to a degree that would render it less valuable than none at all.

So bear in mind the importance of independent thought, and reliance on independent judgment. Do not be discouraged by contradictory opinions based upon greater experience. Your thought might have been predicated on new facts, fresh circumstances and altered conditions which the other man did not take into account. There is a danger latent in all experience: the failure to constantly subject your store of knowledge to the test of change continually going on in our realm of existence.

To illustrate, let us resort to a broad and ludicrous example, but one which, nevertheless, demonstrates the point. Assume that you are a physician, Doctor X, fresh out of school, equipped with all the knowledge that your textbooks, laboratories, and instructors have been able to furnish, but, naturally, sadly lacking in one essential—experience. Dr. Y is a reputable physician, of many, many years of experience, and has become lulled into the state of security that often accompanies the know-how attending experience. Dr. Y examines the stricken patient and correctly diagnoses the illness as being pneumonia. Whereupon, he reaches down into his fund of experience and comes up with a suggested remedy. The patient fails to respond and death appears imminent. You, Dr. X, are called in, and upon examination, also diagnose the illness as pneumonia. You are told what remedies Dr. Y has administered. You have consider-able respect for the great experience that you know to be Dr. Y’s stock in trade. If you are awed by his experience to a degree which stifles your own independent thought and imagination, you will yield to his greater experience, abandon your own ideas, and allow the patient to die. If you are not to be overcome by the magnitude of his experience, you will rely on your own independently calculated opinion which suggested that in this particular case, a new drug will help, and the patient survives. Dr. Y has become overly complacent in, and reliant upon, his experience, without subjecting it to the constant test of innovation and new circumstances. Therefore, he was not aware of the new magic drug. You lack his experience, but your opinion was based upon fresh independent thought which refused to be thwarted by a contradictory conclusion predicated upon greater experience. And yours is the glorious satisfaction that comes from formulating your own judgment, and acting according.

If I have cloaked this point with a seeming redundancy, it was for the express purpose of conveying to you the importance of independent thought and reliance upon your own judgment. If you are convinced of that, you are already equipped with one of the most potent and resourceful implements in our tool chest of success.

In every era of prosperity there is talk of economic recession to follow. The years immediately following war years are generally plush in the economic by-product of industrial recovery. There is a frantic drive to resuscitate inventories depleted by the necessity of having diverted all resources to the war effort. Employment attains new peaks; new commodities are bought up as soon as they reach the sales floors; price ceases to become an issue and prosperity permeates the entire economic system. Eventually, there comes the leveling off period when the laws of economics again take over. The boom that existed during and immediately after the war years is at an end. But should this mean that opportunity is lost? Of course not.

We hear talk now of a recession. It is true that business in general is not as booming as it was during the war years. But should this mean that opportunity is lost? Of course not. I would venture to say that opportunity is greater than ever, because getting back to a normal period of competition requires greater ingenuity and resourcefulness from all branches of business.

You may ask, “Where do I fit into this picture of commerce? How can I do something creative when I don’t have the opportunity?” There are answers. Do you work for an employer? Then try to find a better and more efficient way of doing things at your own job. If you come up with an idea to improve or expedite your portion of the work tell it to your employer. He will be grateful to you. The important thing is to get the thinking wheels in motion in your own mind. We want to dust off the cobwebs, so to speak, and start you thinking in a constructive manner. If you are self-employed, you can try to think of better ways of doing your work, or of ways to stimulate your sales or improve your services. Chances are that you are not working at top efficiency. Why not set aside ten minutes every day, either in the morning or just before retiring, to this task of constructive thinking. Ideas will come to you. There is a specialized technique to be used, which we will discuss thoroughly later in the book.

Are you discouraged with things in general? Do you feel that opportunity will never visit you? You are wrong! Discouragement is the very thing that you must fight. How do you do it? You do it by forcing yourself to change your mental attitude. Don’t dwell on your failures. Instead think of your success.

Necessity many times is the springboard for success. Many a poor boy has become a millionaire because his early poverty impelled him to achievement. Often such a person was not an especially good talker, and many times he did not have the advantage of higher education. Yet, to the surprise of many he achieved a high station in life. What was the asset that somehow forged him and others like him ahead? It was determination, faith in his own ability, and enthusiasm for what he was doing.

The president of the Necchi Sewing Machine Company was a refugee from Poland. When he came to the United States several years ago he was penniless. His only trade was fixing sewing machines, but he had a burning desire to achieve success. He was the first to import the Necchi sewing machine from Italy. Within a relatively short period of time he built a million dollar concern.

Look at the successful people in your own community. Have they all had college educations? Were their positions just handed to them? Did they all inherit their wealth? Did success just happen to come their way? You will find they have one common denominator, and that is, all of them possessed a vital enthusiasm for their work. They were consistent in the furtherance of their goals, and they believed in their own abilities.

You may say that the same opportunities that existed years ago do not exist today. That is true. Today’s opportunities are different, but greater in number. If your idea has merit you can capitalize on it almost overnight. Years ago we did not have the mass distribution systems and the mass communication that we have today. Think of all the products that are sold through magazines and newspapers. Radio and television offer other vast media for reaching the public. Many products owe their quick success to television. I am sure that many of you have seen the advertising for Charles Antell Formula No. 9 on your television sets. I, myself, started using this hair preparation after I had seen it very cleverly advertised on television.

Just think of how many ball point pens have been sold in recent years because of effective advertising. Yet the ball point pen was not a radically new idea. It was merely an improvement on an existent article; an improvement that made pens “leak proof.” I don’t have to tell you the results. You yourself probably own several ball point pens.

The book-publishing industry has been able to increase its sales by millions of books each year because someone had the foresight to print popular books in pocket editions to sell at twenty-five cents apiece in addition to the larger and heavier bound versions which sell for three and four dollars a copy. Normally the average book sells about five thousand copies. Now the initial run on any pocket size book is two hundred and fifty thousand copies, and many have sold over the million mark. This idea could have occurred to anyone. The idea of a comic book started a billion dollar industry.

I have pointed out these few examples to show you that opportunities are always there for those who are willing to put on their thinking caps and devote a little time toward reaching their goals. Ideas will come to you automatically, once you begin to channelize your thinking. Don’t submit to the course of least resistance, which would have you believe that there is nothing new under the sun; that there is no idea which might occur to you which hasn’t already occurred to someone else; that if the idea were of any value, surely it would ha...