The Science of Being Great the Practical Guide to a Life of Power by Wallace D
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OCTOBER OCTOBER 2011 The Science of Being Great The Practical Guide to a Life of Power by Wallace D. Wattles A Perfect World It’s not our circumstances but our attitudes that need improvement. QUICK OVERVIEW If Wallace D. Wattles lived in this century, his works would have undoubtedly found a large audience among those who patronize the self-help section of bookstores. Many of the theories, suggestions and tools in The Science of Being Great are mirrored today in 12-step programs, as well as in motivational speeches and books about how to improve your life. According to Wattles, the answer is simple Published in 1911 and within your control: To change their lives and the world, individuals need only change their attitudes. Wattles argued that the world was a perfect place for any given moment in time. The world is perfect for the individuals who live in it and for that exact moment in history. Any improvement needs to come from within, and Wattles clearly spells out the steps for internal change. Along the way, he meanders SUCCESS Points into in-depth discussions on religion and provides examples that are dated, but his This book will teach you message remains refreshingly modern. how to: • Change your beliefs by APPLY AND ACHIEVE changing your self-talk It’s easy to focus on how others need to change, to complain, to feel superior, and to give in to the notion that the world is an evil place. But if you want to be • Train your mind with daily great, none of those are the right path to take. Instead, Wattles explains you need to thought exercises develop the attitude that your power and potential emanate from within. You need • Transform thoughts into action to believe that the world is a perfect place—despite its obvious imperfections. In other words, it’s perfect for those who live in it at any given moment. After you have • Shape your destiny with wrapped your brain around those notions, think about what you tell yourself day habitual thoughts after day, week after week, and realize that your actions follow your thoughts and words. If your self-talk is less than perfect, change what you believe and what you tell yourself, so that positive actions can ow from you. Wattles counsels that if you believe you are healthy, you will be. If you see yourself as nancially successful, that too will follow. If you want to be great, it’s in your hands—or at least, in your mind. Page 1 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES The Science of Being Great his must be your point of view: The world and all fear, no cause for anxiety, nothing to worry about. Never it contains is perfect, though not completed. complain of any of these things. They are perfect; this is the “All’s right with the world.” That is the great very best possible world for the stage of development man fact. There is nothing wrong with anything; there has reached. Tis nothing wrong with anybody. All the facts of life you must contemplate from this standpoint. There is nothing wrong with nature. Nature is a great We do not know where the advancing presence working bene cently for the happiness of all. All things in Nature are good; she has no evil. She is not boundary of the mental powers of completed; for creation is still un nished, but she is going man is; we do not even know that on to give to man even more bountifully than she has given there is a boundary. to him in the past. Nature is a partial expression of God, and God is love. She is perfect, but not complete. So it is of human society and government. What though This will sound like rank folly to many, perhaps to most there are trusts and combinations of capital and strikes and people. “What!” they will say, “are not child labor and the lockouts and so on. All these things are part of the forward exploitation of men and women in lthy and unsanitary movement; they are incidental to the evolutionary process factories evil things? Aren’t saloons evil? Do you mean to say of completing society. When it is complete there will be that we shall accept all these and call them good?” harmony; but it cannot be completed without them. Child labor and similar things are no more evil than Behold it is all very good. See government and industry the way of living and the habits and practices of the cave as being perfect now, and as advancing rapidly toward being dweller were evil. His ways were those of the savage stage complete; then you will understand that there is nothing to of man’s growth, and for that stage they were perfect. Our industrial practices are those of the savage stage of industrial development, and they are also perfect. The Right Attitude Nothing better is possible until we cease to be mental There are two mental attitudes a man may take. savages in industry and business, and become men and One makes him like a football. It has resilience women. This can only come about by the rise of the whole and reacts strongly when force is applied to it, but race to a higher viewpoint. And this can only come about by it originates nothing; it never acts of itself. There is the rise of such individuals here and there as are ready for no power within it. Men of this type are controlled the higher viewpoint. by circumstances and environment; their destinies The cure for all this inharmoniousness lies not with the are decided by things external to themselves. The masters or employers but with the workers themselves. Principle of Power within them is never really active Whenever they reach a higher viewpoint, whenever at all. They never speak or act from within. they shall desire to do so, they can establish complete The other attitude makes man like a flowing brotherhood and harmony in Industry; they have the spring. Power comes out from the center of him. numbers and the power. They are getting now what they He has within him a well of water springing up desire. Whenever they desire more in the way of a higher, into everlasting life, he radiates force; he makes purer, more harmonious life, they will receive more. True, changes to his environment. The Principle of Power they want more now, but they only want more of the things in him is in constant action. He is self-active. “He that make for animal enjoyment, and so industry remains hath life in himself.” No greater good can come to in the savage, brutal, animal stage; when the workers begin any man or woman than to become self-active. to rise to the mental plane of living and ask for more of Page 2 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES The Science of Being Great the things that make for the life of the mind and soul, if your practices are not such as to separate you from God, the industry will at once be raised above the plane of savagery thing you want will come to you in material form. and brutality. Make no thought-form of yourself in connection with But it is perfect now upon its plane; behold, in fact it is all disease or sickness, but form a conception of health. Make a very good. thought-form of yourself as strong and hearty and perfectly All this does not prevent you from working for better well; impress this thought-form on creative intelligence, and things. You can work to complete an un nished society, if your practices are not in violation of the laws by which instead of to renovate a decaying one; and you can work the physical body is built, your thought-form will become with a better heart and a more hopeful spirit. manifest in your esh. It will make an immense di erence with your faith and Make a thought-form of yourself, as you desire to be, and spirit whether you look upon civilization as a good thing set your ideal as near to perfection as your imagination is that is becoming better, or as a bad and evil thing that capable of forming the conception. Fix upon your ideal of is decaying. One viewpoint gives you an advancing and what you wish to make of yourself; consider well and be sure expanding mind and the other gives you a descending that you make the right choice; that is, the one that will be the and decreasing mind. One viewpoint will make you grow most satisfactory to you in a general way. greater and the other will inevitably cause you to grow Do not pay too much attention to the advice or suggestions smaller. One will enable you to work for the eternal things; of those around you: do not believe that any one can know, to do large works in a great way toward the completing better than yourself, what is right for you. Listen to what of all that is incomplete and inharmonious; and the other others have to say, but always form your own conclusions. will make you a mere patchwork reformer, working almost without hope to save a few lost souls from what you will BE YOURSELF grow to consider a lost and doomed world. Do not let other people decide what you are to be. Be what So you see it makes a vast di erence to you, this matter you feel you want to be.