(An excerpt from The Strangest Secret Library available on Amazon)

Chapter 6 The System in Operation

IF you are the possessor of a very vivid imagination, you will probably be already well on the way towards practice with no more than the clue in that sentence: Act as if it were impossible to fail. If you are not, or if you have been badly hurt by failure, there may be some difficulty in beginning to act effectively, but there need not be very much.

To get at it more slowly, the idea is just this: instead of starting wherever you are – or, to be accurate, instead of trying to start, or swearing that you will start, or deceiving yourself into thinking that you are going to start tomorrow or the day after – beset by all the usual doubts of your own performance and memories of past pain, take time first to “make up” your state of mind, the mental condition in which you are going to work.

If you have an important appointment you do not rush out to it unkempt, unwashed, in any old clothes. You take some trouble to make yourself look as well as you can. Man or woman, you brush and clean your clothes, you look for your good points and emphasize them, you hide or improve your blemishes. Then, when you go to your appointment, you try to act as much as possible as if that heightened condition were your normal state.

Now, you are mentally going to an appointment, an appointment with your successful self. How can you arrange your frame of mind to make that appointment fruitful? You first give yourself a model. Everyone has had a taste of success in some line, perhaps in a very minor matter. Think back to it, however childish it was, even if it was a success of your schooldays. It needn’t be, even remotely, success in the adult work you hope to do. What you want to recapture is the state of mind in which you once succeeded. Be careful, now; you do not want to overshoot the mark. Don’t jump ahead into the elation which followed the success itself. Just recapture the steady, confident feeling that was yours when you knew the fact that was demanded of you, when you realized that you could do the thing that was necessary, that what you were about to do was well within your powers.

Try to bring back as clearly as you can every surrounding circumstance of that moment. Now transfer in imagination that success-sequence to the work in hand. If you were absolutely certain that everything about the present work would go as smoothly as everything went when you succeeded in the past, if you knew that what you are beginning would certainly go well, from the moment you begin till the moment of the work’s ultimate reception, how would you feel? How would you act? What is the state of mind you would be in as you launch out into it? Fix your attention on that, for that is to be your working frame of mind. Until you can reach it, refuse to begin; but insist to yourself on reaching it as soon as possible.

When you have found the mood hold it steadily for a while, as if waiting for a word of command. All at once you will feel a release of energy. You have received from yourself your working orders, and you can begin. You will see that you no longer have to push yourself to do the work; all your energy is free to push the work alone.

It was that extra, unnecessary labor of pushing your own inertia aside which made it seem, before, that you were too hampered to get started, were groping through a fog to get at your object, or were stopping continually to brush away half realized doubts, anxieties, memories of failure that buzzed about you like a cloud of gnats. Clear all that away before you begin to work by the simple expedient of refusing to contemplate the mere possibility of failure.

Next, work till you feel the unmistakable onset of true fatigue. True fatigue. The early flagging of attention will be only the old state of mind trying to creep in once more when your attention is elsewhere. If that happens, stop a second and say to yourself, “No. That is the way I will not think!” clear out the impulse entirely, and go on working. When your muscles and your mind honestly protest that they have done all they should do for the time, stop and find some relaxation. If you are held by office-hours, go away quietly alone for awhile when the old state of mind seems in danger of returning, or when you find that you are going to have to spend some time in altering the attitude of a fellow worker before you can move smoothly in the new way. Stay alone until you have reestablished your confident attitude, then return to the group.

When the time for relaxation comes you will find that you get the full joy of playing at last.

There are some persons who have been so badly bruised that, although any unwarrantable indulgence towards oneself should be guarded against, it may be necessary to begin this system by practicing it only for a short time each day, and on some secondary desire. Most educators agree that the best way to teach a child to act confidently and competently, and to facilitate the process of learning, is to ask him first to perform some small task which is well within his untrained powers. As Dorothy Canfield Fisher says in her excellent little book for parents and teachers, Self-reliance, “Success or failure in adult life depends largely on the energy, courage and self-reliance with which one attacks the problem of making his dreams come true.

Self-confidence in any enterprise comes as a rule from remembrance of past success.” And, again, Professor Hocking in Human Nature and Its Remaking: “Education consists in supplying the halted mind with a method of work and some examples of success. There are few more beautiful miracles than that which can be wrought by leading a despairing child into a trifling success; and there are few difficulties whose principle cannot be embodied in such simple form that success is at once easy and revealing. And by increasing the difficulty by serial stages, the small will, under the cumulative excitement of repeated and mounting success, may find itself far beyond the obstacle that originally checked it.”

So in our own cases, when self-confidence has been lost, should we find some little desire which for some reason has never been gratified. There are scores of these opportunities in every life. All that is necessary, in these experiments toward success, is either that some desire should be taken from the realm of dreaming into that of realization, or that a procedure which was not the perfect one for the effect to be produced should be corrected.

You remember the immortal Bunker Bean, and how his life changed when he was persuaded by the fraudulent medium that he was the reincarnation of a Pharaoh? His rise in the world was rapid; one success followed another and brought a third in its train. When at last he knew he had been cheated, that he was no incarnation of Rameses, nor was the mummy case that had been sold him made of wood that ever saw ancient Egypt, he had so learned the technique of success that he could not slip back into obscurity. If you observe any family likeness to H. T. Webster’s Mr. Milquetoast in yourself, it might be worth your while to get Bunker Bean and reread it; the time will not be wasted, since it is only a little less funny than it is fundamentally true.

Here are some examples of developing secondary talents so that confidence in important matters follows:

There is a notably successful physician in New York who recently learned to model in clay, and went on to learn the coloring and glazing of pottery. He did it with the direct intention of giving himself the experience of success in an avocation, since his profession, which is psychiatry, calls on him to deal constantly with refractory material. The confidence which he gains in one line is carried over into his difficult daily work; and in addition he has an engrossing hobby which freshens his mind and has become one more source of approval, since his modeling has come to be always amusing and frequently really distinguished. He must have had a great deal of talent, you may think. Well, what he did have was the knowledge that he had always been attracted by the idea of modeling; he had never touched clay until he was in his thirties. He simply took a desire which almost everyone has felt at some time or other and turned it into a source of pleasure and added self-confidence.

Again, in the Art Institute of Chicago there is a room called by the name of a business man who learned to paint after he was fifty. His work, entered in a competition in which his name could not possibly be known, took a first prize