“Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow.”
Norman Vincent Peale is the author of the famous book The Power of Positive Thinking. That book and other works from Peale went on to sell tens of millions of copies. During the depression he, JC Penney and Thomas Watson – of IBM fame – spent time on philanthropy. Peale also had his own radio show for over half a decade.
Here are some of my favorite tips from Peale.
- Focus on today.
- Don’t take tomorrow to bed with you.
- Don’t walk around with the world on your shoulders.
- Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. Don’t take yourself so seriously.
- You may be surprised if you just step up and face your obstacles.
- Stand up to your obstacles and do something about them. You will find that they haven’t half the strength you think they have.
- The “how” thinker gets problems solved effectively because he wastes no time with futile “ifs” but goes right to work on the creative “how.”
- Understand to overcome.
- Understanding can overcome any situation, however mysterious or insurmountable it may appear to be.
- Expect to get what you expect.
- Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are.
- Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture… Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.
- Believe it is possible to solve your problem. Tremendous things happen to the believer. So believe the answer will come. It will.
- Find the upsides of the problem.
- Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don’t have any problems, you don’t get any seeds.
- Problems are to the mind what exercise is to the muscles, they toughen and make strong.
- Check your phraseology.
- Watch your manner of speech if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful.
- Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory.
- Don’t go too fast.
- To go fast, row slowly.
- Develop the most useful habits of thinking.
- Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate. So practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast.
- Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex.
- Learn not only from your mistakes.
- We’ve all heard that we have to learn from our mistakes, but I think it’s more important to learn from successes. If you learn only from your mistakes, you are inclined to learn only errors.
- Check what you did right and don’t get lost in basking on your glory. It will make it easier to repeat whatever you did that created the success.
Simply Simple 