How to Succeed in the World Today Revised and Updated Edition: Life Stories of Successful People to Inspire and Motivate You

PART ONE

Think Positively about Yourself

Absolutely everyone, regardless of his or her circumstances, can have a happy, successful life. Everyone can enjoy waking up in the morning knowing that they will experience a joyful, uplifting day. This may sound like nonsense, but it’s true.

First and foremost, at the center of our relationship with others is our relationship with ourselves. As simplistic as it may sound, adopting a positive attitude is the essential first step toward our own happiness, and to how we present ourselves to, and are experienced by, everyone we meet.

In the first part of this book, Carnegie shares his insights on thinking positively about ourselves. He knew that our acceptance of who we are and encouragement about who we can become are the foundation upon which we build the lives we want.

CHAPTER ONE

Be Positive in Your Thoughts and Actions

The power of positive thinking to dramatically impact our lives is clearly not a new idea: everyone has put it forward, from the writers of the Bible to Shakespeare and on to the present day. It is a fundamental precept of Buddhism: controlling our thought processes is at the core of Buddhist practice. The mind is everything, said the Buddha. What you think you become.

We may be inclined to doubt the truth of the power of our minds to shape our lives. We may want to attribute our success or our happiness to circumstances: I had bad teachers and never learned how to read well! My father was abusive, so I only know fear and anger. Our circumstances may be difficult, but how we respond to them is at the heart of our daily experiences and our expectations. If we think, I have strong comprehension skills, and I can master economics, or I’m a confident, loving person, we can, in all actuality, begin to experience academic achievement or confidence.

Fear probably defeats more people than any other one handicap in life. A lot of people think they were born with fear. But psychological experiments have proved that a baby is born with fear of only two things: loud noises and the sensation of falling through space. All your other fears you have acquired and developed yourself. So if you developed them yourself, you can get rid of them yourself if you really want to.

Can you? Who is stopping you? Nobody but yourself. Where are these fears of yours? Ever stop to think of that? They exist nowhere except in your own mind. They can’t possibly exist anywhere else. And I am going to tell you how to get them out of your mind.

I’m going to give you four suggestions, which you can use to conquer an inferiority complex, destroy fear, and develop courage and self-confidence.

Four Steps to Self-Confidence

Stop thinking of yourself as shy or timid.

Act as if it were impossible to fail.

Become interested in other people.

Do the thing you fear to do.

Do you want to be courageous? All right. First, be courageous. Begin right now. Walk out of your house with your chin up, your head in the air, and a song in your heart.

Second, act as if it were impossible to fail. One of the most popular books in the 1930s was Dorothea Brande’s Wake Up and Live, and its main point was: Act as it were impossible to fail. Remember that the most important thing about you is the thoughts you think. Think thoughts of fear, and you are bound to be fearful. But if you think thoughts of courage and act as if you really had courage, you’ll gradually get courage.

Third, stop thinking of yourself. Get interested in other people. You are only fearful because you are thinking of what other people are thinking about you and what impression you’re making on them. How foolish! Nine times out of ten, the other person isn’t thinking about you at all. He is just like you: he is thinking about himself.

Fourth, do the thing that you fear to do, and keep on doing it until you get a record of successful experiences behind you. If you are a salesperson, pick out the buyer you most fear to call on. Go and see them tomorrow. When you get in their office, tell them that you have been afraid for years to call on them. If you are nervous and shaky right then, admit it. That will break the ice. Tell them they are so important that the very thought of calling on them makes your knees tremble. They will take that as a compliment. That will make them like you and want to help you.

I am not giving you new ideas. They have been used and tested for thousands of years. If you go out and apply these principles, they will work miracles for you. I know, because I have seen this happen with thousands of people.

All negative thinking, whether generated by fear or resentment or anger, is something that we ourselves create. If we create it, we can certainly create something else in its stead. Yes, it is much easier to give this advice than it is to actually change the negative thoughts that we’ve grown so accustomed to. But consciously try it out. If you’re afraid to ask someone for a date, try telling yourself that you’re perfectly comfortable asking that person out, and ask anyway. If you think that you can’t jog a mile—I’m out of shape; it’s too hard!—try telling yourself that you actually can jog that distance, and get to the track.

You’ll be amazed at how your positive ideas about yourself will be shared by others. And you’ll be delighted to learn just how capable you are, how much you can enjoy yourself, and how completely your experiences and feelings will follow your thoughts.

CHAPTER TWO

The Road to Happiness

What do you want more than anything else in the world? That’s an easy question to answer. You want happiness. Everybody does.

The answer to being happy, as simplistic as it sounds, is to think happy thoughts. Our experience of every event and every interaction completely relies on how we think about it. Why not think something good?

Novelist Grace Miller White suggests seven ways you and I can be happy. She calls them her seven roads to happiness. Follow these roads, and what a happy person you’ll be!

The first road to happiness is: smile! Smiles are contagious. Get in the habit of smiling as soon as you open your eyes in the morning. Smile as you fall asleep at night.

Just listen to what a few smiles did for one young lady. Mary said she was miserable. How could a person be happy, she asked, when my mother and sisters are always chewing at each other, seeing which one could bite the deepest? And my young brother! What a pain he is!

Although Mary was only in her teens, she looked fully twenty-five, because she frowned so much. Grace said to her, By chance, have you a smile somewhere behind those pretty teeth? The corners of her lips twitched a little. Mary sighed, and said she never smiled anymore. There was simply nothing to smile about.

So Grace told her she must start making others happy. And to do so she must follow one road: smile!

Grace saw her about a month later. And what a different child! She looked eight years younger. She positively beamed. She said, Mrs. White, you told me to smile, and I did. And you know, I discovered you can’t smile at a person and fight with him at the same time.

It’s positively amazing what a flood of sunshine can be let loose by a few little smiles. The American steel magnate Charles M. Schwab once said his smile had been worth a million dollars, and he was probably underestimating the truth.

The second road to happiness is to give for the joy of giving. One woman craved happiness, but when she was asked if she ever thought of making others happy, she said no.

Grace told this woman to keep only one thought in her mind: she must think only of what she could do for others, at least for a week. The idea didn’t appeal to the woman very much, but she agreed to try it.

First, the woman practiced on a hungry man. She took him to a restaurant and bought him a hearty meal. Next, she saw a blind boy standing patiently at the curb. She helped him cross the street. That woman experienced a new warmth in her heart. Now those were only little things, but what a miracle they performed! We can all find new happiness with just a few thoughtful acts every day. There is often more real happiness in giving than in receiving.

The third road to happiness is very easy and very effective: look for the good qualities in everyone and everything. After all, if we’re only going to look on the bad side of every picture, we can’t be very happy, can we?

Rule four is: be happy in spite of adverse circumstances. We can do it, and it’s lots of fun. Grace told about a mother who had a dearly beloved son. He was a brilliant boy: an engineer, with several college degrees. Suddenly he was stricken with polio. His mother could have poisoned his life and hers with worries and sadness. But what did she do? Each day she went smilingly on her way, never weeping, never displaying grief. Her heroic fight to be happy was an inspiration. Conditions could be much worse, she said one day. My son loves me devotedly. That’s all I ask.

If that dear mother could be happy in spite of such misfortunes, surely you and I can be happy in spite of our little troubles. Our happiness depends on our mental attitude. Abe Lincoln used to say, Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

The fifth rule is, fill your mind, your heart, and your hands with love. You’ll be surprised to find how it will overcome every hateful thought and experience. People go around criticizing others, yet it’s all in their own thinking. If you love with all your might and main, you can’t be unhappy about these things.

For example, once a man came to see Grace, and he was so unhappy that he wept. He hated the world and everyone in it. When his sobs had subsided into short little gasps, Grace asked, Feel better now, don’t you?

No, he answered. I’m going to kill myself.

Grace did a funny thing. She helped that man make out a list of the ten best ways to commit suicide. Then she asked him to pick one way—just one—that wouldn’t cause anyone any trouble or any pain. Because you mustn’t hurt other people, she said.

For several minutes, the man stared at the paper. Then he asked, ever so softly, There isn’t any nice way, is there?

Of course there isn’t, Grace replied. So snap out of it! Live! Now I’ll tell you what to do. Get the hate and bitterness out of your heart. Every time a mean or hateful thought comes to you, immediately think of something pleasant, something beautiful. Substitute thoughts of love for thoughts of hate.

In less than a week of this new way of thinking, the man found a nice job with a good salary. And let me tell you, he said, when I gave my wife my first paycheck, it was some grand sight.

The sixth rule: mind your own business. To muddle about in someone else’s affairs seems much easier than minding our own business, but it can have adverse effects. Grace tells about a very handsome and intelligent man who had an attractive personality and good manners. But he couldn’t hold a job.

He said that his employer should have had a sense of gratitude for all he had done.

A sense of gratitude? Grace asked. What have you ever done for him?

Oh, I told him where he was wrong, and what’s more, I told him about a lot of mistakes he was making. The next day I was fired!

That isn’t surprising. The more Grace talked with him, the more she realized that this fine-looking young man had been interested in the business of everyone but his own. Mind your own business, she told him. He tried it, and it worked wonders.

Now, for the seventh, and last, rule for the road to happiness: be thankful things are as good as they are. They might be a lot worse. Most of us aren’t half as happy as we ought to be, largely because we concentrate on the little, unimportant things that we dislike instead of thinking about the thousands of things for which we ought to be profoundly grateful.

I was walking home from the train one night, and I was a bit unhappy about something; I