Thought Is Not Enough
Thought is the power that sets the creative process in motion, which I talked about exhaustively in one of my previous posts. You can read it here if you haven’t before: Create Your Success With Your Thoughts. But today, I want to let you know that Thought is not enough to create the success that you desire in any area of your life.
I’m I contracting myself here? Certainly not. To get anything in life, you need to first create it in your mind through your thought, however, for it to become a reality in your life, there is something you need to do in addition to your thought.
I will allow Wallace D. Wattles to tell you what that other thing is from his book: Financial Success: Harnessing The Power Of Creative Thought.
Here is an excerpt from the book that covers the other part to creating and having whatever thing you desire in life in addition to your thought.
Acting in the Certain Way
Thought is the impelling force which causes the creative power to act. Thinking in the certain way will bring riches to you, but you must not rely upon thought alone, paying no attention to personal action. That is the rock upon which many otherwise scientific metaphysical thinkers meet shipwreck – the failure to connect thought with personal action.
We have not yet reached the stage of development, in which a person can create directly from the formless substance without nature’s processes or the work of human hands. A person must act as well as think.
By thought you can cause the gold in the hearts of the mountains to be impelled toward you. But, it will not mine itself, refine itself, coin itself into double eagles, and come rolling along the roads into your pocket.
Under the impelling force of the Supreme Power, people’s affairs will be so ordered that someone will be led to mine the gold for you. And, another person’s business transactions will be so directed that the gold will be brought toward you. You must arrange your own business affairs so that you are able to receive it when it comes to you. Your thought makes all things, animate and inanimate, work to bring you what you want. However, your personal activity must be such that you can rightly receive what you want when it reaches you. You are not to take it as charity or steal it. You must give every person more in use value than he gives you in cash value.
The scientific use of thought consists in forming a clear and distinct mental image of what you want, in holding fast to your purpose to get what you want, and in realizing with grateful faith that you do get what you want.
Do not try to project your thought in any mysterious or occult way with the idea of having it go out and do things for you. That is wasted effort and will weaken your power to think with sanity.
In the preceding chapters, I have fully explained the action of thought in getting rich. You must use your faith and purpose to positively impress your vision upon the formless substance, which has the same desire for more life that you have. And, this vision, received from you, sets all the creative forces at work in and through their regular channels of action, but directed toward you.
It is not your part to guide or supervise the creative process. All you have to do with that is to retain your vision, stick to your purpose, and maintain your faith and gratitude.
But you must act in the certain way so that you can appropriate what is yours when it comes to you – so that you can accept the things in your picture and put them in their proper places.
You can readily see the truth of this. When things reach you, they will be in the hands of other people who will ask an equivalent for them.
You can only get what is yours by giving the other person what is his.
Your pocketbook will not become bottomless; it will not always be full of money without effort on your part.
Receiving is the crucial point in the science of getting rich – right here, where thought and personal action must be combined. There are many people who, consciously or unconsciously, set the creative forces in action by the strength and persistence of their desires. However, they remain poor because they do not provide for the reception of the thing they want when it comes.
By thought, the thing you want is brought to you. By action, you receive it.
Whatever your action is to be, it is evident that you must act now. You cannot act in the past. It is essential to the clearness of your mental vision that you dismiss the past from your mind. You cannot act in the future because the future is not here yet. And, you cannot tell how you will want to act in any future contingency until that contingency has arrived.
Because you are not in the right business or the right environment now, do not think that you must postpone action until you get into the right business or environment. And, do not spend time in the present planning the best course in possible future emergencies. Have faith in your ability to meet any emergency when it arrives.
If you act in the present with your mind on the future, your present action will be with a divided mind and will not be effective. Put your whole mind into present action.
Do not give your creative impulse to the original substance and then sit down and wait for results; if you do, you will never get them. Act now. There is never any time but now, and there never will be any time but now. If you are ever to begin to make ready for the reception of what you want, you must begin now.
Your action must be in your present business or employment and must be upon the persons and things in your present environment.
You cannot act where you are not. You cannot act where you have been, and you cannot act where you are going to be. You can act only where you are.
Do not dwell on whether yesterday’s work was well or poorly done. Do today’s work well.
Do not try to do tomorrow’s work now. There will be plenty of time to do that when tomorrow comes.
Do not try by occult or mystical means to act on people or things that are out of your reach.
Do not wait for a change of environment before you act. Cause a change of environment through action.
You can act upon your present environment so as to cause yourself to be transferred to a better environment.
Hold with faith and purpose the vision of yourself in the better environment, but act upon your present environment with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your mind.
Do not spend any time in day dreaming or castle building. Hold to the one vision of what you want, and act now.
Do not cast about seeking some new thing to do or some strange, unusual, or remarkable action to perform as a first step toward getting rich. For some time to come your actions will probably be the same as those you have been performing. But, now you will perform those actions in the certain way which will surely make you rich.
If you are engaged in some business and feel that it is not the right one for you, do not wait until you get into the right business before you begin to act. Do not feel discouraged or sit down and lament because you are in the wrong place. No person was ever so misplaced that he could not find the right place, and no person was ever so involved in the wrong business that he could not get into the right business.
Hold the vision of yourself in the right business – with the purpose to get into it and the faith that you will get into it. But, act in your present business. Use your present business as the means of getting a better one, and use your present environment as the means of getting into a better one. Your vision of the right business, if held with faith and purpose, will cause the Supreme Power to move the right business toward you. And, your action – if performed in the certain way – will cause you to move toward the business.
If you are an employee and feel that you must change places in order to get what you want, do not project your thought into space and rely upon it to get you another job. It will probably fail to do so. Hold the vision of yourself in the job you have, and you will certainly get the job you want.
Your vision and faith will set the creative force in motion to bring it toward you. And, your action will cause the forces in your own environment to move you toward the place you want. In closing this chapter, I will add another statement to our syllabus:
There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.
A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.
A person can form things in his thought, and by impressing his thoughts upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.
In order to do this, a person must pass from the competitive to the creative mind. He must form a clear mental picture of the things he wants. And, he must hold this picture in his thoughts with the fixed purpose to get what he wants, and the unwavering faith that he will get what he wants – closing his mind to all that may tend to shake his purpose, dim his vision, or quench his faith.
That he may receive what he wants when it comes, a person must act now upon the people and things in his present environment.
Efficient Action
You must use your thought as I have directed in the previous chapters. You must begin to do what you can do where you are, and you must do all that you can do where you are.
You can advance only by being larger than your present place. And, no man is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place.
The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.
If no one quite filled his present place, there would be a backslide in everything. Those who do not quite fill their present places are a dead weight upon society, government, commerce, and industry. They must be carried along by others at a great expense. The progress of the world is retarded only by those who do not fill the places they are holding. They belong to a former age and a lower stage or plane of life. Their tendency is toward degeneration. No society could advance if every individual was smaller than his place because social evolution is guided by the law of physical and mental evolution. In the animal world, evolution is caused by an excess of life.
When an organism has more life than can be expressed in the functions of its own plane, it develops the organs of a higher plan, and a new species is originated.
There never would have been new species had there not been organisms which more than filled their places. The law is exactly the same for you. Your getting rich depends upon your applying this principle to your own affairs.
Every day is either a successful day or a day of failure. And, it is the successful days which get you what you want. If every day is a failure, you can never get rich; if every day is a success, you cannot help but get rich.
If there is something that may be done today and you do not do it, you have failed in so far as that thing is concerned. And, the consequences may be more disastrous than you imagine.
You cannot foresee the results of even the most trivial act. You do not know the workings of all the forces that have been set mobbing in your behalf. Much may be depending on your doing some simple act; it may be the very thing which is to open the door of opportunity to great possibilities. You can never know all the combinations which Supreme Power is making for you in the world of things and of human affairs. Your neglect or failure to do some small thing may cause a long delay in getting you what you want.
Do, every day, all that can be done that day.
There is, however, a limitation or qualification that you must take into account. You are not to overwork or to rush blindly into your business in the effort to do the greatest possible number of things in the shortest possible time.
You are not to try to do tomorrow’s work today or to do a week’s work in a day.
It is really not the number of things you do, but the efficiency of each separate action that counts.
Every act is, in itself, either efficient or inefficient. Every inefficient act is a failure, and if you spend your life doing inefficient acts, your whole life will be a failure. The more things you do, the worse for you, if all your acts are inefficient ones.
On the other hand, every efficient act is a success in itself, and if every act of your life is an efficient one, your whole life must be a success.
The cause of failure is doing too many things in an inefficient manner and not doing enough things in an efficient manner.
You will see that it is a self-evident proposition that if you do not do any inefficient acts and if you do a sufficient number of efficient acts, you will become rich. If it is possible for you to make each act an efficient one, you see again that the getting of riches is reduced to an exact science, like mathematics.
The matter turns, then, on the question of whether you can make each separate act a success in itself. And, this you can certainly do.
You can make each act a success, because the infinite is working with you, and the infinite cannot fail.
The Supreme Power is at your service. To make each act efficient you have only to put your own power into it.
This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you desire to harness the full power Of your creative thoughts, and get whatever you want in life, including the good financial success you’ve always desired.
