The “As If” Success Principle — Part One

WHERE TO BEGIN

Man was cre­at­ed with an awe­some, pow­er­ful, and some­time mys­te­ri­ous abil­i­ty to suc­ceed in life.  Lit­er­al­ly, man was cre­at­ed to suc­ceed!  We have the abil­i­ty to choose the direc­tion of our life’s jour­ney.  You may have already begun your suc­cess jour­ney; if not, then start today, now.  You can choose now to have a suc­cess­ful jour­ney.  Begin today by seek­ing only knowl­edge and wis­dom rel­e­vant to our suc­cess­ful jour­ney.  Knowl­edge, when it is truth, will set you “free” to pur­sue suc­cess.  Through liv­ing and learn­ing expe­ri­ences wis­dom will grow.

MEN AND WOMEN WERE CREATED TO SUCCEED

Under­stand that God wants suc­cess for you.  You have already begun your jour­ney.  I encour­age you to con­tin­ue today, now by check­ing your map.  Make sure you are on the right road.  Seek knowl­edge and wis­dom.  Knowl­edge, when it is truth, will set you “free” to pur­sue suc­cess.

BUILD A SUCCESS FOUNDATION 

Dur­ing my more than 50 years as entre­pre­neur I spent many years in mul­ti-fam­i­ly apart­ment devel­op­ment.  And we all know apart­ments must be built on firm foun­da­tions to pre­vent move­ment and set­tle­ment to avoid unin­tend­ed con­se­quences to the build­ings.  Life is full of events that can give us unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.  Life requires a sol­id foun­da­tion.  Knowl­edge and truth are co-cat­a­lysts to our foun­da­tion.  There are many such co-cat­a­lysts nec­es­sary to build­ing a sol­id foun­da­tion.  Build­ing your life foun­da­tion will include the heart [your spir­it], truth, knowl­edge, wis­dom, choic­es, faith, hope, love, will, words, patience, and actions.  All are nec­es­sary when putting faith into action.

I would sug­gest you should begin, or con­tin­ue, your jour­ney by build­ing a sol­id foun­da­tion of knowl­edge and truth to avoid unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.  Truth must be present in all the areas men­tioned.  A foun­da­tion of false beliefs will crum­ble.  Seek the truth and learn as much as you can con­tain about each area.  As you learn, the lights will begin to come on men­tal­ly.   Then, you can make the choice [free will] and accept the truths into your heart.   They must become part of you and be in our spir­it heart.

To deny the truth will not change the TRUTH and is self-destruc­tive.

HAVE A BURNING DESIRE

William James, one of the great philoso­phers said “If you only care enough for a result, you will almost cer­tain­ly attain it.  Only you must, then, real­ly wish these things, and wish them exclu­sive­ly, and not wish at the same time a hun­dred oth­er incom­pat­i­ble things just as strong­ly.”  And Napoleon Hill in his books on suc­cess also wrote of desire, “There is a dif­fer­ence between wish­ing for a thing and being READY to receive it.”

When you learn to believe that with the Cre­ator all things are pos­si­ble, then your desire can be made to burn hot enough; and you will be ready to focus on hav­ing a suc­cess­ful life’s jour­ney.   It takes FAITH; so only when one believes will you gen­er­ate that BURNING desire.

FAITH TO BELIEVE IN GOD AND YOURSELF

Faith is nec­es­sary for any accom­plish­ment.  Edu­ca­tion that includes hear­ing and doing will grow your faith.  A jour­ney through life will be very dan­ger­ous for any­one who does not believe in them­selves.  It is a fact that self con­fi­dence grows from suc­cess­ful expe­ri­ences.  Start now to expe­ri­ence and learn and become self con­fi­dent.

POWER OF THE MIND

Even the philoso­pher Pla­to, in an era some 400 BCE, had learned and wrote that we can take charge of our thoughts.  For many, many, years, some believed our thoughts con­trolled us; not at all the truth.  I have learned the mind, will, and emo­tions co-exist in man. The mind is a tru­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and pow­er­ful fea­ture of man.   It has been accept­ed by schol­ars such as Maxwell Maltz in his book Psy­cho-Cyber­net­ics, that Man has two minds, the con­scious and the sub-con­scious [uncon­scious] mind.  I have come to believe that there is a direct con­nec­tion of the sub­con­scious mind to the heart of man [spir­it man].  Doubt and fear both orig­i­nate in the con­scious mind, then if accept­ed goes to the sub­con­scious mind and then to the heart, thus become what we believe in our heart.  The pro­found con­cept of “renew­ing the mind” spoke of in the bible is an imper­a­tive to our hav­ing a suc­cess­ful jour­ney.  We can have a renew­ing of the spir­it of the mind which I believe to be when the sub­con­scious con­nects to the heart.

About the mind it should be not­ed:  Psy­cho-Cyber­net­ics is a self-help book writ­ten by Amer­i­can writer Maxwell Maltz in 1960. Moti­va­tion­al and self-help experts in per­son­al devel­op­ment, includ­ing Zig Ziglar, Tony Rob­bins, Bri­an Tra­cy have based their tech­niques on Maxwell Maltz. Many of the psy­cho­log­i­cal meth­ods of train­ing elite ath­letes are based on the con­cepts in Psy­cho-Cyber­net­ics as well. Wikipedia

IMAGING AS IF IT BE

This suc­cess build­ing prin­ci­ple is not dif­fi­cult to prac­tice.   Any­one can do it.  It is a pow­er­ful, even mys­te­ri­ous, force of our Creator’s Nature built deep into our minds.  It is work­ing on, a built into man, prin­ci­ple that dri­ves man to become, or achieve, exact­ly what is imaged.  Our imag­in­ings pass from the present mys­te­ri­ous­ly into our sub­con­scious mind as seeds ready to grow.   They are then passed into our fer­tile hearts where they will grow as long as they are prop­er­ly nour­ished.  Our heart accepts images and growth begins.  There begins an inde­scrib­able force to bring the image into real­i­ty.  Then From the abun­dance of our heart our des­tiny grows.  Imag­ing some­thing as if it be real can grow your faith.

If I were to make a moti­va­tion­al speech to young group of inex­pe­ri­enced stu­dents about pos­i­tive think­ing in which I said to my audi­ence, “You must have a pos­i­tive atti­tude about self improve­ment.  When you lack inter­est you can just say and act as if you are enthused and you will become enthused.   When fac­ing a task you must think you can.  Then you can.”  Most of these young peo­ple would accept it to be a fact; some would think of it as pos­i­tive think­ing, oth­ers might dis­miss it alto­geth­er.

Of course these pre­cepts are “poten­tial­ly true” and are encour­aged by many moti­va­tion­al speak­ers.  There are many leg­endary moti­va­tion­al speak­ers, pop­u­lar min­is­ters, and oth­ers who have pro­claimed philoso­phies that infer we can man­i­fest into our lives things that are non-exis­tent and bring them into real­i­ty now.   Some offer advice on how to make this hap­pen.  One famous moti­va­tor, Dale Carnegie, spoke and taught “Act enthu­si­as­tic and you will become enthu­si­as­tic.”   This is a true con­cept.  The “As If” prin­ci­ple is an expan­sion on what Dale Carnegie and oth­ers were teach­ing  I will expand on it and add oth­er truths and show how and why they work for some, and not for oth­ers.  You can learn to use them to your ben­e­fit.

This “As If Prin­ci­ple”, like many oth­er uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ples of truth, is like­ly to be gross­ly mis­un­der­stood.  To many it is lit­tle known and scarce­ly under­stood, and to oth­ers may even be a secret [as in being hid from their view].  I pray you will have the desire to learn the truth about this con­cept and God’s intent.

HOW “AS IF IMAGING” WORKS

These con­cepts work by putting faith into action.  Is this Mag­ic?  No.  Pos­si­ble yes! It is REAL and it WORKS.  While this is not “… the rest of the sto­ry,” as Paul Har­vey used to say, it is indeed a valu­able intro­duc­tion to anoth­er uni­ver­sal suc­cess prin­ci­ple that is lit­tle known and scarce­ly under­stood.  I will con­tin­ue details in Part One and Part Two com­ing.

FOLLOW MY COMING ARTICLES

In com­ing arti­cles I will show how this suc­cess prin­ci­ple WILL WORK for you, and I will include some true sto­ries of how I learned to use this prin­ci­pal suc­cess­ful­ly.  The truths described here are many and are truths that can be ver­i­fied in the KJV of the bible.  Quo­ta­tion marks, ital­ics, bold­ing, and under­scor­ing I use for empha­sis.

REFERENCES

 The ref­er­ences here are by no means all that are avail­able.

Romans 12:2 And be not con­formed to this world: but be ye trans­formed by the renew­ing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and accept­able, and per­fect, will of God.

Eph­esians 4:23 And be renewed in the spir­it of your mind;

1 Corinthi­ans 1:26–28 ²⁶ For ye see your call­ing, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: ²⁷ But God hath cho­sen the fool­ish things of the world to con­found the wise; and God hath cho­sen the weak things of the world to con­found the things which are mighty; ²⁸ And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God cho­sen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:

Mark 11:21–23  ²¹ And Peter call­ing to remem­brance saith unto him, Mas­ter, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is with­ered away.  ²² And Jesus answer­ing saith unto them, Have faith in God.  ²³ For ver­i­ly I say unto you, That whoso­ev­er shall say unto this moun­tain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have what­so­ev­er he saith.

Proverbs 1:7 ⁷ The fear of the Lord is the begin­ning of knowl­edge: but fools despise wis­dom and instruc­tion.

Romans 10:17 ¹⁷ So then faith cometh by hear­ing, and hear­ing by the word of God.

Matthew 7:8  For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh find­eth; and to him that knock­eth it shall be opened.

Matthew 21:22 And all things, what­so­ev­er ye shall ask in prayer, believ­ing, ye shall receive.