Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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lack the ability to assert yourself or get justice, if your wits are driven out of you temporarily by a snub, a frown, a sneer, you cannot succeed in the world; you cannot have that to which you are justly entitled.
Force is that quality or element which, in case you receive a sudden shock, a misfortune, an unexpected failure, causes you quickly to rally, get yourself together again, forget all the trouble, and lose sight of it in new efforts to push ahead. Force is that spiritual element which must rule the material. In the physical world there will always be accidents and failures. Houses will decay or burn; business may not succeed for a time according to our hopes; friends may fail in time of need. Trials must come in every phase of life, until they cease to be trials through your growing force. What now may be to you as mountains, will in the future, through getting more force, be but as mole-hills. You may not to-day fear the person or thing which in your childhood was a terror to you. Why? Because you have more force, more wisdom; and wisdom and force mean the same thing. But wisdom is seeing by the mind’s eye. It is not the knowing or holding in memory of a store of assertions or opinions gathered from books or men.
Why force should come to us when we set our minds toward it in the attitude of prayer or demand is a mystery. Probably it will always remain one. It is not desirable to be ever occupied in the endeavor to unravel mysteries.
The mystery of existence will always increase. To solve it is to try and find bounds to endless space. We need only to know that which will do us real good for the hour and the day.
It is a truth that we can get more and more force by simply asking for it: and it is in the possibilities of human spirit to get so much, that through it the material world can be wholly subdued and ruled. Then misfortunes are impossible. For if they do come, you have always the power to build up again. You may be turned on the street without food or shelter; yet if you have grown to a full confidence and faith in this power, you will feel certain that by keeping your mind calling for force, force will come to you to relieve your difficulties. It will come in the shape of a friend, or an idea to be acted on immediately. To call or pray for force is to connect yourself with the higher thought-realm of force; and out of this there will always come element or individualized spirit to give aid in some way. But all aid coming of individuals, seen or unseen, cannot be lasting. For if you depend in any way on another, you cease to call for force. You are then content to be carried, not to walk with your own limbs. You are also as much a reservoir—a vessel whose mouth can be turned toward this power to receive of it—as the other person on whose force of character you depend. You want to earn the house you live in, the carriage you ride in, the clothes you wear, the food you eat. Call, demand, pray for force, and then for wisdom to apply it, and you can earn these.
When, through prayer or demand, you have gained force, then ask for wisdom to direct it. You can direct your own force to injure or benefit yourself. You can use your force on a whim, or an imaginary necessity. You may run about half a day to buy something you do not need. You may employ two hours in cheapening an article ten-cents; and in so doing, use up the same force which might have made you ten dollars. It is not enough to be merely industrious. Mere industry can use up valuable force in scouring the bottoms of tin pans, or counting the tacks in the parlor carpet. It is quite as important to know where, or on what, to put your industry or force so it shall bring the best result.
If you spend half an hour in moping, or fretting, or frantic hurry, or indecision, you spend the same force, the same material, the same element, which would turn in some other channel, push your business, or do you good in some way. The question we need to ask every morning is: “I have now a certain amount of force for to-day. How shall I expend it so as to get the best results—the most lasting happiness out of the day?” When you arise in the morning, if you need force to push things—if you feel timid and like shrinking away from people, then simply think of force. Keep the word, the idea, in your mind as much as possible. That keeps your mind in the direction of force. What you think of, you are always attracting to you.
The mood in which you keep your mind is a force in the kingdom of nature, as much as the current of air or electricity is a force. The thoughts ever going in a current from you are forces acting on other minds, and as real in such action, though unseen, as is the push of your arm against a door. Your force does not stop with the action of your muscles, but in thought can go, and may now be going, hundreds and thousands of miles from your body, and acting and affecting other mind, or minds, for good or ill as you put out good or ill thought toward them.
Force is that which gives you daily new idea, plan, suggestion, as to business. The methods for every successful business are always changing. Fertility of invention is force. A. T. Stewart’s force begot a new method for carrying on the dry-goods business. The same force which begets a new idea also pushes it. If the timid inventor called for force to put his invention before the public he would get it. Now he often starves in the corner, while the man who knows only how to use force to push an invention takes the inventor’s property and makes by it a fortune.
Sometimes the unsuccessful but talented artist fails to sell his pictures, because he fails to cultivate or bring himself-properly before society; while the inferior artist finds a ready market for his work, because he keeps himself favorably before the world. If you stand and point and make faces at the world, no matter how valuable your goods, it will not be so ready to buy of you. It is also a part of life’s business and happiness to make ourselves inviting to others. To do this we must commence and invite from the inside—not the outside alone. The successful business method of to-day will not be the successful business method of twenty years hence. New force,—that is, new device,—new invention, is always coming. Force begot the railway. But something is to supersede the railway. Force begot the telegraph. But something is to make the telegraph a relatively slow and expensive coach. Minds in sympathy—be the bodies those minds use far apart as they may—can send thought, ideas, and news to each other; and when more is found out how to use, keep, and train such minds, there will be unseen wires flashing intelligence across continents which no monopoly can grasp. The air also will be navigated by man, and with more speed than the railway train; for every need, every longing, every desire of human mind, is a thing, a power, a force, a thought, ever drawing to itself the means and power for material accomplishment.
The force which through countless ages has made man what he is, is to make him far more than he is.
Monopoly of iron rails and locomotives which owns states, and controls legislatures; monopoly of wires and telegraph-poles; monopoly of every thing,—is in time to be outflanked, not by the destructive force of violence, but by the stronger, the peaceful, the constructive force of new invention, which shall find out, by the so-called trivial, despised things of to-day, new powers in nature and new powers in man, which every man shall find it possible to use; and the wonder then will be that we did not find it out before.
To get force, talk your business, plan, or project over with those who are in full sympathy with you.
The successful business world constantly acts up to this law. Monopolies and powerful corporations are begotten through the originators putting their heads together, and talking the thing over. They so come together day after day, and talk. As the talk goes on, new ideas suggest themselves as to methods of action. The leading idea may seem to come from one man or mind. But it would never have so soon occurred to him, had it not been for the previous combination of the thoughts talked out, and put out, by different minds. The thought-elements from those different minds mingle; and out of such mingling, the new element, thought, idea, is born, and eventually expressed by some one of the group,—possibly by the man or woman who says least of all.
The greatest force, the clearest idea, will be developed where woman is a factor in such group.
If two persons combine in harmony their force of muscle to lift a heavy weight, they will lift it easier than one. If four persons so combine, they will lift it easier than two. The same law and result applies to mental force. Each one of us, consciously or unconsciously, sends out daily and hourly this silent mental force,—this invisible element we call thought, which affects favorably or unfavorably the persons of whom we think. It is the same force which may lift a box, a bag, a trunk. Only it may be differently applied.
If you have in view any enterprise