Efficient Action

You must use your thought as directed in pre­vi­ous chap­ters and 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 one 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, you can see that there must be a going back­ward in every­thing. Those who do not quite fill their present places are 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 slowed only by those who do not fill the places they are hold­ing. They belong to a for­mer age and their ten­dency is toward degen­er­a­tion. No soci­ety could advance if every­one was smaller than his place; social evo­lu­tion is guided by the law of phys­i­cal and men­tal evolution.

In the ani­mal world, evo­lu­tion is caused by 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 plane, 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, while if every day is a suc­cess, you can­not fail to get rich.

If there is some­thing that may be done today and you do not do it, you have failed inso­far 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 mov­ing in your behalf. Much may be depend­ing on your doing some sim­ple act, and it may be the very thing which is to open the door of oppor­tu­nity to very great pos­si­bil­i­ties. You can never know all the com­bi­na­tions which supreme intel­li­gence 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 what you want.

Do, every day, ALL that can be done that day.

There is, how­ever, a lim­i­ta­tion or qual­i­fi­ca­tion of the above that you must take into account.

You are not to over­work, nor 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, nor 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 a suc­cess or a fail­ure. Every act is, in itself, either effec­tive and effi­cient or inef­fec­tive and inef­fi­cient. Every inef­fi­cient act is a fail­ure, and if you spend your life in 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, now, 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 ALL power is work­ing with you, and ALL power can­not fail.

Power is at your ser­vice, and to make each act effi­cient you have only to put power into it.

Every action is either strong or weak, and when every action is strong, you are act­ing in the cer­tain way which will make you rich.

Every act can be made strong and effi­cient by hold­ing your vision while you are doing it and putting the whole power of your FAITH and PURPOSE into it.

It is at this point that the peo­ple who sep­a­rate men­tal power from per­sonal action fail. They use the power of mind in one place and at one time, and they act in another way in another place and at another time. So their acts are not suc­cess­ful in them­selves; too many of them are inef­fi­cient. But if ALL power goes into every act, no mat­ter how com­mon­place, every act will be a suc­cess in itself. And since it is the nature of things that every suc­cess opens the way to other suc­cesses, your progress toward what you want and the progress of what you want toward you, will become increas­ingly rapid.

Remem­ber that suc­cess­ful action is cumu­la­tive in its results. Since the desire for more life is inher­ent in all things, when a per­son begins to move toward larger life, more things attach them­selves to him, and the influ­ence of his desire is multiplied.

Do, every day, all that you can do that day, and do each act in an effi­cient manner.

In say­ing that you must hold your vision while you are doing each act, how­ever triv­ial or common-​​place, I do not mean to say that it is nec­es­sary at all times to see the vision dis­tinctly to its small­est details. It should be the work of your leisure hours to use your imag­i­na­tion on the details of your vision and to con­tem­plate them until they are firmly fixed upon mem­ory. If you wish speedy results, spend prac­ti­cally all your spare time in this practice.

By con­tin­u­ous con­tem­pla­tion you will get the pic­ture of what you want — even to the small­est details — so firmly fixed upon your mind and so com­pletely trans­ferred to the mind of form­less sub-​​stance, that in your work­ing hours you need only to men­tally refer to the pic­ture to stim­u­late your faith and pur­pose and cause your best effort to be put forth.

Con­tem­plate your pic­ture in your leisure hours until your con­scious­ness is so full of it that you can grasp it instantly. You will become so enthused with its bright promises that the mere thought of it will call forth the strongest ener­gies of your whole being.

Let us again repeat our syl­labus, and by slightly chang­ing the clos­ing state­ments bring it to the point we have now reached.

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 thought 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 must do — with faith and pur­pose — all that can be done each day, doing each sep­a­rate thing in an effi­cient manner.

About the Author

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