Quite the opposite is true. Man is a proud creature, but pride, unless it is false, can be based only on achievement. When a man's work becomes so routine that all sense of achievement is lost, pride suffers, and all the platitudes about contentment with one's lot cannot soothe an injured pride. To put it more strongly, achievement on which to feed one's pride is as necessary to the complete man as income on which to feed his family. The corollary of that is that a poorly fed pride means a poorly fed family, with a further loss of pride and a greater in-crease of worry and frustration.
Worry is a doubly vicious form of mental harassment. It consumes an enormous amount of mental and physical energy while contributing not a thing to one's welfare.
At the same time, like a wasteful disease, it produces "think poor" thoughts that create more room in which worry can expand. I remember its effects on one man whose achievements indicated that he was of management caliber though he was currently employed as an assembly line worker fitting tires on automobile wheels.
"Don't tell me that," he moaned. "It takes all I've got to fit tires on wheels, let alone thinking about tackling a foreman's job."
His was not an unusual case. Many men seem to feel that by using only half their talents on the job, they have the rest in reserve, like an army that has half of its men on the front line, with the rest in reserve to be called up in emergencies.
Not so. There can be no half-way measures with success. Talent unused is talent wasted. One might as well say that the Olympic high jumper should practice with the bar set at three feet to keep his talent in reserve for the great day when he will be called upon to jump seven feet six inches. With his muscles subdued by that kind of training, he'll never make it, and with your best talents subdued by "think poor" thoughts, neither will you.
Here is what actually happened to John Carleton, a married veteran who went through college on the G.I. Bill of Rights. His second child was born during his senior year, and he was one proud graduate when he posed in his cap and gown with his wife and family. Then at a graduation party "that night he was brought crashing to earth by a statistically minded fellow graduate.
"You know, John," this realist informed him, "I've figured it out. By the time your two kids are ready for college, it will take fifty thousand bucks to put them through, and no G.I. bill to help. As a matter of fact, now that we've graduated, we haven't got any G.I. bill to help us anymore."
For three years during his Army career, and three more during college, John had never had to worry about where the money was coming from. It was not much money, but at least a regular income. Now, all of a sudden, lie saw himself confronted with a $50,000 debt, and it over-whelmed him. He had tentatively accepted a teaching job in a small town high school, but it no longer looked adequate for his needs. The higher paying job with a wholesale house that he had turned down as "too drab" had already been filled. He scurried around hunting for the "big money" job he thought he had to have, only to discover that the big companies had signed up the college graduates they needed during the same period he had signed up to teach school. He was out all the way around.
During the summer months he did uncover a few possibilities, but each job had something wrong with it. The starting salary was too low, there was no room for rapid advancement, it wasn't his kind of work, it was routine work beneath the dignity of a college graduate-always something. His subconscious mind had frozen on the $50,000 debt he saw hanging over him. When no job promised him that much-and no job can promise that much until you can promise that much to the job-his morale dropped to zero. He moved his family into the home of his parents, blaming his plight on "the recession" that was purely one of his own "thinking poor."
With John still jobless in November, his father told him firmly that if he wanted to give his children any Christmas presents, he would have to earn the money himself. "I'm taking care of you," his father told him, "because you are part of the family, and your children are my grandchildren. But I'll not buy gifts for the kids and have you sign them to John and Kate from daddy. That would make liars out of both of us."
Thus stung, John got his first job as a toy salesman in a department store, one of the scores hired for the Christmas rush. To say he was thinking poor is to put it mildly. "I hit bottom," he told me later. "There I was, a college graduate, and a lot of high school kids were filling in for the rush at the same salary. Doing a better job than I was, I have to admit, because they were eager and I wasn't. I couldn't stand that, having kids ring up more sales than I did, so I went to work to top them. I did, too, but I couldn't take any pride in it. Beating kids. Not until John saw the pleasure of his children in the gifts he had bought with his own money did he really snap out of it. "I thought then that maybe I wouldn't be able to give them much, but at least they'd enjoy what they got," he said. "I stopped worrying about their college educations, and started worrying about buying them clothes for grade school."
If he was still worrying and thinking poor, he had freed his subconscious mind of the $50,000 debt. He was ready to analyze his achievements in a more constructive light. He was even ready to plant some small seed successes instead of trying to "shoot the works" for an unrealistic $50,000 job. He was prepared, in other words, to make his climb towards success one step at a time.
The first thing an analysis of his achievements did for him was to restore his morale. The achievements were real. They represented things he had done well, and which had rewarded him with a feeling of pride and accomplishment. Each achievement represented a "think rich" situation. On the basis of that kind of constructive thinking, he determined that advertising was the field that could use his achievements to greatest advantage. We worked out a program through which he got a job in the advertising department of the store in which he had worked during the Christmas rush. Since then he has become Advertising Manager, and his future and the education of his children are assured.
