Think And Grow Rich: The 21st Century Edition Chapter 2 - Thoughts Are Things

Think and Grow Rich: The 21st-Century Updated Edition Chapter 2 starts with how a man, Edwin C. Barnes who with his bulldog determination and persistence and focusing on a single desire had mowed down all opposition to finally become the business partner of Thomas A. Edison.

I like the part that talks about how opportunities often come disguised and slipping in by the back door. And often it comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.

It then explain that one f the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when you are overtaken by temporary defeat and every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another.

The above characteristic of giving up too soon is so true through the evidence of meeting so many aspiring internet and network marketers while building my business. In fact, I hasten to add that many of them did not even get to start at all. Many a time, when a distributor joins a network marketing company, he/she got excited, phoned a few people and met with a few rejections and then concluded that network marketing does not work…

… it’s the same for some internet marketers I’ve seen who just created one product for sale and then expect it to be an overnight sensation. And when it didn’t, they don’t make any attempts to improve the product or website and concluded that internet marketing does not work!

In this chapter, I specially like the commentary which I quote a little directly from the book:

“… Wayne Allyn Root to write his book The Joy of Failure… which proved that the rich and famous got to be that way only because of what they learned from their failures.

“People such as Jack Welch, the hugely successful CEO of General Electric, who, early in his career, failed dramatically when a plastics plant for which he was responsible blew up.

“Billionaire Charles Schwab was a failure at school and university, flunking Basic English twice due to a learning disability, and then failed on Wall Street more than once, before the thought of the idea that grew to make him very rich indeed.

“Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton, Steven Jobs, Donald Trump… had to fail in order to learn the lessons that ultimately made them successes. Every one of them was a failure, but none of them was defeated.”

The chapter concludes with the notion that we must magnetize our minds with intense desire for riches … becoming ‘money conscious’ until the desire for money drives us to create definite plans for acquiring it.