Thinking Alone Won't Make You Grow Rich

By Asoka Selvarajah

There is a lot of false information being given out about positive thinking and the abundance mindset. An increasing number of people think that all they need to do is to "think positive" and visualize better in order to attract everything they desire into their lives. While this is definitely a LOT of the total solution, it is not ALL of it. The fact is that no matter how much people kick and struggle against the idea, practical real world action is nevertheless essential!

Although people are fond of quoting Napoleon Hill's classic self-help book, 'Think & Grow Rich,' the little known truth is that, towards the end of his life, Hill himself ended up almost bankrupt. It was his future partner, billionaire W. Clement Stone, who eventually bailed him out of this miserable state, by buying the rights to all of Hill's works, and putting him to work as the chief sales trainer for his team of insurance salesmen.

Ironically, it was Stone, himself a big believer in the Hill philosophy and one of its most shining success stories, who realized that simply 'thinking' was NOT the passport to great riches. There is a doing part to it as well, and a major part of that doing is to develop and grow a streamlined system for attracting abundance to you. While Hill understood the theory, and wrote and taught it with great ability, it was Stone who was the more successful at putting that theory into practical effect. And it didn't all come about just by 'thinking'!

The fact is that all the wealth creation literature, even the metaphysically inclined, DOES talk about the need to DO as well as visualize, but this fact has been rather de-emphasized in recent years. This is probably due to the previous OVER-emphasis upon practical business activity in total exclusion to developing the abundance mindset.

Many of the wealth/abundance courses available today place a heavy stress upon the success mindset, visualization, and positive anticipation. However, it is also true that all of these same courses DO clearly state that physical action in the real world is going to have to take place as well!

This is definitely true of even the most 'spiritual energy' oriented wealth teachers, such as Bob Proctor and Robert Anthony. Nobody, not least of all Napoleon Hill himself, ever went so far as to teach that you could JUST think, be positive, and visualize in order to attract what you desire. Maybe, at more advanced levels of development, even that is possible. However, for most us, it would be best to take the road more traveled.

Another interesting but little known fact about the super wealthy is that they are NOT all positive abundance thinkers, filled with a genius for visualizing their outcomes in 3D Technicolor. Many of them are grumpy, jealous, unhappy, cynical, and fiercely competitive abrasive people. Rather than having positive motivation, a LOT of people become incredibly wealthy as a result of anger, jealousy, the need to prove a point to someone else, and a whole plethora of "unworthy" motives. It can be argued that as many people became extravagantly rich through precisely these attitudes as did through nurturing the positive mindset taught in the self-help literature.

If they did so, it was probably because they had an emphasis upon developing an efficient wealth producing system, set within a target market highly likely to produce wealth! In other words, they were NOT just thinking!

The point is that you should really not be doing one or the other, but both. Focused action in the physical world will be turbo-charged by properly connecting to the non-material realm, from which all reality ultimately manifests. That is definitely where much of the energy should go, since it is in the realm of ideas and creativity that wealth and abundance are created.

Although it IS possible to manifest and achieve without making any such spiritual contact, the fact is that you emerge as a far more balanced, happy and well-centered person if you DO focus upon both the mental/spiritual, as well as the material, rather than if you merely focus upon the material alone. Success is also likely to come more easily, in the RIGHT area for you, and with a greater degree of peace of mind than would otherwise be the case.

Certainly, some of the most "hard-nosed" financial success stories in America, as well as the rest of the world, have a firm grip on the metaphysical secrets to manifesting prosperity. If this is true for them, it might be a good idea for us to do the same. However, at the same time, let us never forget that mere thinking, positive or otherwise, needs to be backed up with a firm system for manifesting those dreams in the physical world.