ALSO BY JERRY GILLIES

MY NEEDS, YOUR NEEDS, OUR NEEDS: A Handbook For Discovering

Each Other and Enhancing Your Love Potential

FRIENDS: The Power and Potential of the Company You Keep

TRANSCENDENTAL SEX: A Meditative Approach to Increasing Sensual

Pleasure

PSYCHOLOGICAL IMMORTALITY: Using Your Mind to Extend Your Life

MEN ON WOMEN: 101 Men Reveal Their Deepest Desires, Feelings, and
Fears

2
 MONEYLOVE
How to Get the Money You Deserve
for Whatever You Want
This publication is not intended for use as a source of legal, accounting, or tax advice. All users are advised to retain the services of
competent professionals for legal, accounting or tax advice. The author and publisher assume no responsibility or liability whatsoever
on the behalf of any purchaser or reader of these materials.

Copyright 1978 Jerry Gillies. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

First Digital Edition 2014

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means,
electronic, mechanical, recording, photocopying or otherwise without prior written permission of the above copyright holder.

3
 A NOTE FROM JERRY FOR THIS DIGITAL EDITION:
When the hardcover edition of Moneylove was first published in 1978,
with the paperback coming a year later, I was completely unprepared for
the impact it made and the powerful positive feedback it received.

Though I referred to it many times since, in preparing workshops and

producing dozens of prosperity audio programs, this new digital edition
gave me the opportunity to read it word-for-word for the first time in over
35 years.

And once again, I was completely unprepared--this time for how very
timely and current it is, perhaps even more relevant in this new Information
Age dominated by the Internet. In addition to a lot of quotes of mine
circulated online, many of them from this volume, I have gotten a lot of
gratifying compliments from young, successful Internet entrepreneurs.

The fact that so many people had so many nice things to say even
more than three decades after its original publication, convinced me there is
an audience for a digital version of this classic work. This, despite the fact
that I am now working on an expanded, revised, and updated version. That
book will contain the core ideas in the original, but with lots of new
thoughts and concepts and strategies honed over the years since
Moneylove first came out.

In terms of editing, I was determined to leave as much of the text

intact as possible. And again, I was unprepared for how little I needed to
change. A few terms that were dated, like substituting “recordings” and
“audios” for “tapes.” Other than these minor edits, this is the book that sold
two million copies in its paperback edition over a twenty-five year period.

Jerry Gillies
Panama City,Panama
October, 2014

4
 To Maggie S. Davis
for her loving support
before, during, and after

5
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This digital edition of Moneylove wouldn’t have

happened if it weren’t for the support of Christina
Makrides, Leo Quinn, and Barry Dunlop.

Leonard Orr laid the foundation for this book with his
ideas, his famous Money Seminars, and his
encouragement. It’s often been said, but never more
sincerely meant: This book wouldn’t have been possible
without him.

To my late parents, Minnie and Edward Gillies, a debt

of gratitude for all the healthy money habits they
stimulated and inspired. These had a far deeper effect on
me than the times they wondered when I was going to
settle down and get a steady job.

And to Julie Coopersmith, my agent and friend, warm

thanks for believing in my prosperity almost as much as I
did.

6
 CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION 8

1. DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE RICH? 18

2. WORKLOVE 40

3. AND THE MONEY GOES ROUND AND ROUND 78

4. PROSPERITY BANKING 99

5. PROSPERITY INVESTING 116

6. KEEPING AFLOAT TILL YOUR SHIP COMES IN 129

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES 148

7
 Introduction

You deserve to be rich, and you can be rich, MONEYLOVE can help you have
a life of abundance, filled with love and creativity and, incidentally, all the
cash you want. It’s as simple as this: Thinking poor will keep you poor;
thinking rich will make you rich. The MONEYLOVE concepts in this book will
help you understand your money situation and what to do about it.

Some of the ideas expressed here may shock you or frighten you, but
they are all based on commonsense approaches to money. Here’s a
preliminary sampling of those ideas:

Spending money is better for your prosperity consciousness than

banking it.

Money is an extension of your self-esteem.

You can’t be emotionally healthy without healthy money attitudes.

You are probably, to some extent, living your parents’ money script.
Financial satisfaction is better than financial security.

Enjoying your money will make it easier for you to accumulate wealth.
You don’t have to work hard to earn a good living.

Loafing is one of the most creative, money-producing things you can do.
You can be as good a person rich as poor, probably better.

Worrying about money has nothing to do with how much money you
have.

Money is something to be loved rather than feared.

8
 There are a number of reasons I have linked the words money and love
In creating this new concept. I know that will upset some people. Our
society has often seemed to be divided between those who believe money
is more important than love and those who believe love is more important
than money. This book is an attempt to bridge that gap, and to say that
money is love, love is money.

Your money is an extension of your personality, and the more loving

your personality, the more money you will attract and the more you’ll enjoy
that money. Statistics have shown time and again that those people who go
into a business because they want to perform a service they love
performing, or produce a product they love producing, make much more
money than those who are in business just to make money. If you feel
unlovable, chances are you will have a strong poverty consciousness. If you
can’t receive love, because you don’t feel you deserve it, then you won’t be
able to receive money for the same reason. In order to be a really loving
person, you have to be emotionally well, and you cannot be if your negative
attitudes toward money are creating emotional problems.

The strongest single factor in prosperity consciousness is self-esteem:

believing you can do it, believing you deserve it, believing you will get it.
Loving yourself. That love energy will go out to the world and come back to
the form of money.

One of my favorite examples of this occurs every day in a little

restaurant I know. There’s a waitress named Lil who is so filled with joy, so
pleasant to the customers, so cheerful even after a long evening’s work,
that she just exudes loving warmth. And the customers respond. Lil makes
a fortune in tips compared to the other waitresses. She’s been there six
years, and you’d think her colleagues would have caught on by now. But
no, they go on their gloomy way in poverty consciousness, while Lil spends
love and gets love and money in return. And she’s not doing it for the
money, she’s doing it because she genuinely enjoys her work and the
people she serves, and she loves the way they send love back to her.

It’s an indication of what the economy could be like if everybody

practiced MONEYLOVE: not customers and servants, employers and
employees, clients and professionals, but everyone sharing as co-lovers,
sharing the process and the profit. This may seem idealistic to you, and of
9
course it is, because not enough people will overcome their inbred poverty
consciousness to make it happen just yet. But if you can’t change society,
you can change yourself, and that’s the most important transformation of
all. Pioneering psychologist William James once gave three rules for
changing one’s life:

1. Start immediately.

This is why I suggest you plunge right into the book, pick out one or
two suggestions that make sense to you, and start using them now! Just for
it to become clear that you want to be prosperity-conscious can be the first
step.

2. Do it flamboyantly.

The seven Prosperity Banking Accounts in Chapter 4 are a good

example of flamboyant change, and there are lots more dramatic prosperity
programmers throughout these pages. Announce to your friends that you
are now prosperity-conscious, and on your way to financial satisfaction and
financial independence. If you make the announcement with love, and they
still resent you for it, you can offer to share the information with them. The
resentment would probably be an indication of poverty consciousness, and
you cannot change other people until they are ready to do it alone, so if
they don’t respond favorably, drop it. People who can’t handle your
prosperity consciousness aren’t giving you the nourishment and support
you need anyway, so you will most likely be better off removing them from
your life.

3. No exceptions.

Exceptions are major obstacles to real change-for example going on a

diet, but saying:

“I’ll just forget my diet for today.” Or starting a prosperity consciousness

program for yourself and saying, “I’ll act this way from now on, except in
front of my parents.” Exceptions are a way the negative parts of you
weaken your resolve and dilute your active decisions.

10
 There are many exercises in this book, and they will stimulate thought
and facilitate change for you, if you use them.

I invite you to pick and choose from your favorite techniques to raise
your own prosperity consciousness. Some will appeal to you more than
others. If any make you feel uncomfortable, chances are it’s because your
old poverty programming is at work resisting change. That old phrase by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The willing suspension of disbelief,” can provide a
useful tool. If you can suspend your disbelief that you deserve to enjoy your
money, even for the moment, then you can actually start enjoying, despite
any fears or anxieties.

I find the most resistance to the MONEYLOVE concept from people who
are trained to think analytically--particularly lawyers, engineers, and
accountants. It is most difficult for these professionals, trained as they are
in logical, rational thoughts, willingly to suspend their disbelief.

I remember making a statement in one seminar that spending money

can make you as prosperous as putting it in the bank. An accountant in the
audience raised his hand and said, “But if you leave money in the bank long
enough, with compounded interest, you will substantially ahead.”

I responded, “That sounds like arithmetic to me, and I was talking

about getting the most for your money in terms of pleasure and building an
attitude that would enable to creatively produce more money. Sacrificing
the current use of your money to put it in the bank, usually indicates a
neurotic need for security, and the kind of fears that come from poverty
consciousness.”

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have money in the bank. In fact,
there’s a whole chapter coming up on Prosperity Banking. But it’s important
to understand that the more current enjoyment you get from your money,
the more predisposed you will be to create more wealth for yourself, and
the more fulfillment you will receive when you do accumulate a great deal
of money.

As long as you have a clear vision of what you want, and the inner
determination to get it, the money will come. Money, after all. Is just a
vehicle to take you to your desires. As in driving to the seashore, if you are
11
going to spend all your time worrying about the car breaking down, you’ll
mess the fun of the trip!

And yet people do worry about money. For some, it is the overriding
concern in their lives. Couples break up over money conflicts, people
commit suicide over money, others become emotionally immobilized by
neurotic expectations of losing their money, and still others rob, kill and lie
for money. And all of these attitudes or actions are manifestations of
poverty consciousness. If you focus attention on the lack of money, that’s
what will get reinforced.

Where you put your attention is what gets nourished. Poverty comes
to the person who is emotionally and intellectually prepared for it. Wealth is
attracted to the person who is emotionally and intellectually ready to accept
it, expect it, and enjoy it. Poverty consciousness will overwhelm you if you
don’t have a personal program for prosperity.

So-called money problems are not problems at all but results that are
dissatisfying. If you get result that don’t satisfy you. It is because you are
doing something to achieve those results. Many people want their money
problems solved without changing what they are doing to achieve those
results, and some even without becoming aware of what they are doing.
This is magic. Prosperity consciousness is not magic, though, because it
works so well, people often attribute magical powers to it. But it won’t work
at all if what you are doing to produce “money problems” is feeding your
poverty consciousness with fears and negative reinforcement. You have to
change what you are doing if you want to change the results, results which
you may be calling a “problem.”

Everyone in our culture has some degree of poverty consciousness. It

would be impossible not to, considering all the negative money
programming from parents and the various media, such as books,
television, and movies. If you can answer yes to any of the following
questions, you’ll have some resistance to prosperity consciousness. Count
any response that isn’t an immediate and strong “No” as a “Yes.”

1. Do you believe loafing and daydreaming must prevent you from being
successful?

12
 2. Do you believe spending money will make you poor, while saving it
will make you rich?

3. Do you believe other people and the general economy are mainly
responsible for your current money situation?

4. Do you believe a good job or profession is the best way to make lots
of money?

5. Do you believe your parents’ ability to enjoy the money they had was
limited?

6. Have you made a strong effort to avoid frivolous spending?

7. Does negative news about the economy start your worrying about
money?

8. Do you believe the best way to use a bank is to put your money in
and leave it there?

9. Do you believe there is a limit to how much you can earn?

10.Do you believe you won’t ever become financially independent?

11.Do you believe money is inherently evil?

12.Do you believe desiring a great deal of money makes you greedy
or unlovable?

If you answered “No!” to all or to a majority of the questions, you

probably are capable of becoming prosperity-conscious without much effort,
and with hardly any difficulty.

13
 Many of the techniques and methods described in this book are
specifically designed to replace negative programming to positive. You’ll
find the personal Prosperity Proclamations particularly effective in this.

One of the most revolutionary ideas contained in MONEYLOVE is the

premise that hard work won’t make you rich or financially secure. Most
people end up, after working forty hours a week, barely surviving on a
retirement pension or Social Security payments, with less income to spend
than when they were working. This is isn’t security, it’s economic slavery,
wherein you become a slave to the results of lifelong poverty
consciousness. The only way to get ahead financially, and be able to enjoy
it, is to come up with services and products and ideas worth money.

By having a healthy attitude toward money, and using your creative

mind to produce valuable ideas, you will thrive. The objective of
MONEYLOVE is to help you get to a position where you are living easily and
happily in your chosen environment, without money worries, and with an
awareness of your own unlimited financial potential. And it doesn’t matter
how little or how much money you have to start with!

When I left a lucrative broadcasting career in New York to 1970, to

start using my creative imagination to develop new techniques in
meditation, awareness, and interpersonal communication, I was about
$30,000 in debt. Using prosperity consciousness, I’ve now gotten to the
point where, in 1977, I was paid $10,000 for a single idea that took me
about an hour to create—and that was just a down payment, with a
promise of much more to come!

For several of those intervening years I was hardly solvent, with no

regular income and quite a bit of debt. But I kept on, with the certain
knowledge that I deserved to be prosperous, and that it would happen as
long as I continued to do what I wanted to do. There were strong
temptations in the form of job offers that would have gotten me back into

14
the grind, and paid me huge salaries, but I easily resisted these. I was
having too good a time to go back to work!

Over those years I’ve talked to any number of men and women who
were working at jobs they disliked, jobs that provided no pleasure or
creative satisfaction. Many of these people cited as their fondest dream the
desire eventually to have enough money to retire to Florida somewhere
between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five. I moved to Florida at the age
of thirty-two! My life has been filled with all the leisure time I’ve desired,
and organizations now have to pay me large sums of money to leave my
delightful living environment, even for a one-day workshop.

I don’t need a million dollars to be happy. In fact, I doubt I could be

any happier than I was when I was $30,000 in debt and allowed myself the
freedom to do what I wanted to do. And if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t
matter, because, in the meantime, I feel like a million dollars, and that
feeling is generating more money each and every day.

The money that pours in when I have a valuable idea evokes a

euphoric feeling. Not because of the money. The money is just a symbol of
the energy and love people are sending my way because the idea works for
them. I get the same good feeling when someone else makes a lot of
money by using my MONEYLOVE concepts. I actually got into the prosperity
consciousness business by accident.

For many years, friends have been amazed at my freedom from

financial worry, even when I was heavily in debt and no income was coming
in at all. I would tell them that wealth is an attitude and that I knew my
ideas would pay off someday, that I trusted my own capabilities. These
friends would ask me how I did it, and ask for tips on how to achieve this
state of mind. The ideas I gave them worked. Conducting workshops and
seminars in relaxation and creativity and interpersonal relations, I realized
that my money ideas were very similar to my ideas on how to become
emotionally free and loving. In the past several years, there have been a
15
number of systems developed to teach people new attitudes about money. I
think these systems filled a need, since people were becoming more and
more aware that their personal growth was often stifled by their money
attitudes.

The one man who seemed to be teaching the best prosperity

consciousness methods was Leonard Orr. People whom I respected in the
human potential movement raved about his workshops and tapes. I decided
to investigate. I was amazed that Leonard and I had many of the same
ideas about money, though he was more solvent than I. His money
seminars helped me synthesize my own ideas into a workable format, and
Leonard encouraged me to start presenting my own money workshop.

When four people who attended my first prosperity consciousness

seminar, at an event sponsored by the Association for Humanistic
Psychology, called me the following week to tell me that the seminar had
helped them change their attitudes toward money in dramatic ways, and
actually helped them earn more money in just a few days, I knew
MONEYLOVE was a concept whose time had come!

The continuing feedback I’ve been receiving from people who have attended
my seminars has given me tremendous support and nourishment in my
efforts.

I expect to make a lot of money from this book. But making money
is not my primary motivation, just a happy fringe benefit. One of the major
premises of MONEYLOVE is that one of the best things you can do for your
own prosperity consciousness is to lift someone else’s. Every dollar you help
someone else earn will come back to you multiplied, along with large
helpings of love. A large number of people have paid me twenty-five dollars
for a three-hour seminar, or one hundred dollars for an all-day workshop,
and the information in this book is exactly the same information I’ve shared
with them. In fact, I’ve elaborated and expanded each of the concepts, so
that there is even more information in the book. I suppose financial
16
consultants would say I was foolish to put information in a book that I can
get a lot more for in seminars and workshops, and some of my moneywise
friends have actually stated this.

I emphatically disagree. This book is being written with a great

amount of love and enthusiasm. I am excited about your reading these
words and beginning to explore these ideas for yourself. I believe that
achieving prosperity consciousness brings someone into strong emotional
contact with everyone else in the world who feels prosperous and is
convinced of his or her own personal worth. I welcome this connection with
you, and invite you to share your success with me by letting me know the
exciting things that happen to you as a result of living and learning
MONEYLOVE.

17
 1
DO YOU REALLY
WANT TO BE RICH?

Man was born to be rich or inevitably to grow rich through the

use of his faculties.
-RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

-GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry; but

money answereth all things.
-ECCLESIASTES 10:19

18
There is a powerful and persistent concept running through this book. It is
not a new idea, and I did not invent it, but this entire volume is aimed at
helping you accept and believe it. It is a basic truth, proven time and time
again by people in all walks of life. I don't intend to hold it out as a
tantalizing reward for reading my book. You deserve to hear it right now, at
the beginning of your efforts toward a more prosperous life. It is the core of
prosperity consciousness that, in order to be as wealthy as you want to be,
you need just three things:

1. A clear vision of what you want.

2. The belief that you will get it.

3. Practical skills to put that belief into action.

THE REALITY OF MONEY

The basic reality about money is that it's unreal. Money is a myth. It
has no value in and of itself. It is a medium of exchange for goods,
services, and ideas. It's a beautiful human invention that most people
haven't figured out how to use yet. Myths are wonderful things, made to be
enjoyed, but if you try to embrace them, you’ll just end up hugging air. So
it is with money. For example, one of the most romanticized eras in recent
history has been the Great Depression of the 1930s. People who struggled
through that period loved to recount tales of hardship, and warned that it
can happen again.

Now, I'm not saying the tales of pain and deprivation aren’t true, just that
they're not true at this moment, and they may never be true again. So
living your life as if you were in the middle of the Great Depression is not
seeing life clearly, is not seeing the reality of money.

The Depression had nothing to do with money. It was a massive collapse of

the myth. It was a powerful display of poverty consciousness, in which
people lost their faith in themselves and the economy; did anyone survive
that era with prosperity consciousness? Of course. Though some of them
didn't like to talk about it, feeling those who suffered might be resentful,
19
many people made a lot of money during that period. The economy had
collapsed, but personal initiative was still present in isolated pockets
throughout the impoverished land. The point is, the general state of the
economy doesn't have to affect your personal financial situation.

YOU CAN BE RICH BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS

What is your reaction to that thought? Close your eyes and imagine a
voice telling you over and over again, "You can be rich beyond your wildest
dreams!" Visualize the income and life-style you would like. Ask yourself if
there is any reason why you shouldn't have them. Make sure you visualize
what you really want, not what someone else wants for you. It's also
important to keep your deepest specific aspirations to yourself; otherwise
you will dilute your personal imagery and provide other people with an
opportunity to tell you why your plans won't work, which many others will
be only too happy to do.

Do not get anxious or upset if your dreams don’t materialize immediately.

This isn't magic you're performing but simple, effective preparation for
prosperity. And remember, those who have achieved great financial
success often describe their most exciting moments as the ones leading up
to their attainment of wealth, rather than the actual moment of
achievement.

Once you have a strong idea of what you'll do when you get the
money, you can begin to focus on a specific amount that will allow you to
do what you want. Don't just ask for enough to survive or to be
comfortable. For six years I kept myself at a subsistence level by focusing
only on survival.

A major breakthrough in my prosperity consciousness was the moment

when I realized I could ask for a surplus as well as mere survival. Instead of
focusing on $200 coming in to pay the rent (and it usually did come in), I
now focus on $20,000 coming in, so I can take a year off. I know it may be

20
difficult to believe at this point, but that $20,000 came just as easily as the
$200. As you begin to experiment with MONEYLOVE techniques, you'll find
this will be true for you, too.

People who say, "Well, I don't want much money, just enough to get by,”
really don't love themselves enough to feel they deserve more. They either
fear money itself or fear that they'll have to do something unpleasant to get
it. In addition to lack of self-esteem, these are some of the factors that
cause people to avoid wealth.

It's a matter of asking yourself three questions:

1. Do I want to be rich?
2. Do I believe I deserve to be rich?
3. Do I believe I can be rich?

Remember the second item of the secret I call the core of prosperity
consciousness:

The belief that you will get it.

This involves answering the three questions above with:

1. I WANT.
2. I DESERVE.
3. I CAN.

If you don't feel you deserve wealth, you won't enjoy life, no matter
how much money you eventually have. Once you begin to feel deserving,
you will feel desire. Most of the books and courses purporting to teach you
how to make a lot of money list desire as the strongest factor. Some of
them, however, paint this desire almost as an obsession. I suggest this is
as destructive as believing you don't deserve prosperity. In fact,
overwhelming desire may be an indication of poverty consciousness.
Obsessive desire is hard work to build up at an emotional level.

Prosperity consciousness is as easy as breathing. You may have already

decided you want to be rich. In fact, that's probably why you bought this

21
book. Once that becomes a clear vision, you won’t have to work on it
anymore.

Here’s another little exercise in creative imagination. Make a list of ten

reasons why you want to be rich. And then make a list of ten reasons why
you deserve to be rich.

A DECISION

Once you decide you are going to be as wealthy as you want to be,
you have made a commitment. Every decision is a commitment. I'm not
talking about wishes, and I'm not talking about promises; I am talking
about decisions, which are active moves you make in a certain direction.
Decision is the beginning of action. At the very core of your consciousness
there is a decision residing: to be poor or to be rich. This is based on your
past programming. It may sound simplistic to say it, but once you make a
decision to be rich, you are well on your way to your first million. And it is
simple. Not easy, but simple.

It's not easy because of all the negative material you've absorbed
through the years. This must be overcome before you can move forward.
This mind sweeping operation is crucial to developing prosperity
consciousness. You may already have had an inkling of the possibilities, you
may already be excited about your potential prosperity, and you may
already believe you want to be rich, you deserve to be rich, and you can be
rich. But that belief is not enough, until you accept it at a deep emotional
level of consciousness.

The reason most books on positive life changes haven't worked for
most people who've read them is simply because they have overlooked the
obstacles and not offered techniques to eliminate them. Until you can
identify and confront these emotional obstacles, you won't be emotionally
free to achieve and enjoy the wealth you deserve.

22
 THE OBSTACLES

Prosperity consciousness is a positive belief system. Poverty

consciousness is a negative belief system. At each moment you can have
only one primary belief, one primary feeling, one primary idea. When you
have two beliefs, two feelings, two ideas, the subconscious will accept only
the dominant one. And since your poverty consciousness has been with you
a lot longer and gotten firmer foothold than your prosperity consciousness,
it will tend to dominate unless you put up a fight for control of your own
mind!

Poverty consciousness is always the result of what others have told

you, while prosperity consciousnesses the result of what you tell yourself.

You must remove as much of your negative programming as possible.

You'll never remove it all. Wait, just wait a minute! Can this be true? Can
an author of a book on self-development actually admit that you won't be
able to become perfect?

Absolutely! I believe this book will help you get rid of most of your negative
programming, but there's no way you will eliminate it all. You are a human
being, not a machine. Part of the beauty of being human lies in being
imperfect and therefore unique. From time to time, no matter how strong
your prosperity consciousness, a negative fear, doubt, or guilt will creep up
from your subconscious. You will have the tools to deal with these little
emotional gremlins, but accept the fact that you will never completely
eliminate them.

A further thought on perfection: People who try to be perfect are never

original, never produce really creative and valuable ideas. In order to be
perfect, you have to do it the way everybody has always done it before.
Psychologists have long recognized the perfectionist complex as one of the
most destructive to human growth and development. In terms of financial
success, many people use perfection as an excuse. Making a statement
such as "When I learn to do it perfectly, I'll start being successful," is a way
to prevent getting started. Waiting for perfection in any aspect of your life
will usually guarantee a deficiency, a permanent deficiency, in that area.
Many people manifest their perfection complex by making "If only" excuses
about their lack of prosperity:
23
 If only I had more education . . .
If only the economy were better . . .
If only I could do it all over again . . .
If only I had chosen a more lucrative profession . . .
If only I had had better breaks . . .
If only I had been luckier . . .
If only I hadn't married so young . . .
If only my boss appreciated me . . .
If only I could clear up my debts . . .

It isn't the man or woman who has it perfect who succeeds. People
who have had all or most of the problems listed about have still made it.
The attitude that seems to provide the surest path to success is one that
says, "Sure, things aren't perfect, I'm not perfect, but I can do it!” People
who make money often make mistakes, and even have major setbacks, but
they believe they will eventually prosper, and they see every setback as a
lesson to be applied in their move toward success. None of the select group
of people Dr. Abraham Maslow termed Self-Actualized was perfect. They
suffered moments of guilt and sadness, moments of fear and self-doubt.
These moments were few, and the self-actualized people were able both to
acknowledge and to accept that they were not perfect. Because of this
capacity, they willingly took risks, were not afraid to make mistakes, and
therefore were able to innovate, to do what had never been done before.
The perfectionist is, at best, a superb copycat.

POVERTY CONSCIOUSNESS

So let's look at the attributes of poverty consciousness. People who

are caught up in poverty consciousness:

1. Don't really know what they want.

2. Avoid responsibility for their own failure or success.
3. Always put things off.
4. Don't feel deserving.
5. Have limited curiosity.
6. Don't feel appreciated.
7. Are indifferent.
24
8. Are misers, hoarders, and prophets of gloom.
9. Rarely enjoy spending money on themselves.
10. Feel guilty when they don't have money, and guiltier when they do.

Most of all, however, poverty-conscious people have an unrealistic

view of the power of money. They use money as a scapegoat, supporting
the myth that they are unable to do a lot of the things they want to do
because of lack of money. A number of my relatives were very upset when I
moved to Florida, and a life of ease, at that age of thirty-two. They had
been telling themselves that they would move to Florida, once they had
enough money. As I'm writing this, six years later, they all have much more
money than they did six years ago, and none of them has moved to Florida,
though they're still talking about doing it eventually!

That's a key word in poverty consciousness: eventually. Using it

means you are not willing to do something now, or feel you cannot do it
now, or are afraid to do it now.

The difference between poverty and prosperity consciousness can be

summed up in two quotes from famous, prosperous men. Jackie Gleason, in
a TV interview with NBC's Tom Snyder, said, "I was poor, but I didn't know
I was poor, and I always knew I'd make it." And the late impresario, Mike
Todd, said, "I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of
mind. Being broke is a temporary situation."

I CAN'T AFFORD IT

"I can't afford it" is one of the favorite comments of poverty-conscious

people. It's often a lie, almost always an untruth. I was talking in early
1977 with Dr. Wayne Dyer, who wrote, Your Erroneous Zones, and almost
single-handedly turned it into a multimillion-dollar best seller by traveling
around the country in his car and appearing on every radio and television
show that would have him, even in the smallest towns. We were talking
about efforts to promote my books, and he suggested I take off on a cross-
country promotion tour, just as he had. I said, "I really can't afford that
right now." I'll never forget his response, coming directly from his
prosperity consciousness. I taped that conversation, so I can share it with
you word for word. Wayne said, "You've really got to stop thinking about
25
what you can afford to do, because you can really afford to do anything that
you decide you want to do".

Largely as a result of that conversation with Wayne Dyer, I spent

much of 1978 traveling around the country in my motorhome, promoting
my books. At the time, I related this story to a friend, who responded,
"Wayne Dyer has a fortune now; why didn't he offer to give you financial
support for your trip?" Because he believed in himself, Wayne Dyer was
willing to believe in me. He knew I could do it. He made me aware of some
of my own poverty consciousness and gave me the greatest gift any human
can give another: He showed me it was possible and encouraged me to do
it myself.

No one's poverty consciousness was ever cured with a dose of money.

If that were possible, the government's poverty programs would be a lot
more successful. The only way to cure poverty, which is a state of mind, is
emotionally, and each person has to cure his own. All anyone else can do is
offer support, encouragement, and positive examples.

Poverty consciousness is what we do to sabotage ourselves. There's a

part of you we could call the inner pauper that will always come up with
excuses, indecision, and catastrophic expectations. The inner pauper is
always motivated by fear-fear of failure, fear of success, fear of never
making it, fear of losing it.

Fear causes us to close our minds in tight little balls. Confidence allows
us to open our minds wide, letting fresh ideas in.

A woman friend of mine was very rich. She had earned it all herself in
real estate. Rather than freeing her, this wealth tied her up in emotional
knots. She was single, but wanted to find someone to share her life.

Because she was afraid of being loved for her money, she refused to date
any man who wasn't rich. She finally ended up with a millionaire, who kept
trying to get her to turn over all her business interests to him! What she
hadn't realized was that a man who had compulsively strived for a great
deal of money was often exactly the type to marry her for money instead of
love. After her divorce, she started dating a symphony violinist earning

26
about $15,000 a year. As I write this, I don't know how it's going to turn
out, but she's certainly smiling a lot more now!

Whenever I run a seminar or workshop on MONEYLOVE, there are

always one or two participants who are obviously being directed by their
inner pauper. They sit smirking, as if to say, "This is ridiculous; changing
attitudes about money won't get you money." These are the very people
will never use the MONEYLOVE tools and never even give themselves a
chance to find out if they work.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who sit with a calm look that
says, "I believe I can use these tools and build my own prosperity, and I'm
going to start right now." Inevitably, whenever I get a chance to follow up
those who have attended my programs, these are the people who report
tremendous success in achieving higher income and more pleasure in life. I
find that when people say a workshop or book won't work, they are really
saying they don’t believe can change. Just as when someone says he or she
can't afford something within financial reach, this is a person who really
doesn't believe he or she will ever be able to afford it. It's all part of a built-
in self-destruction mechanism we all have to watch out for.

Dr. Barton Knapp, a noted Philadelphia psychologist, says, "If you're

going to do yourself in, your attitude toward money will serve as well as
any other tool."

Many people are committing what I call "temporary suicide" by shutting off
potentially alive and enriching moments for fear of what it will cost, or
feeling that they don't deserve to fully live and enjoy. The single most
important financial freedom is knowing you can have a good and full life,
whether you are rich or not. Prosperity is living easily and happily in the
real world, whether you have money or not. Poverty consciousness can
prevent you from living easily and happily, and you have to make an effort
to eliminate it--wishing won't make it go away.

27
 PARENTAL POVERTY MESSAGES

Most of the seeds that sprout into poverty consciousness come from
parents. Dr. Daniel Malamud, a clinical psychologist in New York, has
developed a concept called seed sentences, which he says are messages
from parents and significant others in our early lives--messages that have a
potent effect on the way we see the world and ourselves in relationship to
the world. Some seed sentences that may have led to an adult case of
poverty consciousness are:

"When you grow up you'll learn the value of money!"

"Save your pennies for a rainy day."
"If you went through the Depression like we did. . ."
"Don't spend your money foolishly!"
"Clean your plate, there are starving children in Europe!"
(This last one also led to a lot of cases of obesity!)

Can you think of the money messages your parents gave you? Sit
down with a piece of paper and remember what they had to say about
money and about your spending, earning, or saving it. Perhaps a little
essay entitled "My parents told me money. . ." What were your parents'
attitudes toward money? If you had to pick two words to describe the basic
money attitude of each of your parents, what would those four words be?
And have you incorporated any of them into your current beliefs about
money?

How would your parents feel about your becoming prosperous?

Visualize telling them you've just become a millionaire. See their faces and
their comments. Would they be happy for you? Or would they be worried
because you now were more likely to be a robbery victim, or to have tax
problems, or to spend it all foolishly? Parents are very good at creating
"What abouts":

"What about security for your old age?"

"What about, God forbid, a serious medical problem?"
"What about the children's education?"
"What about us? We're not getting any younger, you know"
"What about your responsibilities and obligations?"

28
 Any of these sound familiar?

Another way parents have of creating a negative view of money is by

telling children they don't have time to play with them or have fun because
they are too busy earning money to feed them. The implication here is that
everyone would starve if someone weren't out with the proverbial nose to
the grindstone. A parent's statement "I'm doing it all for you," is really a
statement that says, "I'm doing it for my own neurotic reasons and using
you as an excuse."

One of the great metaphoric phrases of all time has been appropriated
by parents to conjure up an image of the difficulty in making money:

MONEY DOESN'T GROW ON TREES

What that has to do with any real-life situation escapes me now, as it did as
a child. I know money doesn't grow on trees. I also knew that my parents,
though of modest means, could afford ten cents for an ice-cream cone. It's
as if you asked someone for love, and they said, "You can't find love in an
apple." It's a way of avoiding responsibility, of avoiding saying no.

What your parents actually did in terms of money also affects your
emotional attitude. I will be forever grateful for two things my parents did
that have dramatically affected the way I've lived my life. First, even if they
had only $200 in the bank when vacation time came in summer, they would
withdraw it and we'd go off to the seashore for a week or two. I remember
my father's saying that vacations were important, and making disdainful
comments about neighbors who spent their vacations fixing up the house
instead of relaxing.

The other thing was unusual for their lower-middle income level, and
unique among all their friends and neighbors: Every week, no matter what
the current financial situation, we ate at a restaurant on Saturday and
Sunday nights. They weren't necessarily expensive restaurants, but in the
postwar era of the late forties and early fifties going out to eat wasn't the
national pastime it has since become. Those two habits, those two
examples of prosperity consciousness, had a profound impact on me.

29
 On the other hand, we had some relatives who had a different money
situation. The father of the family believed in keeping his financial affairs to
himself. Even his wife didn't know how much he had in the bank. When he
said, "We can't afford it," she had no way to be a part of that decision. I
remember going to the movies with the kids and watching them unwrap
their meager supply of coins, usually enough for admission only. I treated
for popcorn and candy.

My parents had always discussed the family finances openly and

honestly. I knew what was coming in, and was consulted, even at the age
of ten, about major purchases. I felt a part of the process. When my father
passed away, I knew where all the papers were, and exactly how much
money there was in savings accounts and insurance. When the secretive
father of that family of relatives died, the widow and children went through
painful hassles trying to get everything sorted out. They hadn't even known
whether he had written a will!

I think a parent's keeping financial information hidden and separate

from the mainstream of family sharing, contributes to a poverty
consciousness that stresses money as a thing apart from all other facets of
life. Some parents have a lack of trust of each other and their children, with
a fear-motivated feeling that they must keep a financial hold over the
others in the family. Perhaps this includes distrust of the children, and a
fear that they'll be considered more valuable dead than alive, particularly if
details are shared about insurance and wills.

Another person I know has a mother who has a million-dollar business

while her child struggles along in poverty consciousness, trying to keep the
grandchild well fed and clothed. The mother pours all the money back into
the business, saying, "It'll all be yours and your son's someday." Wouldn't it
be delightful if that mother could prosperous enough to take out ten or
twenty thousand dollars which she could easily afford, and present it to her
daughter and grandson as a gift of love.

Even though I am well aware of the emotional fears and negative

programming that lead to such actions on the part of parents, I still find it
depressing that so many of them seem to prefer that their children should
enjoy their money after they die rather than be able to share that joy while

30
they're alive. This helps in the passing of poverty consciousness from
generation to generation.

I think it's important to state here that you can never change your
parents' poverty consciousness. You can change only your own, and part of
that change is being able to forgive your parents. They are doing the best
they can. They may very well have been victims of their own parents'
poverty consciousness.

It's a well-known and tragic psychological fact that some people fail
just to get even with their parents, as if to say, "See what a rotten job you
did raising me!" Others avoid success to rob parents of the satisfaction of
being proud. What many don't realize is that putting emotional energy into
these negative efforts will produce only self-defeat. This is also true when
you envy or hate people who have achieved success. Some people look
at another's success as a form of punishment, as if that successful person
were intentionally out-achieving them to show them up. Others enjoy and
root for the success of another person, realizing it's an opportunity to learn
by example, and proof that success is possible. Look within your own heart
now, and decide whether you allow yourself to be put down or inspired by
the financial success of other people.

If you are fortunate enough to have parents who are still alive, you may
find them resisting your move toward prosperity. You're going to have to
take some risks in order to make progress, and parents can always manage
to come up with some good reason not to take risks. Understand that they
may just be feeling insecure about your changing in any substantial way.
And make no mistake about it, prosperity consciousness will change you!
Reassure your parents if possible. If they are always complaining that you
need more financial security, it's just because they don't love you enough to
trust you and to believe that you are capable and talented enough to
survive.

You are probably much stronger than your parents ever suspected,
and much more talented and capable. Eventually, when they are exposed to
the joy you feel when you take your life and your fortune into your own
hands, they'll begin to understand. Until then, just love them, forgive them,
and don't expect anything from them. They already gave you the greatest

31
gift of all: life itself. And with that gift came the most sophisticated
moneymaking machine in all the universe: your brain.

AFFIRMATIONS

An affirmation is a declaration you make to yourself of something you

believe or hope to believe. As a first step in substantially changing your
money programming, you'll be working with affirmations, which I call
PROSPERITY PROCLAMATIONS. They will become a major tool in your battle
against poverty consciousness. The repetition of positive and alive
messages to your subconscious is the only foolproof way to reprogram your
brain. Remember, when you have two ideas, the subconscious will accept
the dominant one. Repetition is one way to make sure the good guys win,
that the positive money thoughts replace the negative, self-defeating ones.
You are using the power of suggestion, but, more importantly, you are
getting into the habit of positive action.

Positive thinking sounds great, and it's necessary for success, but you
can positive-think from now until 2001 without changing your basic habits.
It takes action to move forward, and thought that isn't followed by action is
worthless when it comes to changing your life. The Prosperity Proclamations
are the activating force. You can nod your head and agree with a lot of
what I say throughout this book, but until you start reprogramming your
subconscious mind and thereby become committed and emotionally
involved in your own prosperity, you will be doomed to failure!

Realize that a part of you will resist any major change, that the part I
call the inner pauper is frightened of change. Using affirmations, positive
programming words fed directly into your computer-like brain, is an
important breakthrough, a vital indication that you have made a positive
decision to change your money attitudes.

Before going on with the subject of affirmations, and providing more

guidelines for their use, so you can start functioning at a new level of
financial awareness immediately, let's pay attention to your reaction to this
concept of affirmations. For instance, if I said to you, "Just repeat the
phrase 'I feel wonderful!' every day and you will begin to feel better," what
32
would your reaction be to my comment? Would you feel I had gone off the
deep end? Would you feel I'm promoting magic? Would you feel it couldn't
possibly work? Or would you try it and see how it felt, and then decide
whether it worked or not?

THE BIG SECRET

Let me tell you a fantastic, immense secret about human

consciousness. I suppose it's the most powerful idea contained in this book,
and one that countless men and women have used to change their lives. If
you pay attention to it, it can help you change yours. The secret: Your
subconscious mind cannot distinguish between facts and imagined facts!

This means if you present imagined material strongly and vividly

enough, it will be accepted as real! This is why your body responds with all
the physiological attributes of danger--including increased respiration,
muscle tension, adrenalin release, secretion of blood lactate (which is
related to stress), increased skin moisture, and rapid pulse-when you fear
an imagined danger. This means that imagining you are wealthy and are
producing lots of money will convince your brain, which will convince your
body, and you will start to look, breath, walk, and act like a rich person!
Sure, it's easier to feel rich if you're staring at a pile of thousand- dollar bills
you're counting, but visualizing those bills can be just effective. All it takes
is imagination and concentration.

I have been using personal affirmations in my workshops for the past

seven years. I have never once seen them fail as a potent tool for change,
once the person starts using them on a regular basis. People can come up
with all sorts of reasons not to use them:

"It is beneath my dignity."

It escapes me how an affirmation can be any more beneath
someone's dignity than living in financial turmoil, or talking about money
troubles, or believing there is a limit to how much money he or she is
entitled to.

"If it works, why doesn't everyone do it?"

Indeed! Well, it does work, and I suppose the reason everyone
doesn't do it is because not everyone is ready for prosperity. You bought
33
this book, or at least started reading it, so evidently you have decided you
are ready to work on your money situation at an emotional level.

"I'd feel silly."

There's nothing sillier than not being wealthy on this rich planet with
its growing economy. Doing something about it is the least silly thing any
sensible person can do!

"But I want some practical suggestions!"

This is one of the most common objections. Some people come to
one of my prosperity consciousness seminars expecting to be told how to
balance their checkbook, or buy corporate bonds, or deal in commodities.
The whole premise is, of course, that wealth is not material gain but a state
of mind. It therefore can be easily achieved only by starting with the mind
and its basic attitudes, which can be changed if they are obstacles to
prosperity!

So much for the objections. As I write these words, I am excited for

you, for I know how delighted and surprised you will be after using your
Prosperity Proclamations! These are intentional beliefs you will start
programming into your consciousness for the specific purpose of changing
your negative attitudes about money.

A lot of people attribute metaphysical powers to affirmations. I make

no such claims, though I have seen amazing things accomplished in all
areas of life with this method. I assert that these are positive signals you
are sending your brain, so that it can begin moving in a direction that will
provide you with all the money you want. If more than that happens for
you, consider it a happy fringe benefit. Don't question it, just enjoy it.
Again, we do not begin to know the total power of the mind. Repeated
statements and sayings have done much to form the person you are right
now, including the negative, nonproductive, noncreative parts of you. Using
the Prosperity Proclamations is merely a way of reversing that process, in a
highly accelerated manner.

I am going to share seven Prosperity Proclamations with you. You

may reword them if a variation feels better. You may eventually choose to
replace them with your own, perhaps with more specific programming.
There are several factors to consider when creating affirmations. First, they
34
must be alive messages, not wishes. "I want more money," is a wish, not
an affirmation. It must be a positive statement, personalized, to the point,
easy to understand, and preferably one that will conjure up pictures in your
mind. It must be action-oriented, with a feeling of movement, of aliveness.

THE PROSPERITY PROCLAMATIONS

1. A LOT MORE MONEY IS FLOWING INTO MY LIFE. I DESERVE IT AND

WILL USE IT FOR MY GOOD AND THAT OF OTHERS.

One way of ensuring that this programming is received at a deep

emotional level is to keep track of your emotional reactions to it. Repeat the
sentences ten times to yourself. Stop and see whether you're absorbing it,
whether it feels right at a gut level. Take a deep breath, and see whether
you can feel the proclamation click into your subconscious. If you have a
negative reaction, don't repress it, bring it out into the open. Take a piece
of paper and write out the first Prosperity Proclamation twenty times,
leaving room for emotional comments. Then decide what your reactions
are, and write them in, even if they are negative.
For example:

A LOT MORE MONEY IS FLOWING INTO MY LIFE. I DESERVE IT AND WILL

USE IT FOR MY GOOD AND THAT OF OTHERS.
“I don't know, what did I ever do to deserve this money?”

A LOT MORE MONEY IS FLOWING INTO MY LIFE. I DESERVE IT AND WILL

USE IT FOR MY GOOD AND THAT OF OTHERRS.
“C'mon, where's all this wonderful money coming from?”

If you write your emotional response to each of the twenty repetitions,

you'll find that your reaction will start to get more positive. You may want
to write your response after writing each positive statement, rather than
waiting until you write all seven proclamations.

The Prosperity Proclamations must be as believable as possible. Most

of them are money messages that explain themselves. From now on, I will
give some explanation of the particular choice of words. For instance, in the
first proclamation-- A LOT MORE MONEY IS FLOWING INTO MY LIFE. I
35
DESERVE IT AND WILL USE IT FOR MY GOOD AND THAT OF OTHERS
-- the first sentence evokes an image of money moving toward you. This
can be fun to visualize as you say or write the proclamation. Imagine the
money is coming to you. I DESERVE IT is something you have to feel to
accept it openly without guilt or apology, and WILL USE IT FOR MY
GOOD AND THAT OF OTHERS takes it a step further and allows you to
conjure up images of how you'll use the money, giving yourself and others
pleasure.

2. I HAVE AN UNLIMITED NUMBER OF VALUABLE IDEAS IN MY

CONSCIOUSNESS.

This is absolutely true, and the sooner you believe it, the sooner you
can start bringing those ideas up to the surface. I remember one woman in
a workshop who complained she wasn't creative. Her husband supported
this view, because he did some writing and liked to think of himself as the
only creative person in the family. I had her make up a proclamation, just
suggesting that it should be a sentence that, if she believed it, would
change her attitude about her own creativity. She came up with I AM
MORE CREATIVE THAN I EVER BELIEVED POSSIBLE. At first she found
this hard to believe, but she was persistent and kept it up. She had always
wanted to work with her hands, so she tried macramé. She told me she
didn't even feel the proclamation working, but one day she just sort of
knew it was true! Her macramé work, in just four months, got good enough
for her to sell at a local flea market. Then an interior designer saw her work
and hired her to create original macramé pieces to blend in with his
interiors. Within a year she was making a substantial income from her
creativity. Even I was surprised at how fast it worked for her. But that's just
one of many examples of the power of the mind. You might picture, with
this affirmation, ideas crowding together in your subconscious, just bursting
to get through to your conscious mind.

3. I LOVE WHAT I DO, AND THAT LOVE BRINGS ME ALL THE MONEY I
WANT.

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 This is one of the core principles of MONEYLOVE, coming up in detail in
the chapter entitled "Worklove”. This could put you in touch with some
dissatisfaction over what you do to earn a living, but repeating it, even
under these circumstances, can have a potent effect on your life and your
work. It’s also valuable to understand that the loving energy you put into
your work is what provides you with a large income.

4. EVERY DOLLAR I CIRCULATE ENRICHES THE ECONOMY AND COMES

BACK TO ME MULTIPLIED.

This Prosperity Proclamation is a powerhouse! It can change your entire

attitude toward spending money. You’ll understand it more clearly after
reading Chapter 3, “And the Money Goes Round and Round.” But it doesn't
have to make complete sense for it to begin to work on your subconscious.
Abstract thoughts are usually the most powerful, since they allow your own
mind to interpret and adapt the idea to your individual needs. This
proclamation also makes economic sense, since you do put any money you
spend into the economy, and the richer that economy the more money
there is to buy your goods, services and ideas.

5. EVERY DOLLAR I BANK IS ACCUMULATED WEALTH FOR MY PERSONAL

PLEASURE.

This one will make more sense after you read the Chapter4,
"Prosperity Banking”. Basically, it's a way to change your attitude about
saving money, so that you have a more direct contact with your money in
the bank. A lot of people are programmed to put money away for
emergencies such as sudden illness. This associates money with pain in
your subconscious and is a good way to keep yourself in poverty
consciousness.

6. NO MATTER WHAT I DO, MY FINANCIAL WORTH INCREASES EVERY DAY.

This relates to two chapters, "Worklove" and "Prosperity Banking." In

the first, it relates to the fact that, as a growing, creative person, you
produce more valuable ideas each day and so become a more valuable
person. In terms of banking, this is true because of interest building up in

37
even a modest bank account. And all of this does happen no matter what
you do.

7. ALL MY INVESTMENTS ARE PROFITABLE, EITHER IN MONEY OR

VALUABLE EXPERIENCE.

This is related, naturally, to Chapter 5, "Prosperity Investing." Many

successful investors have related to me tales of how they learned priceless
lessons when they lost money on specific investments. In the long term,
the sensible investor will gain. The short-term losses that can occur are
merely guiding lights, pointing out the right direction.

One of the investments I lost money on provided the spark that led to
one of the valuable concepts I talk about in the investing chapter. But you
go into each investment of time, money, or energy with the expectation
that you will somehow come out ahead. This means also having an attitude
of "If I don't get what I want, it's because something better is waiting for
me." If you check out your personal history, you'll find that this has usually
been true.

An easy way to absorb your seven Prosperity Proclamation is to record

them and play them back whenever possible. I suggest recording each one
ten times. You might even choose to repeat them out loud along with the
recording. Modify them as you please, and even come up with your own
when this feels right.

A couple of additional hints: when saying them, you might take a deep
breath and feel your wealth increasing as you inhale, and all your negative
programming leaving your consciousness as you exhale. This can be a
valuable visualization for you throughout the day, with or without your
proclamations. You might say to yourself, WITH EACH BREATH, I AM
INCREASING MY WEALTH AND ELIMINATING MY POVERTY
CONSCIOUSNESS. Another useful habit is to say silently to each person
you meet, YOU DESERVE WEALTH AND THE FULFILLMENT OF YOUR
fONDEST DREAMS. Time and time again I've seen it proved that the more
you are willing to help others prosper, the more prosperous you will become
yourself!

38
 You have probably already had some emotional feelings that acted as
Prosperity Proclamations. Have you ever set out to do something and said
to yourself, “I can do this”? That's a way you had of convincing yourself,
and it usually works! I remember one woman saying to me, “I always make
money in the stock market,“ That, too, was a Prosperity Proclamation, and
it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As you see the power of these positive statements, realize that the
negative statements you've been saying to yourself and others have just as
much power. Just this acknowledgement of their potential for harm will help
you eliminate them from your life.

Saying "He doesn't deserve that job. I hope he doesn't get it," is a
poverty proclamation of the highest order, and it will bounce back into your
own subconscious. If for no other reason, avoid these statements to avoid
damaging yourself.

You are the best-equipped person in all the world to program your own
brain. Giving up this privilege to others is one of the most damaging things
you can do to yourself. Using the Prosperity Proclamations will help you
take charge of your own creative process. You might picture yourself in
front of a sophisticated giant computer, programming in important
information with confidence, with joy, and with certainty that the
information will result in positive action!

39
 2

WORKLOVE

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they
spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these.
-JESUS

Greater even than the pious man is he who eats that which is the fruit of
his own toil; for scripture declares him twice-blessed.
-THE TALMUD

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds

him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or
broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
-RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Work is love made visible.

-KAHLIL GIBRAN

What we call "creative work" ought not to be called work at all, because it
isn’t. . . I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty
years.
-STEPHEN LEACOCK

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The richest man in all the world is the one who has a good time earning his
daily bread. WORKLOVE means just that, loving the work you do, doing the
work you love. When Dr. Abraham Maslow studied Self-Actualized people,
that tiny portion of the population who made the most of their human
potential, he found that they all had some work they felt was worthwhile
and important. They found work a pleasure, and there was little distinction
between work and play. To be Self-Actualized, someone must be not only
doing work that he or she considers important, but doing that work well,
and enjoying the doing.

Psychologists far and wide have come to the conclusion that human
beings can reach the heights of their true potential only when they operate
as unified organisms. Having work separate from what is pleasurable
creates disunity. Most people in the world today are working at jobs or
careers that give them no pleasure, no excitement, no outlet for their
creative imaginations. If most people are working at jobs that they don't
love, you can imagine what kind of emotional environment this creates, and
how it would change if we all went to work with a smile on our lips and love
in our heart!

As a creative human being, with countless valuable ideas waiting in

your subconscious right now, you can be truly fulfilled only when you find a
means of expression. This is a crying demand from your own
consciousness, and to ignore it is to remain forever stifled, forever
mediocre, forever dissatisfied.

Patanjali, the founder of Yoga in ancient India, as translated by

Edmond Bordeaux Szekely in his book, Creative Work, said: "When you are
inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your
thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your
consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new,
great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become
alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever
dreamed yourself to be."
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 You'll notice that so far in this chapter I haven't mentioned money. It's
been intentional. Working at something just for money is an act of poverty
consciousness at its worst. It's saying to yourself, "I haven't the talent or
imagination to earn money doing something I enjoy."

When I was working as a radio newsman and commentator, I always

quit a job when it was no longer fun, when it no longer stimulated me.
When I would apply for a new job, my interviewer was usually impressed
with the fact that I left a job freely to find a more interesting and
challenging one. And I always got a better job within a few days!

Many people give themselves a self-imposed prison sentence by

working at something they don't enjoy, aiming for the day they can retire.
Working to retire is poverty consciousness. It's saying, "I don't deserve to
do what I really want to do until I put so many years of hard labor in." As I
said, a prison sentence.

Deep in your subconscious, handed down from generation to

generation, there are some ancient beliefs imbedded--beliefs that say work
is hardship, a punishment from the gods, something we have to endure
while living this life. The belief is that it is natural to have to work hard to
survive, that this is somehow dictated by the natural order of things. And
with these beliefs so deeply ingrained at a subconscious level, most people
find themselves in a frantic internal conflict, between what they want to do
and the way they believe it has to be. Let's check out your own beliefs in
this area. Answer these questions:

1. Do you believe a nose-to-the grindstone attitude is the surest path to

prosperity?
2. Do you believe it's frivolous to want to enjoy your work?
3. Do you believe work has to be a serious affair?
4. Do you believe your job determines how worthwhile you are?

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5. Do you believe pensions and retirement benefits are one of the most
important things to look for in a job?
6. Do you believe that you're supposed to work hard forty hours a week so
you can enjoy your evenings, weekends, and vacations?
7. Do you really believe you deserve a job that is fun and exciting?
8. Do you really believe going to work is just something you have to do?
9. If you left your current work, could you ever see yourself wanting to do it
without pay, just for the fun of it?
10. Would you encourage a child of yours to enter the same field?

If you answered questions 1,2,3,4,5,6,8 "Yes," or questions 7,9,10 "No,"

you probably are the victim of those negative beliefs, In, Creative Work,
Edmund Bordeaux Szekely wrote: "If you feel that work is a punishment or
hardship, or if you have no desire for work, or live in the hope of retiring
soon-- do not think you are entertaining the thoughts of a wise man; you
are merely dancing to mental tunes that savages played ten thousand years
ago."

Patanjali taught that, with love and enthusiasm directed toward our
work, what was once a chore and hardship now becomes a wonderful tool
to develop, enrich, and nourish our lives. And this is the only kind of
attitude to have in order to really prosper. A sense of accomplishment is
what brings happiness, not the money you get for that accomplishment.

In Karma Yoga, Patanjali taught that work should be the principal

channel of expression for mind and soul. When your work is what you most
enjoy, the love energy that this creates brings you untold wealth.

Stop punishing yourself! I suppose that's the message that will bring
you the most money. You are a creative human being, not an ox. An ox can
work all day just for its daily meal. Working at drudgery just to survive is
something any dumb animal can do. Almost any noncreative task can now
be performed by a machine. But you are still a creative human being, not a
machine.
43
 Ask yourself this: "Can what I do to earn a living be done by a
sophisticated but unfeeling and unimaginative robot?”
Of course, the difference between work and play is attitude. If you are
not enjoying what you are doing right now, it doesn't mean it can't be
enjoyable. Our deeply ingrained attitudes about work really conspire against
enjoying anything we choose as a way to earn money. A lot of people don't
even enjoy their play. And exercise is something most people do because
they think they have to do it. The nationally syndicated columnist Dr. Peter
Steincrohn wrote a book some years back entitled, How to Keep Fit Without
Exercise, and he has angered jogging enthusiasts with such comments in
his column as "I never see joggers smiling." But it's true that people seem
to take their exercise as seriously as their work. It's a way to punish
themselves for eating too much, or enjoying too much, or relaxing too
much. And this, too, is poverty consciousness. Exercise that becomes hard
work is a form of punishment. Unless what you do is done with love and
joy, it cannot have the best possible results for you, physically or
emotionally.

There's no way you will ever be able to buy back enough pleasure to
make up for what you missed by not enjoying your work.

Jack is a young man I know who is determined to retire by the age of

forty. He is working at a job he detests, and saving every cent. He even
lives with his parents to save on rent. He'll probably make that retirement
deadline, but I doubt it will be worth it. Whenever I talk to him, he asks me
about all the fun I've been having in my work, and says, "Ahh, when I
retire, that's how I'm going to live!" He'll have about a quarter of a million
dollars by the time he's forty, but he will have thrown away twenty years of
youth, twenty years in which he put all his energy into a job he hated.

Jack is socially retarded. He just hasn't been out in the real world. It's
going to be very difficult for him to stop sacrificing and start living. And
there is no way he's going to be able to make up all that lost time! Jack
44
may have a lot of money right now, but you wouldn't know it to talk to him.
He gets no pleasure from his money. He gets no pleasure from his work. He
gets no pleasure from life. And he firmly believes that's the way it's
supposed to be! Jack is no better than an emotional cripple, and he may
never recover.

The reason you were born was not to have to go out and earn a living.
There has to be a higher purpose to life than that. You arrived on this
planet against tremendous odds, and after millions of years of evolution.
Life is your reward for surviving that struggle, for making it. Does it make
sense to believe that you have to spend the rest of that life earning that
reward all over again?

The well-known literary agent, Paul Reynolds, tells of a boat trip he

took at the age of twenty-one. He met an elderly, distinguished-looking
gentleman on the boat. The older man asked him what his aspirations in life
were, and Paul responded. "To make as much money as possible."
To this the elderly gentleman replied, "Oh, I can tell you how to make
a lot of money.“

Paul said, "Tell me."

And the man said, "All you have to do is find a town somewhere in
America that is growing. There are plenty of them. Find a job in that town,
any job, And immediately start investing 10 per cent of your earnings in
real estate in that town. In thirty or forty years, you'll be guaranteed a
fortune!"

Well, that sounded pretty simple, so Paul asked the man, "Did you do
it?" And the man responded, "No. It wasn't worth it."

I love the story because it goes to the heart of WORKLOVE. What use
is a fortune when you've forgotten how to laugh, to feel, to love? And make

45
no mistake about it, a boring, frustrating, noncreative job will result in just
those deficiencies!

Ask yourself another question: "If I knew that I would make enough
money to be financially independent in twenty or thirty years, would I be
willing to continue doing what I am now doing to earn a living?"
And let's look at that popular description of work: earning a living.
Another poverty consciousness statement if I ever saw one. Earn a living?
You already earned your right to life by being born in an abundant world.
You are living right now, you don't have to earn it. How about saying
instead: "I'm earning a pleasure," or "I'm earning satisfaction.”

Two of the primary goals of the prosperity-conscious person are

financial satisfaction and financial independence. Financial satisfaction is
enjoying the money you now have, and feeling comfortable and secure
about your life. Financial independence is having enough money to do what
you want to do without concern about having to earn any more.

I prefer these categories to "financial security" because there is no

such thing as security outside of your own consciousness. Even a
multimillionaire can be wiped out, even a pension can fail to keep up with
inflation, and there's been a lot of thoughtful opinion to the effect that the
Social Security System will be bankrupt in our lifetimes. Knowing you have
the creative imagination to always earn a living is the best kind of financial
security you can have. Even worrying about security is a negative
statement you are making to your own subconscious, saying, "Someday I
won't be able to take care of myself, earn my own money, and I need
money put aside for that time." When your subconscious hears a statement
like that it starts preparing you for the slowdown you predict.

Your subconscious is an obedient servant. I remember an old movie

comedy in which a wealthy bachelor said to his oriental servant, "I'm fed up
with women. I never want to see another one again." The servant threw out
all his pictures of women and his address book, canceled all his dates, and
46
wouldn't let a woman visitor in the door. Once you give instructions to an
obedient servant, who may have no way of knowing how seriously you
mean them, watch out!

VALUES

Values are those qualities you consider worthwhile and important. But
a good many of your values are imposed upon you by society and parents
and other important people in your life. Here again, the first humanistic
psychologist, Dr. Abraham Maslow, made some important discoveries in his
research into those superior people he called Self-Actualized. He found that
their values are based on what is real for them, rather than what they've
been told by the outside world.

How about your values? Are they really yours? How important is
money in your life? Did you create this idea of the importance of money?
You probably didn't, and if you think about it, you can come up with the
name of the person who first planted that idea in your head.

Many people rush headlong into the pursuit of wealth, without ever
considering whether this is a real value for them. I think the biggest crime
against humanity is the steering of young people toward careers for money
instead of for love. I also think the pitiful state of our medical and
educational systems can be directly attributed to the fact that many young
men and women got into medicine, not through any inborn desire to heal,
but because it's a lucrative profession, while many got into teaching
because they believed it was a secure profession. I know I wouldn't want to
be operated on by a surgeon who's more worried about his fee than my
health, and I wouldn't want to be taught by a teacher who's more
concerned with job security than with how and what I'm being taught.

47
 When you are lucky enough to be served by the person who truly loves
his or her chosen profession, what a difference! I have a good friend who
was probably one of the most financially successful gynecologists in the
nation. But he wasn't in it primarily for the money. He really believed in
what he was doing. He believed in telling his women patients the truth
about their health, and in teaching them preventive medicine skills. He had
a strong sense of prosperity consciousness and put great value on his
capabilities, so his fees were high. But no one ever complained, because he
followed one of the basic prosperity consciousness rules. I'll talk about it
later in this chapter: He gave them more than their money's worth.

VALUES CLARIFICATION

Values clarification is an entire science of human behavior. It's just

what it says, a set of strategies to help you clarify your values and choose
more appropriate ones if you so decide. Dr. Sidney Simon was the foremost
teacher of Values Clarification in the world, in his regular position as
Professor of Humanistic Education at the University of Massachusetts, and
in his books, including the pioneer work, Values Clarification, and his
workshops conducted around the world. It was at one of these workshops
that I was first introduced to what I consider an extremely effective way of
looking at one's values in terms of work. Sid Simon used a chart to facilitate
this awareness, and he graciously gave me permission to use it, before he
even published it, with the sole stipulation being that I don't change it in
any way.

This is a way of looking at what you hope to get out of your work.
These are the rewards you hope to get from working, what you actually
went from your job or career or profession. The idea is to rate each
category in order of importance to you. First the chart, then some
explanations.

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WHAT I WANT FROM WORK

MONEY STIMULATION/ LOVE & AFFECTION LEAVE A

EXCITEMENT THUMBPRINT ON
THE WORLD
Survival & Luxuries Challenge Colleagues Change Individuals

To Give Other Cutting edge of Boss or Bosses Chang Systems &

Newness Institutions

Freedom of Choice Variety Clients & Customers Create Product with

Long Shelf Life

Security & Protection Be Part of Team Family & Friends Affect Family &
Solving Real Problems Friends

USING THE VALUES CLARIFICATION CHART

The purpose of this chart is to help you discover exactly what you
want from your work. You are rating these wants in order of importance
from 1 to 4, with 1 being the highest rating and 4 the lowest. To start with,
you'll be looking at how it is right now. What satisfactions are you looking
for in the work you are doing now? First, rate the four major categories in
order of importance. Each one gets a number from 1 to 4. You are thus
asking yourself:
Am I working mainly for financial gain?
Am I working for the stimulation and excitement my work provides?
Am I working for love and affection?
Am I working to accomplish something important, to leave a
thumbprint on the world as I know it?

Most of us have aspects of all four in what we do. Rate them for yourself.
Next, take the first category, MONEY, and, rate, in order of importance:
49
 SURVIVAL & LUXURIES (Food, shelter, stereos, and vacations.)
TO GIVE OTHERS (College for children, support family, donations.)
FREEDOM OF CHOICE (So you don't "have" to do what you don't want
to do.)
SECURITY & PROTECTION (For your old age, medical emergencies,
savings.)

The item you think is your strongest motivation for wanting money is
ranked 1.

The next column is STIMULATION/EXCITEMENT. Many prosperity-

conscious people cite this as one of their major motivations for work. Rate
the categories:

CHALLENGE (Sid Simon describes this as “enjoying getting in over

your head with the feeling that you'll make it out.”)
CUTTING EDGE OF NEWNESS (Being really alive gives a sense of
newness to all work.)
VARIETY (Lots of different things to do, a many-faceted career.)
BE PART OF TEAM SOLVING REAL PROBLEMS
(This can generate exciting group energy.)

Again, the four subheads for STIMULATION/EXCITEMENT are to be ranked

in the order in which they are important to you in your current work.

The next column, LOVE & AFFECTION, covers an area largely ignored
by people talking about and exploring their reasons for choosing a certain
profession. But it's a vital area. This one is ranked from 1 to 4 on the basis
of who you are most trying to please in your work, other than yourself, of
course. Do you most want the love and affection of:

COLLEAGUES (The people you work with.)

BOSS OR BOSSES (Where the money and promotions come from.)

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 CLIENTS AND CUSTOMERS (Would include students if you're a
teacher, patients if you're a therapist or physician.)
FAMILY & FRIENDS (Are you working for the love you get when you
get home?)

I really like Sid Simon's phrase for the next category: LEAVE A
THUMBPRINT ON THE WORLD. It's the kind of creative imagination
someone with true prosperity consciousness exhibits, and an apt description
of the impact his Values Clarification work has had on education and
psychology. Is this what you're working for: impact? And where is it most
important for you to have that impact?

CHANGE INDIVIDUALS (Teachers are often motivated most by this

one, the heady knowledge that you've moved someone in a new
direction.)
CHANGE SYSTEMS & INSTITUTIONS (This is often the province of the
idealist, and can be one of the most frustrating motivations.)
CREATE PRODUCT WITH LONG SHELF LIFE (This can be any kind of a
product from a book to a new medicine to a new way of doing
something.)
AFFECT FAMILY & FRIENDS (Of course, the occupation most strongly
motivated by this one may be homemaker.)

If you look closely, you may find you are motivated a bit by each of
these sixteen factors, plus the four main categories. To take this effective
tool a step further, go through it again-- MONEY;
STIMULATION/EXCITEMENT; LOVE & AFFECTION; LEAVE A THUMBPRINT
ON THE WORLD-- with all the subheads ranked from 1 to 4, but this time
the way you would like it to be, the way you want it when you achieve your
fondest dreams. The first time was what you want from what you are doing
now; this second run-through is for the work you would like to be doing a
few years from now.

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 I have used this Sid Simon values chart time and again in reassessing
my own desires and dreams related to my work. I am pleased to be able to
share it with you, and deeply grateful to Sid for his generosity and his
inspiration.

It was a revelation for me, and it may be for you, to discover so many
reasons for working. I suppose most of us focus on money and enjoyment
of the work itself as the primary motivations. And money is usually what
people talk about when discussing someone else's job, "He's making fifty
thousand dollars a year!" is much more prevalent than "She loves what
she's doing and it sounds like a lot of fun." In fact, many people, especially
parents, don't take your work seriously if you seem to be having a good
time. Fun and work are a difficult combination for a lot of people to accept.
"Silly" is the word used to describe someone who works primarily for
pleasure, even if that person is also making a lot of money. And the
judgments people make!

I've been involved in the creation of a TV series, and the situation in

Hollywood is a poverty consciousness addict's dream. There, if you're a
writer earning $3,000 a week, you wouldn't be caught dead having lunch
with a $1,000-a-week writer! Imagine being so caught up in a "money trip"
that you ignore someone's creativity, personality, and aliveness, and focus
on the size of his or her paycheck. Recently a vicious rumor was started
aimed at assassinating the character of a well-known screenwriter. Word
was passed around that he was getting only $30,000 for a script instead of
his customary $100,000. He spent quite a bit of time tracking down the
rumor, finally discovering it came from the producer his ex-wife was seeing
and was an act of revenge on her part for what she considered to be an
inadequate property settlement.

When money becomes the only way of measuring success in the

world, a lot of resentment is built up when someone achieves sudden
financial gain. Rather than ask if that person is enjoying the money, many

52
people start to make hostile comments, such as "Some people have all the
luck!" or "He must know somebody."

Contrast this with the attitude of the people who live on the little
island of Nauru in the Pacific. Because of their rich guano deposits, they are
among the richest people on earth. They practice a unique ritual known as
bubutsi. The moment someone strikes it rich, or has some stroke of good
fortune, or celebrates a special accomplishment, any friend or relative can
ask for and take his or her possessions. Bubutsi means "to ask for and
take" and is a custom everyone seems to love, even the "victims." It is
perhaps the height of sharing. If, for instance, you celebrated your twenty-
fifth wedding anniversary on Nauru, your neighbors might come over and
appropriate your car, and some relatives might make off with your
furniture. And you would just laugh and enjoy their pleasure. How about
that for prosperity consciousness?

LETTING GO

Letting go is one of the most difficult things to do. Like a trapeze

artist, you must let go of the first trapeze bar before you can catch the new
one. In many instances, that first trapeze bar is represented by a
stagnating, dead-end job. Understand this, however: Any job or career can
be made interesting and profitable. So it's a matter of personal priorities.
Do you want investigate the possibilities in your current work? Or do you
want to reach out in new directions? Remember, a decision is the beginning
of action, not wishing or promising. Whichever you choose, you will be
better off than if you don't choose at all.

Let's acknowledge here and now that letting go can be a scary

business. When I left a lucrative career in broadcasting in 1970. I believed
in myself, but I was also frightened. No matter how secure you are within
yourself, no matter how much confidence you have, there's a part of you
that will always respond to any change with fear, and sometimes just the
contemplation of change will give you shaky knees. Pretending you aren't
53
afraid isn't going to do you much good. Confront your fears, list them, get
to know them, and only then will you be able to put them aside and move
ahead. So write out a list:

THE IDEA OF MAKING A MAJOR CAREER CHANGE MAKES ME

FEEL__________.

Fill in the blank with as many different answers as you can come up
with. And realize how your body feels as you think about this. Often, by
paying attention to the physiological changes caused by fear, discomfort, or
anxiety, we can rid of the restrictive effects of those emotions.
One woman who attended one of my seminars had this list:

THE IDEA OF MAKING A MAJOR CAREER CHANGE MAKES ME FEEL

That I’ll make the wrong choice.

That I’ll exhaust all my savings.
That I won’t get a better job, or even as good a one.
That I won’t be able to support my children.
That I won’t have an outlet for my creativity.

Even if you are not dissatisfied in any way with your current work, it is
useful to look at your emotional reaction to leaving it. You may be so
emotionally attached to security that the mere thought of leaving produces
anxiety. This could be called a “security addiction” in that you are feeling
withdrawal pains as soon as the idea of giving up your security is suggested
to your subconscious mind. This security addiction is a strong indication of
some deep-rooted poverty consciousness. At one of my seminars, someone
once asked me, “You sound like you expect everyone to give up their job
and do what they want to do. If some communist government wanted to
undermine our free society, wouldn’t this be a good way for them to create
the necessary chaos?”

54
 The person who asked this question wasn’t really being hostile; in fact,
he was a lawyer putting to use his overdeveloped rational-logical conscious
mind. I replied that prosperity consciousness could never happen in a
communist country, where the government chooses to do all the
reprogramming of its citizens, where you would never be free to leave a
dissatisfying job and find something more appropriate and where individual
initiative is suppressed. In fact, I think the pervasive poverty consciousness
in our Western culture right now does far more damage than any fantasy
visions of external plots could create.
I’m not suggesting you immediately go out and quit your job. Your
current work, with an improvement in your money attitude, might provide
you with all you need. My experience has been, however, that the best way
to become prosperous is to use your creative imagination to produce
valuable ideas, and the best environment for doing this is not working for
someone else, is not keeping your nose to the grindstone forty hours a
week, is not immersing yourself in drudgery day in and day out so you
might eventually retire to a life of boredom and inaction. There is one thing
for sure, however: No one ever stayed very long in a job or career if deep
down he or she really believed he or she deserved better and was worth
more. And prosperity consciousness is believing you are worth more than
anyone else can pay you!

So, I hope you now have a much better idea of how you feel about
your work. You may have decided that you can do better for yourself, and
the next step is to find a direction.

A PROSPERITY CONSCIOUSNESS DIRECTION

The best place to go in terms of work is to that place in your

subconscious mind that knows exactly what you want. This will provide you
with a sense of direction. A fantasy trip inside your subconscious seems an
appropriate method to tap into this inner knowledge. So close your eyes
and get into as relaxed a position as possible, and imagine the following:

55
 You are completely free to earn your income in any way you choose.
Whatever you do choose will provide you all the money you want, so all you
have to decide is how you would best like to spend your time. Once you
decide what talents you most like to use, and how you would most like to
use your creative energy, you can start to make a list of the possibilities.

THE POSSIBILITIES

Each of us has more talents and capabilities than we realize, and we

do ourselves a disservice when we place limitations on the possibilities. If
you can think of a dozen things you can do for pleasure, you’ll never be
bored. If you can think of a dozen ways to earn money, you’ll never be
broke. And if you can think of a dozen reasons why you will succeed, you’ll
never be intimidated by temporary setbacks or by what other people tell
you. Try it.

THE PLEASURE DOZEN

Think of twelve things that give you pleasure anytime you experience
them.

THE EARNING DOZEN

Think of twelve ways you can earn money.

THE SUCCESSFUL DOZEN

Think of twelve reasons you’ll succeed.

56
 See if you can’t make a connection between some of the items in
these three categories. In one of my workshops, a young woman who was
working in a telephone company office put baking bread as one of her
PLEASURE DOZEN. On her EARNING DOZEN list she put down the fact
that she could always get a job managing an office, but she really didn’t
find this enjoyable or challenging. On her SUCCESSFUL DOZEN list, she
put down the fact that she was willing to take a chance. The group member
brainstormed with these three items and came up with several suggestions.
The one the woman finally took a chance on was to organize a group of her
friends, also bored with their jobs, into a homemade bread business.
They rented some booths at various festivals and conventions, offering
to deliver a loaf of home-made bread every week to any customer in town.
In addition to the bread, they had a little booklet printed up that told the
story of baking, and the significance of the term “daily bread,” and why it
was important for spiritual as well as physical nourishment that the bread
one eats be baked with skill, love, and nutritious ingredients. When a major
convenience store started carrying their bread, they were on their way to a
fortune. At last count, eight women were earning their money from this
imaginative venture!

If you want some help coming up with a connection between what you
can do, what you like to do, and the reasons you believe you’ll succeed, you
might get a group of your friends together and have some fun helping each
other find new moneymaking ideas.

A couple I know of wanted to meet the challenge of starting an

unusual business, but they also wanted to live in a remote desert area.
They listed, as one of their reasons for knowing they’d succeed, the “dream
book” they kept, in which they pictured themselves becoming more and
more successful. They decided to sell jet fuel, specializing in the growing
executive jet traffic. They drew estimates and pictures of how they
imagined the business growing, from a one-room tiny service building to
luxurious hangars and a restaurant. They realized that they had to find a
way to lure pilots away from established stopovers and get them to land in
57
a remote desert location. They appealed to both the gambling instinct in
pilots and their prime motivation for flying executive jets in the first place:
speed. This couple offered to provide the fuel free to any plane they
couldn’t refuel and get in the air in ten minutes. Needless to say their
business boomed. A combination of dreams, clear thinking, and creative
imagination produced a winner!

A recent survey of people who had earned fortunes at relatively young

ages showed they all had one thing in common: the willingness to take a
risk.

If you would rather be broke than take risks, if you would rather be
safe than reach for that dangling trapeze bar, if you would rather return to
the security of pre-birth in your mother’s womb than savor and live life with
all its unpredictability, then you probably have a built-in defeat button that
will continuously hamper your efforts to prosper.

ERRONEOUS ZONING HIS WAY TO A MILLION DOLLARS

Dr. Wayne Dyer took a big risk. He gave up a secure professorship, took all
his money, loaded 400 copies of his first book, Your Erroneous Zones, into
the back of his car, and took off on a cross-country promotion trip that got
him on radio and TV shows, and bookstores in every state. It took a year of
major effort, but he finally had a bestseller. And he loved doing it! Wayne
told me, “I think any book that has quality can be turned into a bestseller. I
really do. But I don’t think you can rely on anybody else to do it, other than
yourself. You have to invest yourself, your money, your time, your effort,
your enthusiasm, and everything else into the book, in a totally unique way
that nobody else has ever even contemplated before, and everybody else
would say can’t be done. I believe this is true not just for making a best
seller. I believe it’s true for everything in life. Anything you really want, you
can attain, if you really go after it.“ Actually the title to this paragraph is a
bit misleading, since Wayne Dyer will probably earn close to five million

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dollars from Your Erroneous Zones, and it took him only thirteen days to
write it!

Here are some other questions you can ask yourself when looking for
ways to break out of old earning patterns:

1. What did I get the most praise for doing in my life?

2. What do people often compliment me on?
3. What have people suggested I do more of?
4. What have I gotten paid for in my life?
5. What haven’t I gotten paid for that I could put a price on?
6. What kind of job or career could most enhance and incorporate my
growth and change?
7. How do I prevent myself from doing something new?

THE STIGMA OF SELLING

The last item in the above list has special meaning for me. I was working in
a small radio station in Delaware at the age of nineteen. I was doing all
kinds of things on the air; commercials, newscasts, deejay shows,
interviews. The owners decided they couldn’t afford to pay me my salary
unless I was willing to go out and sell commercial time to sponsors. I
refused to do this, thinking selling was beneath me; after all. I was a
nineteen-year-old radio star! I sabotaged myself by this limitation.

To this day, I don’t know whether I would have enjoyed selling radio
time, but I wasn’t willing to try it. I might have picked up valuable hints on
dealing with people. I might even ended up owning a radio station, since
many owners started out as radio salesman. But I prevented myself from
doing something new.

Selling seems to have a stigma attached to it in our culture. Many

people consider salespeople as some sort of lower caste. I used to feel
funny about selling copies of my book at workshops and lectures, feeling I
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was somehow lowering myself—until I read something John F. Kennedy said
to someone asking him advice on how to be a successful author, as the late
President had been with Profiles in Courage. Kennedy replied that when
friends or relatives ask you for free copies of the book, you should suggest
instead that if they were really your friends and if they really cared for you,
they’d go out and buy a copy. Again, Wayne Dyer came up with some
positive advice by sharing his belief that: if you have something worthwhile
to say or sell, you owe it to people to make it available to them.

Having a product you believe in, whether it’s a piece of merchandise, a

work of art, or yourself, is the first key to successful selling. If you believe
in what you offer, your enthusiasm will convince people to buy it, rather
than any strenuous effort to sell them. I’m not suggesting you become a
salesperson, but merely that looking at your attitudes toward selling can
give you some clues to your own poverty consciousness, and to some of the
obstacles you may have put in your path. Do you feel:

1. That selling something isn’t worthy of you?

2. That exchanging something you value for money is a less that noble
career?
3. That selling isn’t creative?
4. That you wouldn’t be able to talk someone into something?

Those are just few of the common beliefs people have about selling.
I’m going to share with you a means by which you can earn an unlimited
fortune and give your prosperity consciousness a powerful daily booster
shot.

YOUR PRODUCT

Find something you really like, preferably something you own at least one
of. If it’s something others have admired, so much the better. Find out
where you can buy it wholesale, and buy just a few. Carry one around with
you until you sell it. Don’t pressure anyone, just allow their natural curiosity
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about why you’re carrying it around with you to surface. They’ll sell
themselves. If you feel uncomfortable asking for money, let them ask if
they can buy it and let them make an offer. The important thing is to pick a
product you are enthusiastic about and can sell feeling you’re give
something valuable in return for a customer’s money.

Make a list of ten things you own that it would be possible to sell. Look
around your home. Even if you start by selling something for three dollars
that you make only one dollar on, this will start to program you for success.
Even if you want a career that has nothing to do with selling, try this, as
there’s no career in which you won’t have to sell yourself to others and to
yourself, especially during temporary setbacks.

Once I got myself into the habit of doing this, I found all sorts of
things I would feel comfortable selling, most of all, however, books. I love
books, and I found myself over the years recommending many books to
people with enthusiasm. Why not, I asked myself, offer these books for
sale? These are books I believe in and love, and I could even offer a slight
discount. I purposely picked books that were unavailable at bookstores, as I
didn’t want to compete with the merchants who had so kindly sold the
books I’d written. There are forty thousand books published every year,
many of great value, and few that ever make it in the deluged bookstores.
You might find a book in a field you’re interested in and inquire about
buying the rights to it and selling it.

We’ve gotten away from the personal touch, and you could help bring
it back by selling something you personally value on a one-to-one basin.
With the advent of major corporations taking over individual stores, much
of the warmth in merchandising has been lost. When I was a high school
senior, I was elected president of the Future Merchants of Philadelphia. I
thought a career in retailing might be exciting. But when top retail
executives described their reasons for entering this field, and little mention
was made of the pleasure of human interaction, I decided to get into a field
where I could communicate more directly with people.
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 You might start out with some small item that sells for a dollar to two
and, as you are successful, build up to more expensive products. As you
orient your subconscious to success in this personal selling project, you'll
find more and more success happening in your life. Just as, once you learn
a new word, it seems to appear all over the place. Once you accept the
idea, backed up by direct evidence, that you can be financially successful, it
will begin to happen at such a rapid rate your head will spin! But if you
don't give yourself success experiences, if you don't truly believe you
deserve to get money in return for what you have to offer, then all the
valuable ideas you now have buried in your subconscious will stay there,
not feeling it's worth the trip to your conscious mind.

HOW TO MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS

Making a million dollars in the simplest thing in the world, once you expand
this idea of one-to-one selling. Just find a product that sells for $2,000 and
that you can buy at a cost of $1,000, and sell a thousand of them! That's it.
You'll earn a million dollars. Think about it for a few moments. Can you
come up with something of value that might be attractively merchandised
and sold for $2,000? And once you sell that first one, your subconscious
mind will get behind you and make it so much easier to sell the other 999.
This is because you have proven at an emotional level of awareness that
you are capable of making a lot of money.

You have plateaus of belief in yourself. Each degree of accomplishment

can raise your aspirations and your belief in the possible dream. And that
belief frees a lot of your creative imagination, as you start to think of
yourself as a person who is prosperous. We've all had moments of this
potent belief, days when we knew everything would go well and it did. Can
you remember a particular instance when you felt, at a deep level of your
consciousness, that you were going to come out ahead? See if you can
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vividly relive that episode in your life, and remember how it felt, how it
looked, how you acted, what you said, and how it all turned out.

YOUR PERSONAL CONNECTION TO OTHERS

Selling something on a one-to-one basis also puts you in clear touch

with your personal connection to other people. The dehumanization of
financial interactions has done much to foster poverty consciousness in our
so-called civilized world. It all started out with people having skills and
trading those skills for other skills or products among their friends and
neighbors. Then the idea of hoarding and creating a demand took hold, and
this meant that people were more concerned with getting theirs than with
sharing. This is also meant that the more aggressive types took charge of
money, and the gentler souls began seeing themselves as perpetually poor.
Just because it evolved this way doesn't mean it has to be this way
now! Just because a lot of money is handled in cold, impersonal ways
doesn't mean it has to continue that way. It's vital that you understand the
human factor in money. Using it as a direct exchange between you and
another person for goods or services will establish a friendlier relationship
between money and you.

There are too many middlemen in our lives. On a more spiritual level,
you'll feel the oneness of the universe. There's a big difference between
working at a job you don't like and taking your salary and buying food from
the supermarket, where the farmer has his product sold for much more
than he ever got for it, and dealing directly with that farmer. Or, as a friend
of mine does, raising your own organic eggs and hand-carrying them to
your customers. We don't have to drop out and live on a farm to experience
some of this human quality in our lives, in our financial transactions.
There's also a sort of spiritual connection between everyone who is
prosperous. A brotherhood/sisterhood, if you will, of optimism and
confidence. And it is contagious.

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 SHARING

When you're looking for new ideas in careers, or in products to sell,

ask the people who know. If you sincerely ask others for advice, they'll
usually be willing to share the information with you. The more prosperous
they are, the more willing they'll be. For the more someone is willing to
help others prosper, the more prosperous he or she will become. Every time
I've shared a valuable idea, it's come back to me a hundredfold.

During my early days in broadcasting, I was more fortunate than many

colleagues and became quite successful at a very young age. I always went
out of my way to answer questions and offer advice to those men and
women who wanted to find out how to get into radio or television, or those
who wanted to advance faster than they were advancing. I always waited to
be asked, however, since I have a certain bias against unasked-for-advice
givers. (Though maybe all of us self-help book authors fit into just that
category!)

Anyway, some of those young men and women I helped get into
broadcasting, or get ahead, are now top management people or nationally
known performers. I've never asked for anything in return, but it's a nice
feeling to know I would probably never have any trouble returning to that
field if I so desired, and that I'd have friends and supporters in positions
where they could advise or assist me. (I have no plans to return to
broadcasting, but my friends in the industry do come in very handy when I
go out promoting a book on talk shows across the country.)

Be willing to share your ideas freely, without hoarding them, without

petty possessiveness. A beautiful reporter for the Miami Herald, Beth
Dunlop, has interviewed me several times. I always give a lot of what I
consider valuable information in those interviews, rather than just trying to
talk people into spending money for my books or workshops. Wayne Dyer
also did this on all his talk show appearances. Rather than selling his book,
he shared his ideas, and this willingness to share sold the book for him.
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 Beth Dunlop's articles, chock full of information, always had fantastic
results in terms of response. When I did a MONEYLOVE seminar and an
article appeared on some of the concepts you've been reading in this book,
dozens of people signed up for the seminar as a result of the free
information I was willing to share in the interview. You make room for new
ideas to emerge from your subconscious whenever you give an idea away!

FAILURE VERSUS NOT SUCCEEDING YET

One of the fears that keeps people locked into old patterns and
nonproductive careers is the fear of failure. One of the narrow perspectives
that fosters this fear is the belief that life is composed of either success or
failure. This either/or attitude is a manifestation of poverty consciousness,
since it prevents a lot of healthy experimentation.

Trial and error is still the best way to learn something. When, for
instance, learning to play tennis, you hit the ball into the net instead of over
it, your body automatically starts to compensate, your brain sends signals
to the dozens of muscles involved, and changes are made to do better next
time. If you hit the ball beautifully over the net the first time, you might win
some points, but you wouldn't develop your skills as well. In fact, I had a
colleague in broadcasting who could have been a tennis champion, except
that he was such a natural player that he did well right from the beginning,
and he never developed the strong foundation of playing skills needed to
take him beyond the finals in a tennis tournament.

You learn anything by making an effort and recording the success or

failure of that effort, and changing the effort accordingly. If you have failed
in terms of money, and have paid attention to what you were doing, you've
been developing skills that will serve you well on your quest for prosperity.
And if you've never been broke, being prosperous won't taste quite as
sweet! So while failure and temporary setback is nothing to seek and
worship or embrace, it is a very human happening, and a part of most of
65
our lives at one time or another. Looking at it as just a pause on your road
to success, rather than a repudiation of all your efforts is the healthy view.

FAILURE FANTASY

A very effective way to deal with your fears of failure is to confront

them. When you are hesitating about taking a risk, or trying something
new, just ask yourself:

WHAT IS THE WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?

And really visualize it. If you are thinking about leaving a job that
doesn't nourish you, picture leaving it and not being able to find another
one. Can you see yourself broke, with no money for food or shelter? Paint
your fantasy as black as possible. Unspecific fears are the most destructive.
As soon as you have a clear view of what you fear, the fear itself usually
diminishes. We mostly fear that which we haven't experienced, and your
marvelous brain has the capacity to experience through imagination. If you
turn your abstract fears into specific fantasy images, you will have imagined
the worst. This has a number of advantages.

First of all, the reality, when you do take a risk, is never as bad as the
fear. Also, you will have diluted much of the potency of a negative outcome
by vicariously experiencing it. Many of the people who've attended my
workshops and gone through a visualization of the worst possible outcome
came back and reported that they weren't really as worried after having the
fantasy. One woman who took a risk, and didn't have it work out as well as
it could, said, "It was so much less terrible than what I imagined, it was
almost a pleasure!"

Another way to fantasize away some of the negative aspects of fear is

to imagine the worst happening as result of your taking a risk, and then
think of yourself sometime in the future, after that failure, now rich and
successful, telling an audience about that failure, and how you learned from
it and survived it to reach new heights of prosperity. You can even use this
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little fantasy if you actually do have a setback, to give you a more
productive perspective.

Sometimes we get so caught up in temporary passing events in our life

that we lose sight of the total life process and the cyclical nature of things.
If you could look at a chart of your life, you'd probably find that periods of
temporary defeat were almost always accompanied or immediately followed
by dramatic change and new forward momentum. Think about this for a few
minutes, and see it is isn't true for you.

In fact, make a list of the TEN MOST DIFFICULT PERIODS OF MY

LIFE, and check out how many of them signaled major changes in your life,
changes that led to new and better things for you. I remember, for
instance, losing my first job in radio. I would have probably stayed in that
comfortable, sleepy little town for years if I hadn't been forcefully jarred out
of my complacency. I was sad at leaving my friends, but when I got a job
paying twice as much, and with four times the opportunity, I realized I was
being given a chance to use more of my potential.

Self-actualized men and women usually had a number of early failures

before achieving their major successes. Their willingness to risk failure was
one of the things they all had in common. Frank Goble's book, The Third
Force, is about psychology of Abraham Maslow, and focuses a lot of
attention on Self-Actualization, Goble writes of these remarkable people:
"Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they are willing to make silly
mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think 'crazy', such a
person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be
worthless. The creative person is flexible-- he is able to change as the
situation changes, break the habits, to face indecision and changes in
conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as
rigid, inflexible people are."

Some people would rather anticipate catastrophe than deal with the
unexpected. But life twists and turns in many ways, and flexibility is one of
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the most important traits associated with prosperity consciousness. It
sometimes almost seems as if some people are looking for obstacles to stop
their progress. Leonard Orr feels a lot of poverty-conscious people are
victims of deep hostility and are determined to "get even" with the world.
They avoid winning because, if they won, they wouldn't have an excuse to
get even.

Poverty-conscious people are talented at turning victories into defeats.

One man I know was putting his house up for sale, as his son was getting
married and he had been widowed for several years. He was frantically
worried that he wouldn't be able to sell it, or would have to drastically lower
the price. Instead he sold it almost immediately at the price he asked for.
Now he began to wonder whether he shouldn't have asked for more, and
worry about where he was going to live, since he wouldn't have as much
time as he had anticipated to hunt for an apartment. He found an
apartment he liked right away, and signed a lease. Now he began to worry
about whether the new owners of his house would make settlement soon
enough so he wouldn't be paying both the rent and the mortgage payment.
They made settlement on the house almost to the day his new lease
started, so now he turned his attention to worrying about whether he was
getting all the tax benefits he was entitled to. His friends thought that once
he had a large chunk of money from the house, he'd be able to travel and
enjoy himself more instead of always complaining about money. So he took
all his money and put it in long-term bank certificates, and continued to
struggle along on his modest pension. This story doesn't have a happy
ending. The worrying man finally suffered a fatal heart attack. A prosperity-
conscious person would have been overjoyed at some of the events of
those last few years of his life, but he saw them only as bad times, anxious
times, unprofitable times.

To a much lesser extent, a friend of mine also created some negative

experiences from a positive happening. She was offered a chance to do
some consultation work for a government agency. First she worried that her
boss wouldn’t give her the time off. When she got that, she worried that the
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government agency wouldn't pay her an amount equal to her salary, which
was about $300 a week. When the government agency gave her an
indication that she would earn about $150 a day, she was overjoyed. But
then it got down to specifics, it looked as if she'd get only $100 a day. She
had begun to count on that $750 and was bitterly disappointed. Here she
was getting at least $200 more than her regular salary, and she was
disappointed. She felt terrible about this for four weeks before the
assignment, which was to last a week. When it was all over, because of
some new bureaucratic technicalities she got $800 for the week. Did she
jump up and down for joy? Guess again. She was enraged that the
government had put her through so many changes and "created" so much
tension and worry. Of course, it wasn't anyone but herself creating all that
worry and tension!

LAW OF INCREASE

As an important realization for you is something many people have called

the LAW OF INCREASE, which states that things will always get better, you
will always ride an upward earnings pattern, real estate values will always
go up, good stocks will always be higher five years from now than they are
today. Generally speaking, all these things are true. Specifically, this is true
for you, in terms of the value of your ideas. If you have a good idea today,
and believe in yourself, chances are you will have a better one tomorrow.
Most of us tend to increase our incomes from year to year. Look back on
your life, and check whether it's true that things have always gotten a bit
better as life moved on.

This sense of upward momentum, this LAW OF INCREASE, is part of

the basic prosperity cycle we are all a part of. If you recognize it, and allow
it to become a part of your awareness, you'll know that things are always
going to get better, sometimes even in spite of all your fears and worries.

The LAW OF INCREASE can also help you understand that there's no
rush. There's no opportunity that won't be there tomorrow, and chances are
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an even better one will present itself. It's not healthy to procrastinate, or tie
yourself up in knots of indecision, but neither is it healthy to rush into
things without checking out your deepest feelings about them, without
giving your creative mind a chance to choose freely.

People rushing about after a "fast buck" are usually mired in poverty
consciousness. I have often found that someone who is trying to urge me to
rush into some business deal is really having his own doubts about the
worthiness of the project, but wants to justify all the money and time he
invested, so he convinces himself it will all work out in the process of trying
to convince me! I've known a lot of people who have missed opportunities
because of fear, because of feeling undeserving, because of lack of
perception, because of the unwillingness to take a risk, but I've never
known anyone to miss a real opportunity by taking the time out to assess
its value carefully, and calmly move ahead.

SUCCESS MUCH STRONGER

Success is the natural course of events. It's a much stronger concept

than failure, because it's backed up by real experience rather than a lot of
negative fancy. It is also easier to be successful. It takes a lot more of
energy to fail than to succeed, since it takes a lot of concentrated energy to
hold onto beliefs that don't work.

Try a little experiment. Take about five minutes and tell an imaginary
listener about all the times you've failed, all the disappointments, all the
frustrations. Then take another five minutes and talk about all your
successes, all the times you have been praised and appreciated, all the
good ideas you've had, all the people who’ve gone out of their way to be
your friends, all the accomplishments. Tune into yourself and see which
experience was the most tiring, the most debilitating. I’d be willing to bet
the success monologue, once you got going, felt a lot better. That good
feeling can generate a fantastic amount of energy. Failures are almost

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always individual events, while success breeds success and creates its own
momentum.

CREATIVE LAZINESS

This has been one of my most controversial concepts, since most

people are taught that laziness is an evil trait that inhibits growth, negates
progress, and is death to ambition. On the contrary, I’ve found that a
healthy regard for laziness can stimulate growth, can allow you to take
quantum leaps forward, and is a sign of true ambition, rather than a
frenzied rush forward into limited values and rigid goals. Self-reflection, for
example, is one of the most productive things you can do with your creative
imagination. Most of us dream of a day when we can lean back and relax.
But that day is here now. You don't have to be a millionaire to take a day
off and loaf. It's poverty consciousness to imagine that you can't do that
right now. It's saying, "If I slow down for an instant, it will all go down the
drain."

When I was Director of the Biofeedback Institute, I trained a number

of top executives in major corporations in relaxation and meditation. And I
demonstrated to them that by slowing down, they'd be able to tap into
deeper levels of their subconscious and come up with more valuable ideas.
One publishing executive I trained started taking Wednesday off to relax
and meditate. He reported back to me that he got much more work
accomplished in the remaining four days than he had ever gotten done in
five! I've experienced this is my own life. I usually take it easy for eleven
months and surge into high gear the last month of my deadline. And I find
it easier to write that book in a month than many others do in a year!

Sometimes I do get caught up in work, plunging ahead at a feverish

pace. At times like these, I force myself to take a day off and do absolutely
nothing, as an act of mental/emotional discipline. And the work always gets
done, often ahead of schedule.

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The poverty-conscious fear that keeps us from slowing down is perhaps the
most insidious barrier of all to prosperity. Most major achievers in this world
have reported that they made some powerful breakthroughs after taking
time out for contemplation and reassessment. Pay attention to what your
belief system may be telling you right now about these last three
paragraphs. Your inner pauper may be fighting the concept of Creative
Laziness, and the idea that forced loafing is better than forced labor, and
the thought that, by taking time out for regeneration and relaxation, you'll
produce even more of value and worth. Even if you don't see immediate
results, you'll be getting a powerful mental image of yourself as someone
who can afford to take it easy. As James Thurber once wrote: "It is better
to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all."

IDLENESS IS A MYTH

Of course, idleness doesn't really exist. You may be loafing but you're
not idle. Your brain is still performing its millions of chores, your creative
imagination is still going ahead full blast, and your body is still going
through all of its changes. Laziness is truly the mother of creativity. If your
body and conscious mind are idle, your subconscious mind, your creative
mind, can plunge full steam ahead, and your conscious mind will have room
for those new ideas to pop up. A busy life will keep you from tapping into a
lot of your potential creativity. Many people feel they have to prove
something by always appearing busy. Part of the negative legacy of the
puritan work ethic is this "busyness business." And have you ever noticed
how similar those two words are? The creative mind is a split-second
operation. This has been proved by people forced to cut their schedule
because of health, who have then found they produced as much as ever.

Here’s a MONEYLOVE LAW OF WEALTH you can really have fun with:

A TASK WILL ALWAYS EXPAND TO FILL THE AMOUNT OF HOURS YOU

DEVOTE TO IT.
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 A businessman I know gave himself three years to turn a profit, firmly
believing that working very hard for that amount of time would produce
results. And it did! But another businessman, in a very similar field, went
into his business with the attitude that he had something very valuable to
sell, that people would rush to buy his service, and that he would begin
making money immediately. And this is what happened for him!

Check out in your own experience whether you don't fill time with busy
work, when you could actually produce your achievements in much less
time. You have to love and trust yourself enough to let go. If you feel you
deserve to be rich, you must feel you deserve to have more leisure time.

Now is your only reality, and the leisure time you take now is the only
leisure time that will prepare you for the future. It provides an incentive to
earn more of it, and a time to form those all-important clear visions of what
you want. Here are some ways to give yourself these Creative Laziness
experience:

AN UNEXPECTED DAY OFF

Just take a day off and loaf it away to your heart's content. Even if you
have to say you're sick, get away from your routine. Pick a day you would
never normally be off. See what it feels like to be a member of the leisure
class for an entire day.

THE BETWEEN-JOBS VACATION

We all change jobs from time to time. The tendency often is to rush
right into the new job. Give yourself a treat. Imagine it took you an extra
month to find this new job, and enjoy that month to find as a reward for
getting the new job. Inner doubt is the only thing that prevents us from
asking for a delay in the starting date of employment. If you are valuable
today, You'll be even more valuable a month from now. And it isn't bad
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psychology to let your new boss know you feel prosperous enough to take a
whole month off without pay!

THE CONTEMPLATION-OF-ASSETS SABBATICAL

This is a ten-day retreat you take for yourself, with a task in mind for
each day. Write down ten positive talents and characteristics you have.
Make an agreement with yourself to relax, but focus your creative
imagination on ways to enhance that positive part of you, and make it more
valuable, in a lazy day of contemplation. You will thus be taking one full day
for each positive talent or characteristic. The ideas you come up with will be
worth a hundred times any income you’ve lost during the ten days!

THE LAZINESS REWARD

Whenever you have achieved some goals, reached some new

accomplishment, done something you're proud of, take a few days off to
loaf and offer yourself some congratulations. After finishing a book, I
always take a couple of days off in which I do absolutely nothing, not even
think about any new book projects. Even in times when I was almost broke
and had no idea when my next income would come in, I resisted the
temptation to frantically go out and try to solve my financial problems. And
I always found myself so refreshed after a couple of days of lying on sunny
beaches that I was able to pour out an endless stream of valuable ideas on
my return to productivity. You owe it to yourself to provide your creative
mind with an opportunity to prove to you that loafing pays off, physically,
emotionally, and financially.

Just in terms of health, you can't afford not to take it easier. The
reason a number of large corporations brought me in to teach relaxation
and meditation techniques was because their executives were dropping off
like flies from stress diseases. Back in 1971 when I first started doing this
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training, corporations were just beginning to realize that it was costing
them a fortune to replace people who didn't know how to take care of
themselves. Learning to eliminate stress from your life can add five years
onto the end of it. Even if you put yourself at a modest valuation such as
$15,000 a year, that $75,000 in income down the drain, not to count all the
pleasures you could have in five years! So the next time someone asks you
why you're loafing , just tell them, "I'm eliminating stress from my life,
developing a lot of new valuable ideas, and giving myself a taste of the
prosperity that's eventually coming to me."

Some of the great achievers in history have been basically lazy. To

have the freedom of mind just to let go of goal orientation is a major
human breakthrough. The creative mind needs a state of relaxed calm to
really get going, and working hard is one way to deny and avoid your own
creativity.

TRANSCEND GUILT

Loafing will stir up a lot of opposition from people who don't want you to
have it easier than they do. These poverty boosters will try to make you
feel guilty. Since the creative loafer will be more relaxed, happier, and
probably a lot richer than his neighbor, he's bound to produce some
hostility. The best way to overcome this envy is to let them in on the
secret. Creative Laziness is catching. Someone attending one off my
seminars once asked me what would happen to the world if everyone just
took it easy. I responded that it would be a much happier world, and a lot
more would get done. Someone who has the ability to loaf, and the
freedom to exercise that ability on a regular basis, has the kind of self-
confidence that can scale any heights and succeed in any endeavor.

PROSPERITY PROCLAMATIONS

Three of the seven prosperity proclamations are especially suitable for

WORKLOVE:
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I HAVE AN UNLIMITED NUMBER OF VALUABLE IDEAS IN MY
CONSCIOUSNESS.

This will help you realize that the worst thing you could do for yourself
is work at something you don't love, and refuse to give yourself the time
you need to use those valuable ideas at a conscious state of awareness. As
you use this affirmation, you'll find many of those ideas just popping into
your head. Many great scientists and artists have reported that important
ideas popped into their heads, sometimes just after making a statement
like "I wish I could come up with an idea for this." Your subconscious mind
is an obedient servant, if you give yourself the freedom to ask for what you
really want. Loving yourself enough to acknowledge how creative you are is
one of the best ways to lift your spirits and your income.

I LOVE WHAT I DO, AND THAT LOVE BRINGS ME ALL THE MONEY I WANT.

Of all the MONEYLOVE concepts, some people find it hardest to accept

the fact that what you do is more important than how much you make, and
how you feel about it is more important than what you do. Money achieves
an unhealthy and abnormal importance in someone's life only when what
they do fails to nourish, enthuse, and enliven them. If you work forty hours
a week at a job that doesn't excite and pleasure you, then no matter how
much money you are paid for that work, you won't be able to buy back a
single one of those forty hours.

NO MATTER WHAT I DO, MY FINANCIAL WORTH INCREASES EVERY DAY.

This is one of the most potent of all the Prosperity Proclamations,

since it directly reprograms a lot of negative conditioning to the effect that
you are rewarded only for hard work. You are actually an income -
producing-property, and as such your value does increase every day.
Beginning to realize this prosperity truth will help you build your self-
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esteem to the level where you can produce valuable ideas and income-
producing methods whenever you desire. It’s also a great affirmation for
Creative Laziness.

Understand this: There's no way working an eight-hour day can be as

valuable to you as the new ideas a healthy loafing session will stimulate!
And you'll know you've reached prosperity consciousness the day you can
take a day off and tell everyone concerned you're going to loaf, rather than
apologizing, lying or making excuses!

These three Prosperity Proclamations can be valuable aids to your

WORKLOVE efforts. In addition to taking some time out now to say them
each twenty times, and write them each twenty times, prepare some cards
with them printed carefully, and display them in areas where you'll be using
your imagination to come up with prosperity ideas. They will encourage you
and remind you of your own capacity for productive effort.

Remember, hard work is work without love. and when you work just
for money, your imagination becomes a slave to money. You are free, a
free person with free will, and the greatest expression of that freedom is
simply to do what you want to do.

You deserve that most of all!

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 3

And the Money Goes

Round and Round

Once you have decided to keep a certain pile, it is no longer yours; for you
can’t spend it.
-MONTAIGNE

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows
how to spend it.
-HENRY DAVID THOREAU

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I was originally going to call this chapter “Prosperity Spending,” but then I
started to examine the word “spend,” with all its negative connotations. The
precise definition of spend is “consume or waste.” I think that goes to the
heart of a lot of poverty consciousness, the idea that when you use your
money you are using it up, eliminating it, wasting it. While I don’t really
expect you to stop using the word, and in fact, I probably will go on using it
myself, since it’s become such an ingrained part of common usage, it would
do us all good to realize it has negative aspects that may affect our
emotional attitudes towards the use of our money. Since I’ve started paying
attention to this, as a result of planning this chapter, I find myself still using
the word, but not as often, and with more awareness.

To check out its emotional impact for you,, say the following sentences
and experience how they make you feel:
“I’ve spent all my money.”
“Let’s spend it now!”
“I can’t spend that.”

The primary purpose of this chapter is to get you into the habit of
thinking about money as a never-ending event, which goes and comes, but
it always there. Money circulates. We, as individuals, have only temporary
use of it, never full possession. To kid yourself that you possess money just
because you have removed it from circulation is ludicrous and self-
defeating. If our medium of exchange were apples instead of money, and
you put thousands of apples away in a warehouse, instead of distributing
them so you and others could enjoy them, you wouldn’t be rich, you’d be
poor. You’d be a poor person who happened to have a lot of apples rotting
away in a warehouse! If all your money is tied up in the bank or
investments, then you may as well be living on a desert island for all the
good it does you.

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 MONEY USE LAWS

Money does go round and round, and as it circulates it stimulates the

economy, thus providing more opportunities for you to make more money.
Extremely prosperous people have always realized this, which is why they
spend and give away large amounts of money. It perhaps takes a bit more
courage to use your money when you don’t have a million dollars, but that
courage will be repaid over and over again, if you obey certain money use
laws. These commonsense rules include the following:

1. Keep track of the money you circulate.

2. Trust your feelings when confronted by a spending decision.
3. Never spend money without a sense of it as a medium of exchange,
knowing full well what you are getting in return.
4. Balance your necessary expenses with pleasurable spending.
5. Experience your money as a current event, rather than as future
purchasing power.
6. Love yourself enough to realize you deserve the best.
7. Remember: the more you savor what you buy, the more value you get
for your money.
8. Realize that most of your days involve a positive cash flow.
9. Buy for yourself, not according to what others tell you.
10. Understand that if you have enough money to pay for it,
you can afford it.
11. Clearly see that the more you can enjoy using money, the more desire
you will build to achieve prosperity.
12. Realize that feeling guilty about spending money indicates a lack of
faith in your own capacity to create more.

Let’s go over these twelve money use laws one by one.

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1. KEEP TRACK OF THE MONEY YOU CIRCULATE.

The best way to do this is by keeping a record. Try keeping a

MONEYLOVE JOURNAL. To take it a step beyond a mere tally of what comes
in and what goes out, you can keep track of how you use it. I suggest you
consider the following categories:

PLEASURE. This is money you exchange for things that feel good.
This can be in the form of a movie you’ve enjoyed, a dinner that was
delicious, a visit to a friend, a book or vacation or long-distance
telephone call that provided you with an enjoyable experience.
REGULAR BILLS. These are the rent, gas, electric, cleaning,
and so on.
SPECIAL PURCHASE. This is anything that doesn’t appear as a
regular item in your budget: a new television set, a seminar you attend, a
gift, a medical emergency.
DEBTS. This is any money you use to pay off financial obligations.
INVESTMENTS. Any money used to increase your net worth.
BANKING. Any money you put in the bank, for whatever purpose.

One good way to keep track of your money is to provide yourself with
a survey month: one month in which you keep track of all your
expenditures and figure out the percentages for each. Then you might draw
a circle and divide up the various categories according to how much you
spent for each. For instance:

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 As you can see, in this circle REGULAR BILLS is the single largest
category. Paying off DEBTS is the smallest. PLEASURE comes in for a pretty
fair share, along with BANKING. All in all, this is an example of some well-
balanced money use.

To keep further track of your money, divide your REGULAR BILLS

category into sub-groupings, such as rent, food, and utilities. You might
then, after seeing how much you usually spend in a month on each item,
make an effort to cut down a particular expenditure.

For instance, food is an easy one to cut down. Leonard Orr suggests
the perfect way to save most of your food budget: Just get seven friends to
invite you to dinner once a week each. Certainly you have some good
friends who would enjoy your company for dinner. Part of your prosperity
consciousness is believing you are interesting and worthwhile to be with. If
you got just one person a week to invite you to lunch or dinner, you’d save
some money in that part of your budget.

The only budget item I don’t suggest keeping close watch on is the
PLEASURE section. You might vary and adjust the other categories, but it’s

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important for your sense of money as a source of personal pleasure to keep
this one intact, and even let it expand when that feels right.

A friend of mine really made a dent in his REGULAR BILLS section of

the circle when he started house-sitting. He found that a lot of wealthy
people left their homes for the summer months or winter months and were
more than willing to pay a nominal fee to a dependable house-sitter and
give him free room and board. He gave up his apartment and started
house-sitting on a regular basis. It also developed his prosperity
consciousness by exposing him to a wealthy lifestyle. By persistent
investigation, he was ablle to line up wealthy vacationers throughout the
year. If a few weeks were left open, he took his own vacations with the
money he had saved on rent.

If you use your creative imagination, you can play all sorts of games
with your budget, and keeping track of your money will give you a valuable
tool in this effort.

Playing with your budget also keeps it alive instead of a rigid set of
habits. If you used 20 percent of your income last month for clothing,
increase it to 50 percent this month. If you used 25 percent for food, lower
it to 20 percent. Playing like this is one way to pay more attention to what
you get for your money. And it will challenge your creative imagination.

It may seem difficult to cut down on some budget items, and even
harder to give yourself permission to expand others, but the practice it will
give you in having a flexible attitude toward money will be priceless. Take
yourself out of the realm of those statistical creatures who always spend
such and such a percentage of their income for food, shelter, clothing,
entertainment. Give yourself some provocative tasks, such as eliminating
your expenses for food, clothing, and shelter for an entire month and
spending that portion of your income on fun instead! I’m not suggesting
you become totally irresponsible, merely more flexible and more
spontaneous.
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 The Self-Actualized people Dr. Abraham Maslow researched also had
spontaneity as one of their main personality traits. In many ways, they had
the capacity of children who haven’t yet learned to fear the ridicule and
criticism of others, and are still able to see things freshly. Maslow said:
“Almost any child can compose a song or poem or a dance or a painting or
a play or a game on the spur of the moment, without planning or previous
intent.” So see if you can’t have the beautifully fresh approach of a child to
your budget.

2. TRUST YOUR FEELINGS WHEN CONFRONTED BY A SPENDING DECISION.

Inside you there is a barometer that can help you decide whether or
not something is right for you. If you just take time to relax and pay
attention, you’ll know at a gut level whether or not you really want to do
something or buy something. Trust those feelings. Most people get into
trouble when they use their analytical, logical-rational minds to make
decisions on issues that have emotional impact. This creates a conflict
between the left side of your brain: the rational, verbal side, and the right
side of your brain: the creative, feeling side.

In order to be prosperous, it’s vital that you nourish the right side of
your brain as much as possible, since it is this side’s activities that are
going to make you rich. Going against your feelings by saying such things
as, “I’ll be sensible,” is the most unsensible thing you can do. Trusting your
gut feelings is a way you have of loving yourself. Check them out, by all
means. Make certain you really feel you want to spend your money this
way, that you really want what you’ll be getting in exchange for your
money, and then do it!

One of the great myths about money is that it’s a left brain invention
and you must use your analytical mind to deal with it. Money is a dream,
one of the great abstract ideas of all time. This might be one of the core

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problems people have with money: assuming it is fact, when it’s actually
fancy; assuming it has a life of its own, when it has only the life you give it.

Your feelings come from your subconscious mind and are often signals
being sent from your conscious mind, signals containing messages on what
it would be right for you to do at that particular moment. To deny those
signals would be like shutting a door in the face of your subconscious.
Enough of this, and the ideas will stop coming. And you will be bogged
down in the kind of superficial conscious-mind only thinking that will
guarantee emotional, intellectual, and financial stagnation. So trust your
feelings; they are your best friends!

3. NEVER SPEND MONEY WITHOUT A SENSE OF IT AS A MEDIUM OF

EXCHANGE, KNOWING FULL WELL WHAT YOU ARE GETTING IN RETURN.

It’s fine to take money light and easy, but having a casual attitude
about what you get in return for your money can be one of the ways to
keep yourself In poverty consciouness! I don’t mean making sure you get
superior value for every dollar you spend like some emotionally retarded old
miser. I do mean having a sense of the quality you are buying. When you
go to see a show that you love, have a sense of that love being provided in
exchange for the money you used. When you learn something new, have a
sense of that money being exchanged for knowledge. When you buy food,
have a sense of the money circulating and bringing you back pleasant taste
sensations and physical nourishment.

If you spend money on an object that gives you no pleasure, and

performs no useful service, and stimulates no new ideas, then you can
consider your money exchanged for a poor bargain. The more positive
exchange experiences you give yourself, the deeper your personal
connection to prosperity. If you provide too many negative exchanges, your
subconscious mind is going to get the message that money doesn’t buy you
much that is worthwhile, and it is therefore non-productive for you to get
rich!
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 One of these negative exchange experiences is buying solutions for
painful circumstances with your money—spending it on illness and other
emergencies. Of course, money can really come in handy when youre
suffering. But if you designate a large amount of money for this purpose,
then you have an imbalance in your positive ledger, which it is important to
increase.

A prime example of poverty consciousness is putting away money for

illness or other emergencies. It’s like the old joke about the two cowboys
setting off on a trip. One notices the other carrying two paper bags and
asks what they’re for. The other replies, “This bag contains whiskey to be
used for snake bite.” The friend then asks him what the second bag is for.
He replies, “This one has the snake.”

Putting money away just for illness can turn your subconscious into
the snake! Your subconscious mind can create illness. If you focus a lot of
your energy on worrying about illness, to the extent that you earmark large
sums of money toward it, as an obedient servant your subconscious may
just assume you are preparing for illness and are ready to welcome it.

4. BALANCE YOUR NECESSARY EXPENSES WITH PLEASURABLE SPENDING.

This is self-explanatory. If you spend money only on things that are

ordinary and mundane, your subconscious mind won’t be very inspired to
produce more money for you. Being wealthy takes imagination. Enjoying
being wealthy takes even more.

Money of the people attend my Moneylove seminars already have high

incomes but are looking for ways to have more fun with them. One signal
you can give your creative mind, instead of “How can I earn more money?.”
Is “How can I have more fun?” After all, if you are asking for money so
that you can have fun with it, why not directly ask for the fun and cut out
the middleman: money. If you do this, the money will come anyway. You’ll
86
help it along by always earmarking a portion of your available funds for fun.
You might even give them that title, FUNDS FOR FUN. I know some people
reading this are going to be getting message from their inner pauper
advising that “there are no available funds for fun in your financial
situation.” Well, here’s some news for you. That’s a lie, a lie manufactured
by your inner pauper to seduce you into continued poverty consciousness.
You are in charge of your finances right now, no matter how little or
how much you have. And you can use that money for whatever purposes
you desire. Money doesn’t have a mind of its own. It’s no coincidence that
for so many people, their expenses seem to expand to meet their earnings.
That’s the result of saying you have no money for fun. Your subconscious
mind, again the obedient servant, will listen to the message that your
money is going only toward food, shelter, and other necessities and deliver
enough of those necessities to use up all your money. Put a stop to that,
right now! Take five dollars, or ten dollars, and blow it on yourself! It can
be the most valuable investment you’ll ever make in your future success.

5. EXPERIENCE YOUR MONEY AS A CURRENT EVENT, RATHER THAN AS

FUTURE PURCHASING POWER.

Money is a current event. It has life only now. When you are really
prosperous, you can afford to put away something that’s alive now for the
unforeseen future. But until you get there, until you have more money than
you know what to do with, using it now makes the most sense. If you want
to go into the economics of it, just realize that we'll probably always live in
an inflationary cycle, so that your money put away and taken out for
exchange ten years from now will never buy you then what you could have
bought right now. Fear causes many people to make the foolish mistake
thinking their money will buy them more tomorrow than it does today.
That's how people drop dead at an early age with lots of money in the bank
and no smiles on their faces.

I've had people say to me, "I’m glad I put away money for my old age,
because now that I'm on in years, I can live comfortably." I think those
87
people are trying to convince themselves; they're certainly not convincing
anyone else that they're happy about their current situation. They made a
poor bargain trading in the present for the future, and they're stuck with it.
I'd like to share a thought with you now, that if you can believe it may save
your life! That thought is simply this:

PUTTING AWAY MONEY FOR YOUR OLD AGE WILL GUARANTEE THAT
YOU'LL GET OLD.

Sending signals to your subconscious mind that a good deal of your

money is being put away for the day when you are so old and incapacitated
you no longer can earn money will hasten that day. Your subconscious,
always eager to provide you with circumstances in which you can spend
your money, will deliver those circumstances! Look around at the elderly
people who are still youthful, and ask them if they sacrificed current
pleasure for future comfort. Then ask those who are sour-faced, depressed,
and bent over. I feel pretty confident that your research will bear me out,
will emphasize the futility of saving for your old age.

6. LOVE YOURSELF ENOUGH TO REALIZE YOU DESERVE THE BEST.

Economizing can create a "poor me" attitude toward finances and all
other facets of your life. You do deserve to wear good clothes, eat good
food, live in a well-furnished and attractive environment, travel first class,
buy the best made products, and do all of the things supposedly reserved
for people of extreme wealth. You may have to do it in moderation, and
your one good outfit may replace three or four not-so-fine selections, but it
will be more than worth it in terms of your self-image.

I learned a valuable lesson when I was working at NBC, and earning a

lot of money, back in 1970. I bought very good clothes then. When I left
broadcasting to concentrate my efforts on developing the techniques that
eventually led to this book, I had a substantially reduced income. It would
have been difficult for me to go out and buy even modestly priced clothes.
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But I didn't have to that, because the expensive, finely made clothes I had
in my closet lasted. And lasted and lasted and lasted! I still have most of
them.

By all means be a careful shopper, not to "save" money, but to make

sure when you pay the best that you get the best. Don't fall victim to
merchants who mistake high prices for quality. I have found superb
fashions in discount men's stores and women's shops offer even more of a
variety. The point is not to worry about the cost when you find something
you really want. Practice developing this habit by going out to buy
something and shopping without looking at the price tag. Just pick out what
you want, and decide to get it on the basis of whether you like it, rather
than on the basis of cost.

A word about bargain hunting. If you get a kick out of it, fine. But
understand that you may be feeding your subconscious some poverty
messages when you get excited about saving a few dollars. Another
valuable lesson I learned from my mother was the result of her using the
term "Penny wise, pound foolish" to describe someone who wasted a whole
day shopping around to save two dollars on something.

Restaurants are places where a lot of people do themselves harm in

terms of personal pettiness. Get in the habit of knowing the price range at
restaurants you frequent, especially the highest-priced item on the menu.
Don't go unless you are willing to spend that much. And when you go, don't
look at the right-hand side of the menu. If you are ready to be more
adventurous, do this at a new restaurant. Settling for less than the most
delicious meal you can order, to save a few dollars, is like swallowing
poison in terms of what it is doing to your subconscious mind, that
marvelous instrument you must depend on to earn you a fortune!

7. THE MORE YOU SAVOR WHAT YOU BUY, THE MORE VALUE YOU GET FOR
YOUR MONEY.

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 The more intensely you experience what you are buying, the more
value you are getting for your money. What makes a life most valuable is
the quality of time used. The healthiest and happiest way to use your
money is in exchange for something that can provide you with many alive
moments of sensory pleasure, fully engaging your mind, your body, and
your emotions. How sad it is seeing someone focus attention on how much
money he or she "saved" in contrast to the joy of someone enjoying with
great delight what their money brought them!
I particularly remember going on a seashore vacation with some
friends. I gladly paid six dollars more a night to have an ocean-view room.
They opted for the economy side of the hotel. Just the time they spent
coming over to my room to watch the view more than made up for the
difference in price! And at some subconscious level they had to feel pretty
cheap. But at least they were able to appreciate the view. In order to justify
their "economies" many people shut off their senses so that they won't be
confronted with what they are missing

8. REALIZE THAT MOST OF YOUR DAYS INVOLVE A POSITIVE CASH FLOW.

Positive cash flow. Doesn't that have a nice sound to it? It can conjure
up a vision of rivers of money flowing toward you. And you already have it!
Every day that more money comes into your life than goes out, you are
operating with a positive cash flow. Most people do themselves in
psychologically by counting only the end results of their monthly
transactions. If, for instance, you pay all your bills on one day at the end or
beginning of the month, you have a positive cash flow the other twenty-
nine or thirty days! And it's not kidding yourself, it's really understanding
the economics of your financial life. If today you earned $35, and you spent
only $20, even if you owe $150 in immediate bills you still have a positive
cash flow of $15, if you haven't actually mailed out those payments.

This is the kind of positive reinforcement your prosperity

consciousness loves. If wealth is an attitude, as most experts seem to
agree, then working your attitude is the way to get wealthy.
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 You never do yourself any good by imagining that more money is
going out than coming in. Even if, at the end of the month, this is
temporarily true, focus instead on the positive cash flow you have most of
the days of your life. Amounts aren't as important as the fact that more
days see money coming in than see money going out. Close your eyes for a
moment. Yes, right now. Just close them, and envision what your life is like
with a positive cash flow. Did you find it hard to accept? Well, if you start
telling yourself MORE MONEY IS COMING IN THAN GOING OUT MOST OF
THE DAYS OF MY LIFE, you'll very clearly begin to see an effect. You may
even want to adopt this as another Prosperity Proclamation.

9. BUY FOR YOURSELF, NOT ACCORDING TO WHAT OTHERS TELL YOU.

This is a touchy issue for some people. Our parents often gave us
advice to buy certain things in a certain way, and we still have some
remnants of those old money messages. For instance, my mother always
suggested waiting for sales. For a long time I would hold off buying
something I wanted until it was on sale. And sometimes I just never got it.
Now, I consider my time too valuable to look for sales. If an item's on
sale, great, I see nothing wrong with buying something you want, when you
want it, at a lower price. But spending time and energy to follow those old
money messages is ridiculous. Others will also tell you where to shop, what
specific products to buy, and how much you should spend. Accepting good
advice is common sense, but allowing others to make all your choices robs
you of one of your basic freedoms: the freedom to learn for yourself.

Couples often have problems with money, and we're told that it
accounts for a lot of divorces. One of the obstacles to good couple finances
is the putting of all the money earned by both people into one pile. Hostility
can then be built up when the man wants to buy a camera, and the woman
wants to buy a clothes dryer, and the debate starts over how "you're going
to spend our money." When counseling couples on money matters. I
suggest that each of them have a specific amount each month as
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PERSONAL PLEASURE MONEY, over and above their joint banking accounts
and daily living expenses. For instance, one woman I know has now
delegated $100 a month for her own personal use out of the joint family
money pile. She plans all sorts of pleasurable experiences for herself. And
she doesn't feel badly, as she once did, when her husband decides to spend
money on one of his interests. The liberation of the woman’s traditional
stereotyped rules is helping to overcome this problem. But this hasn't
always filtered down to money.

For instance, many a woman who considers herself otherwise liberated

expects the man to pay for dinner when they are dating-- even if she earns
as much or more than he does! This clinging to ancient tribal customs is
destructive to both parties. It perpetuates the woman's poverty
consciousness belief that she will never earn as much as men, or that she
must be dependent on a man. It also perpetuates the man's poverty
consciousness belief that women must be taken care of and protected ,
since they can't do it themselves.

I got in touch with this about six years ago when I was dating a
woman earning about twice my income. Now, I could easily afford to pay
for dinner, but so could she! She was so rooted in poverty consciousness
that she took it for granted that I would pay. I just couldn't see how my
buying dinner for someone who could well afford to buy me dinner made
me a better person. This became even more ludicrous when I was
struggling along on almost no income at all and dating women who were
professionals earning twenty to forty thousand dollars a year. Some of them
were still so caught up in their old programming that they would develop
galloping anxiety attacks If I so much as suggested we go dutch.
Understand, I love treating someone to dinner. as a special event, as a gift.
But not because it's expected of me, and not because the other person feels
uncomfortable doing it any other way.

I took some of these feelings into the heart of liberation land when I
addressed a meeting of the National Organization of Women. I said, "How
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come you women feel liberated when you go dutch with a man, but hardly
ever feel liberated enough to pay the whole bill?" This got me a fascinating
response: four dinner invitations!

10. UNDERSTAND THAT IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR IT, YOU
CAN AFFORD IT.

I talked about this is a bit in the first chapter. I said there that "I can't
afford it" is often a lie, almost always an untruth. To take it a step further,
you are doing powerful damage to your subconscious mind, your marvelous
money machine, every time you feed in the negative programming "I can't
afford it." Again, your subconscious will accept imagined fact as readily as
real fact. If you say "I can't afford it” enough times, you will become a
person who really can't afford it.

What a lot of people who say "I can't afford it" are really saying is "I
don't deserve it." This is not to suggest that you splurge on things that you
don't need. But pay attention whenever you are about say "I can't afford
it." See whether you aren't really making a statement to the effect that this
isn't how you are willing to use your money. I often use a little exercise in
my workshop, asking people to list a series of things they can't do. each
sentence must start with the words "I can't." One such list looked like this:

"I can't fly."

"I can't find someone to love."
"I can't seem to get ahead."
"I can't understand the exercise."

I then suggest that each person change all the "I can't" statements to
"I won't", so the same list would look like this:

"I won't fly."

"I won't buy a new car."
"I won't find someone to love."
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 "I won't seem to get ahead."
"I won't understand this exercise."

Try this for yourself. Not only now in the form of an exercise, but in
your life, whenever confronted by an "I can't" statement. "I can't afford it."
then becomes "I won't afford it." and this will give your subconscious mind
the important idea that you are in charge of your own life. "I can't do it" is
negative thinking, while "I won't do it" is a choice you are making. I know
this sounds very simplistic, but if you use it you'll begin to see some
changes in the way you feel about yourself.
One of the silliest things people say is "I can't afford it, but I'm going
to do it anyway." It's as if they need to remind themselves they're being
foolish. Much better to say, "I thought I couldn't afford it, but I decided it
was important to give this to myself."

This situation can be tremendously clarified if you use THE POVERTY

PENALTY. If you fine yourself a hundred dollars every time you say "I can't
afford it," you won't be able to afford to keep saying it. And that hundred
dollars has to be spent on pleasure!

First impressions create a certain mindset that is difficult to erase.

Have you ever noticed, as an example of this, that if someone you are
meeting for the first time is wearing glasses you always think of that person
as someone who wears glasses, even if he or she never wears them again?
While someone who wears glasses often may not be considered as such if
he or she wasn't wearing them the first time you met, Saying "I can't afford
it" over and over again will create the impression that you can't afford it,
and this will be difficult to overcome even when you have lots of money.
This is one reason some wealthy people get no pleasure out of spending
their money.

11. CLEARLY SEE THAT THE MORE YOU ENJOY USING MONEY, THE MORE
DESIRE YOU WILL BUILD TO ACHIEVE PROSPERITY

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 If your sophisticated computer-like brain gets a lot if information to
the effect that money create hassles, that money is linked with difficulty,
that money and anxiety go hand in hand, that money is for buying security
instead of pleasure, then your subconscious mind will keep you from getting
a lot more money. But if you circulate your money with love and joy, and a
sense that life is worth living and money worth spending, then your internal
moneymaking machine will go full steam ahead.

It's really sad how many people of means think they'll be able to relax
and someday start enjoying their money. But waiting until you have a
certain amount to start enjoying it is like waiting for a paycheck before you
start to look for a job. It just may be too late to get started. I've had many
very rich people come to my seminars, and come to me for private
consultations, and without exception I've found that their main problem was
waiting too long to start enjoying their success. They were often a perpetual
motion machine when making their money, and just found it terribly hard to
get off and take a vacation. I think every bill of every denomination ought
to have engraved on it:

THIS BILL IS FOR PLEASURE, NOT ENJOYING IT MAY BE

HAZARDOUS TO YOUR EMOTIONAL HEALTH.

Many people are future-oriented, but the MONEYLOVE concept is to

enjoy your wealth as it is happening, so you love the process as much as
the goal. Every dollar you receive is an opportunity to learn more about
money, to learn more about enjoying using your money, and an opportunity
to build that clear vision of what you want. Abstract concepts can be very
potent, but money in a bank, or locked away, is too abstract a concept for
the most imaginative person to translate into financial satisfaction or
financial independence. You've got to play with your money, touch your
money, and use your money, in order to become money-conscious.

12. REALIZE THAT FEELING GUILTY ABOUT SPENDING MONEY INDICATES

A LACK OF FAITH IN YOUR OWN CAPACITY TO CREATE MORE.
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 Feeling guilty about circulating money has nothing to do with how
much money you have to circulate. There are millionaires who feel guilt
every time they spend five dollars on themselves. By dealing with money in
terms of figures transferred from one set of books to another, rather than
physically handling it, many wealthy people have a deep disbelief in their
prosperity. This prevents them from eliminating the fear of poverty that is
such a part of their inner awareness. Statements such as: "If I spend this
much this foolishly, I will suffer"; "I have a limited amount, so I'd better
hold on to what I've got"; "This money should be used to help others
instead of giving me pleasure" are all poverty-consciousness statements.
The last of the above negative statements may strike a particular
chord in you. Many people who give away a lot of money are operating on
the basis of guilt. True generosity of spirit is motivated by a much healthier
outlook. It's much more honest to use your money for pleasure than to give
it away pretending you don't expect something in return, whether it be
recognition here on earth or some sense of reward in heaven. The same
human laws apply to giving as do to working: The more you love what you
are doing, the more successful it will be more for you.

If you want to give your money away, give it to people who are doing
something you respect, who are working on a project you are enthusiastic
about. Absentee giving is a way of dehumanizing the exchange of money.
For instance, your time is often a much better gift than your money, a more
effective and more real form of generosity.

The greatest way to express your prosperity consciousness is to give

your money to someone who really doesn't need it, just because you like
what they're doing. Quite often, giving money to fill a desperate need
merely feeds that neediness, expanding the desperation and preventing
those involved from using their creative imaginations to fill their need. Also,
this is a very important truth: GIVING MONEY AWAY ONLY TO THOSE WHO
NEED IT WILL REINFORCE THE POVERTY BELIEF THAT YOU WILL GET
MONEY ONLY WHEN YOU NEED IT. Prosperity is going beyond mere need to
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a surplus economy. If you want to do more than survive, then keep this in
mind, and give with love, a sense of sharing surplus, and an understanding
that what you are giving are just pieces of paper, just a symbol. What
matters is what is done with those pieces of paper.

A word here about tithing: Many people whose opinions I respect have
reported great success in their lives, success they directly attribute to freely
giving a tenth of their income to some spiritual work, whether it be a
religious or a secular organization. It is an ancient tradition observed in
many lands to give a tenth of what you earn to the work of God. In the
reports of tithing I've received, most people started tithing before they
achieved substantial wealth, at a time when it could have been easily
argued that they couldn't afford to give up a tenth of their income. But
without exception they say that they learned to get more out of the
remaining 90 percent than they had out of the total amount, and their
income started increasing almost immediately.

One thing tithing certainly does is help increase your feeling of

prosperity. Feeling you are prosperous enough to give up a tenth of your
income may indeed stimulate your creative imagination to the point where
you more than make up the difference. But don't tithe just to gain, do it
because you appreciate your many gifts, and because you want to share
the fruits of your labor. It also seems to be important not to make tithing
conditional or a future promise, such as, "When I'm successful, I will tithe."
If you give money away, allow it to be in a manner that will enhance
your prosperity consciousness and sense of well-being.

PROSPERITY PROCLAMATION

The Prosperity Proclamation that is specifically geared toward the use,

exchange, and circulation of your money is:

EVERY DOLLAR I CIRCULATE ENRICHES THE ECONOMY AND COMES BACK

TO ME MULTIPLIED
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 All the tools contained in this chapter, and every word of the Money
Use Laws, are aimed at helping you accept this Prosperity Proclamation at
an emotional level of consciousness. Once you do that, you'll have no
trouble enjoying your money to the fullest. It will no longer be a question of
"I can't afford that," but will instead become a question of "Do I really want
that?"

Write the Prosperity Proclamation on money circulation twenty times,

and say it twenty times before going on to the next chapter.

Learning to say Yes! to your money will enable you to say Yes! to
yourself, and that will make you the kind of person other people will want to
say Yes! to.

One final idea: Have this proclamation printed on your checks. You'll
be amazed how much more pleasant paying bills will become!

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 4

PROSPERITY
BANKING

Taking it all in all, I find it is more trouble to watch after money

than to get it.
-MONTAIGNE

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and
wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-HENRY DAVID THOREAU

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A cartoon shows a simply dressed couple standing in front of a modern
palace of banking, dwarfed by its shinning marble façade. The man says to
the woman, “Somehow, dear, an old sock seems more appropriate.”

Well, I have news for you: Despite their often overwhelming

architecture, despite the sometimes patronizing and intimidating attitude of
their employees, and despite the bureaucratic hurdles one has to overcome
in order to do business with them, the nation’s multibillion-dollar banking
institutions are a valuable tool that can move you toward financial
satisfaction and financial independence!

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT BANKS?

Before exploring the many benefits you can gain from Prosperity Banking,
it’s important to examine your current attitudes and where they came from.
Finish the sentence “For me, putting money in the bank means
______________. “

Your answer may give you an idea of how you view banks in general.
Part of this is a reflection of your actual banking experience, and part of it
has probably been influenced by your parents and significant others in your
early life. I remember, for example, my grandfather’s telling how he lost all
the money he had in the bank when it closed during the Great Depression.
I’m certain this determined how he felt about banks for the next thirty-five
years of his life. I know it affected my mother, and me in turn.

For a good number of years I kept most of my money in a checking

account and hardly any in a savings account. I would say, “I can’t afford to
put money in the bank right now.” What a negative programming trip I was
laying on myself! That was a ridiculous attitude. A much healthier approach

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would have been to say, “Right now, I have other priorities, and I’m
choosing not to put any money in the bank.”

I could easily have afforded to put a dollar a week in a savings

account, and sometimes even five dollars, without depriving myself in any
way. Probably another negative banking myth that affected my actions in
those days was the one that says you have to put big chunks of money in a
bank for it to amount to anything. My career as a newsman provided me
with a lot of insight into that myth.

Sometimes, for a human-interest story. I would cover the death of

some poor derelict who was on welfare or had never earned more than a
few dollars a week. The derelict would be found in bed, in a messy, terribly
depressing room, with $80,000 stuffed into the mattress. These poor
unfortunates were, of course, fanatics when it came to saving money. They
were practicing miser consciousness rather than prosperity consciousness.
They also all seemed to have an obsessive and oppressive fear of banks.
But I think we can learn a lesson from their misfortune: In terms of
banking, consistency is more important than quantity.

Another factor that may inhibit healthy banking attitudes is the

subconscious fear that once you put your money in, you won’t be able to
withdraw it without a lot of hassle, or without having to explain what you
want it for. This fear can prevent you from feeling free to withdraw money
for frivolous reasons, an important freedom to have in terms of prosperity
consciousness.

HOW DID YOUR PARENTS FEEL ABOUT BANKS?

Can you see any connection between what your parents believed about
banks, and how you feel on the subject? For instance:

Did your parents consider going to the bank a solemn or joyful

experience?
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 Did they withdraw money only for tragic emergencies?
Did they feel free to take out money to splurge on some pleasure for
themselves or you?
Did they trust the bank to take good care of their money?

If one or both of your parents are still alive, you might chat with them
about banks and banking and find out their basic attitudes. Once you can
see where some of your negative programming originated, you can flow
forward and develop a program of using banks creatively for your own
financial benefit.

Another helpful device in overcoming some of the current emotional

impact of that old negative conditioning is to start avoiding the words save
and savings when referring to money in the bank. To say you are “saving”
your money conjures up an image of rescuing it from a fate worse than
death. And that fate may merely be spending money on something
pleasurable or useful for yourself. The words are just too involved with
symbols and images that get in the way of prosperity consciousness.

Check out, for example, what you feel when you see or hear the old
aphorism “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Does this make you jump for
joy and feel good about banking? Or does it remind you of an authority
figure telling you how to run your life? I’m not saying that the advice isn’t
true, just that it’s too strongly connected to old attitudes about banking.

The word banking also has more of a feel of wealth and financial
independence about it. Poor people save their money, rich people bank it.
So, from now on, you are banking your money.

YOUR SEVEN PROSPERITY BANKING ACCOUNTS

Why seven bank accounts? Because from now on, you are going to use
banks to foster in you a self-image of a person of means and substance. It’s
pretty hard to see yourself as a loser with seven bank accounts. And each
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one has very specific purpose. In fact, once you achieve an initial goal,
you’ll be adding an eighth account!

These seven accounts will help you to keep track of your money and to
have a sense of direction and financial purpose.

Just shopping around for seven banks will be an adventure that will
build your prosperity consciousness. Maintain high standards. After all, you
are an important customer, and will become even more important as your
Prosperity Banking system begins to work. Don’t choose any bank where
you are not made to feel welcome, or where the service is impolite or
inefficient. This would merely reinforce any negative banking attitudes on
your part.

Choose attractive banks, with warm, attractive employees. If you want

to add to the adventure of it, ask to see a bank officer and explain the
purpose of the specific account you are going to open there. Also explain
that you are starting out with a minimal amount to see how you are
treated, and expect to become a major depositor in the coming years. Tell
the officer that you are on the way to becoming financially independent,
and you want to pick a bank where you’ll feel comfortable and well served.
And believe it as you say it, for it’s really true. Once you started reading
this book, you put yourself on the path to financial independence!

1. CASH FLOW ACCOUNT

This is the account into which you put your entire earnings or
paycheck as soon as they are received. The basic rule is to leave it all in
this account for at least twenty-four hours. If possible, leave it in for an
entire month. This is all your income, and the idea is to have to go to the
bank and withdraw what you need for everyday expenses. This will give you
a much clearer idea of how you spend your money. The best way to do it is
to keep it in the bank for a month, figure out, what your expenses are for
that month, and see if you can’t manage on a little less. All surplus can be
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removed and placed in one of your other accounts at the end of the month.
By leaving all your cash flow in the bank for at least twenty-four hours after
receiving it, you’ll begin to find you can survive without money.

If you can go a day without taking from your income, it will be a major
accomplishment In your MONEYLOVE training. You’ll be amazed at what this
Cash Flow Account will teach you about money, and how easy it will be to
arrive at the end of the month with a surplus. If, for instance, you use the
MONEYLOVE suggestion to have a friend invite you to dinner, you won’t
have to withdraw the money you would have needed for that meal. If you
get four friends each to invite you once a month, as suggested in the last
chapter, you’ll start having a fat surplus every money—certainly enough to
do something nice for your generous friends and still have quite a bit left
over. Using creative budgeting skills in conjunction with this account will
automatically provide you with a new sense of personal wealth.

The main purpose of your Cash Flow Account is to give you a real
sense of how cash flows in and out of your life, and give you an easy and
direct means of changing that flow.

2. CREATIVE CONSUMER ACCOUNT

This is an account you go to for all major purchases. This may mean
a vacation, a new TV, a car, a medical emergency, or a new camera. The
basic rule is that you have to have a specific large purchase in mind,
knowing that you will buy that item when you have enough money in this
account. Another rule is that you have to work toward keeping this account
empty. You are always aiming at getting enough money in the account so
you can take it out and make your purchase. This may not be as easy as it
sounds.

When you start putting prosperity consciousness into practice, you

may find that, as soon as you have enough money in the account, enough
comes in from another source to pay for that particular item, or someone
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gives you what you were going to buy. This happened to me when I was
saving for a dictation machine. I almost had enough in the bank, in my
Creative Consumer Account, when lo and behold, a friend of mine who’s a
therapist called me up to tell me that a patient had run out of money and
had paid for his therapy sessions with an almost-new dictation machine. My
friend asked if I had any use for it, as he had no need or room for it. I took
it off his hands with the agreement that we would split the profits if I ever
sold it. This left me with about $400 in my Creative Consumer Account. So I
decided to splurge and flew down to Nassau for an afternoon, just to play
blackjack in the casino there. I had wanted to do this for quite a while, but
hadn’t felt I could afford it, and I firmly believe in never gambling unless I
am ready, willing, and able to lose my entire stake. This also added to my
prosperity consciousness, since the casinos are filled with wealthy people,
and have an aura of prosperity.

Just telling the immigration people that I had no luggage and had just
flown in for the afternoon from Miami gave me the feeling of being a
multimillionaire. Even if I had lost it all, I think it would have been worth it.
But I ended up almost doubling my money. So now I had about $700. I put
$600 in my Financial Independence Account, since it was in effect, found
money, and I gave the rest to a friend who was collecting funds to bring a
spiritual master over from India. This is the kind of thing that’s always
happening to me with MONEYLOVE.

That old saying “When it rains, it pours” really makes sense when you
are working on your prosperity consciousness, and the Creative Consumer
Account can help you keep track of your major purchases, as well as
stimulate your imagination.

3. FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE ACCOUNT

This single account can do it all for you! Into this account you put only
money you will not have to touch. Once you put money into your Financial
Independence Account, it stays there. This is your one permanent bank
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account. Once you start this account, you are on the way to financial
independence, for you have begun to accept it as a reality, and have
actually started the process. There is one further stipulation that is an
important part of the process.

Remember, you are not only putting money away, but becoming more
aware of your prosperity potential. To help you do this, arrange to have the
interest paid to you by mail quarterly. You will probably have to have this
account in a Savings and Loan Association in order to arrange this service.
And your first goal is to have enough money in your Financial Independence
Account to produce an interest check that will support you comfortably for
one whole day. When that happens, you will have achieved partial financial
independence, you will be financially independent four days a year! This will
reinforce your determination and give you a taste of what it will be like
when you can live without having to earn an income. You will be achieving
financial independence one day at a time, the most emotionally healthy way
to do it. It will begin to be a current event for you, rather than some far-off
distant wish.

One important note, here, is to avoid becoming compulsive. The idea

of financial independence may appeal to you so much that you’ll rush to put
money in this account that really doesn’t belong in it, money you may need
for other things, money you could be enjoying now. Remember, this is the
money you can afford to put away indefinitely, after everything else is
taken care of. It can start out small, as can all the Prosperity Banking
Accounts, perhaps with as little as ten dollars in it.

It’s the idea that’s important, the idea of getting started, of triggering
the momentum. Getting to the point where your interest will support you
for a day could take a year or more. In fact, there is an advantage in not
putting enough in at the beginning to achieve that first goal: You can then
enjoy the anticipation of reaching it, and more intensely experience the
excitement of arriving at your first plateau on the road to financial
independence!
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4. SABBATICAL ACCOUNT

This account is designed for one special purpose: to give you enough
money to take a year off. I can’t stress too much the importance of having
the idea of a sabbatical as a part of your prosperity consciousness. It gives
you a specific, fairly short-range purpose, one that is more immediately
achievable than complete financial independence. And it prepares you for
the exciting possibilities of freedom from having to earn a living. Rather
than counting the money in this account, count the days. For example, if it
costs you thirty dollars a day to live comfortably, as soon as you have thirty
dollars in this account you have the first day of your sabbatical.

The easiest way to make this work is to put 10 percent of your income
into the account. With the accumulating interest, it should take you about
seven years to reach your goal. Actually, in practice, prosperity
consciousness will get that account filled up even more quickly, and you
may find yourself able to take a year off in as little as two or three years.

Taking 10 percent of your income may seem difficult, but it’s easier
than it appears. You can consider it as a form of tithing. Many people of
very modest means manage to give 10 percent of their earnings to a
church, so you could manage to give that amount to your Sabbatical
Account. And if you want to add a more loving quality to the concept, make
an agreement with yourself to spend some of your sabbatical year in giving
service to others.

One real estate salesman I know decided to spend a couple of weeks

of his year reading to the blind. Another self-tither spent some of her
sabbatical visiting old-age homes and just talking to some of the lonely
people stashed away by relatives and a society too busy to care. She was
fascinated with the interesting stories told by these men and women whom
no one else would listen to—so fascinated, in fact, that she decided to write

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a book on the subject. It’s just possible that when that book is finished and
gets published she’ll be able to take another year off.

Giving freely, honestly, and with love can produce some amazing
dividends. It also adds to your prosperity consciousness, since you begin to
see yourself as someone who can afford to give to others.

As with your Financial Independence Account, it’s important that you

put in the Sabbatical Account only money that you absolutely don’t need or
want right now. Do not sacrifice current pleasure for future security. That’s
a very poor bargain.

The reason for having both a Financial Independence Account and a

Sabbatical Account is to expand your prosperity alternatives. Moving toward
both complete financial independence and temporary financial freedom for a
year will give you two fiscal projects you have actually started, each of
which can produce pleasant tingles of anticipation, each of which can give
you a satisfying sense of accomplishment, and each of which can provide
you with great financial rewards. The core concept here, as with all the
MONEYLOVE techniques, is to reprogram your brain with a new way of
thinking, while moving practically in a creative, productive, and prosperous
direction.

5. PLEASURE ACCOUNT

Though all of your Prosperity Banking Accounts may give you pleasure
in one form or another, this one will challenge you to come up with new
ways to enjoy your money. Every penny in this account must be spent for
your personal pleasure. And you can't let money accumulate here for more
than three months. Every ninety days, you must empty the account and
spend all the money on pleasure, on having a good time.

This will allow you to learn even more deeply the basic truth that
money is for pleasure. You'll have to keep a close watch on this account and
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make certain you aren't neglecting it in favor of the others. It's a vital to
your future prosperity as your Financial Independence Account. Many
people have put together huge fortunes and never gotten a moment's
pleasure out of them. They had forgotten how to enjoy in their frantic effort
to accumulate. Prosperity is not only having money, it is enjoying it!

The idea for the Pleasure Account came from a story I heard told in
Miami a few years ago by Dr. Leo Buscaglia, author of Love, and
Personhood. Leo told about an uncle of his who had died and left sums of
money to each of his nieces and nephews, with the stipulation that the
money had to be spent on pleasure, otherwise it would go to charity. You
can imagine how this upset Leo's old-fashioned Italian mother, whose first
inclination was probably to rush to the bank and put money away for "the
future." But the uncle's will had her trapped. if the money wasn't spent for
fun. It had to go to charity. Imagine what that household was like, with
eleven boys and girls, all with legacies they had to splurge on themselves,
which was totally against everything Mama had taught them about money.
What a way to instantly boost their prosperity consciousness!

There's another lesson in the rest of the story, as Leo Buscaglia tells it.
"My definition of 'fun' at the time was to go and sit at the feet of Jean-Paul
Sartre and live with the existentialists in Paris. My dad and my mother said,
‘You can't go, my God, you're only sixteen years old!' So, after much ado, I
said, 'I'll send it to charity! I'll give it to charity!' They said, 'Oh, you can't
give it to charity! You’ve got to use it! Okay, go, but the minute you go, you
have declared yourself independent of us.' Sure, I was ready. I get my
money, and I get my little old suitcase, and off I go to Paris. The first thing,
the American in Paris Syndrome, I get a little garret apartment that looks
over all the little chimney tops, I buy wood for the fireplace. I buy French
wine and Camembert cheese. And I invite all people in, and we rap all night
about matters of consequence. We don't know what the hell we're talking
about, but we're having such a good time doing it! And, all of a sudden, in a
bleak November in Paris--and there is no bleaker thing than a November in
Paris, it is so cold you cannot envision it--I realize I have no more money.
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My rent is paid to the end of the month, but that's it. No more wood and
just a handful of coins. So I figure, 'Oh hell, Mom is a soft touch, I'm going
to let her know, she won't let me die!' So I go and send a telegram, the
cheapest one I could send: STARVING--LEO. Twenty four hours later, and I
still have the telegram, I got the response: STARVE--MAMA!"

That was a moment of truth for Leo Buscaglia. But he survived. He got
pretty hungry, but he survived, and stayed in Paris another year. One way
to look at his experience, for someone in poverty consciousness, is that he
had to pay for his pleasure with a lot of suffering. But that's not the way
Leo looked at it. He remembers it all as one of the most exciting, joyful,
alive, and important learning periods of his life. And he cites the despair of
hunger as one of the experiences that taught him the most. In fact, after
that telegram, a year later, he went home and told his mother, "Thank you,
you made all the difference."

Leo was lucky. How many times do people postpone pleasure for fear
of an outcome far less traumatic than going hungry in a bleak November in
Paris? Far too many times, I'm afraid. Poverty consciousness is an insidious
force in our culture and dictates that one must always be afraid of spending
money for pleasure instead of for some "serious" purpose. The willingness
to take a risk, to face up to any fears that have you resisting the enjoyment
of money, is a major prerequisite for prosperity consciousness.

Unwillingness to take that risk is a sign of poor self-esteem, in effect a

statement that says you don't believe you deserve pleasure, and that you
don't have the faith in your own creative talent that will let you believe you
can easily replace any money you spent.

The Pleasure Account is one way to start programming yourself to

enjoy. It is a vital counterbalance to the other accounts and will ensure that
the joyful part of you will in win the tug-of-war with the inner pauper in
your personality.

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6. INVESTMENT ACCOUNT

This is one of the simplest accounts of all. You put in only money that
you can afford to invest. You take out money only when you find an
investment that fills all the criteria cited in the following chapter, “Prosperity
Investing," and one that will give you a return greater than the interest the
bank is paying you.

7. MILLION-DOLLAR ACCOUNT

The only difference between you and someone who has a million
dollars in the bank is all those zeros in the millionaire's bankbook. You are
going to bridge that separation with the greatest of ease. Open an account
for ten dollars, and write or type five extra zeros in your bankbook, so that
it reads $1,000,000, and so that you can now see what it feels like to have
a million dollars in the bank. This may seem silly to you, but it's a fact that
the more you visualize something as being true, the easier it is to accept at
an emotional level.

The more you see yourself as wealthy, the easier it will be for you to
overcome any emotional resistance connected to your poverty
programming. You don't touch your Million Dollar Account, it just sits there.
You can pretend to yourself that, for some reason, you cannot touch the
million dollars just yet. If you can begin to consider yourself as actually
having a million dollars in the bank, it will begin to change your money
attitudes. Not that you'll go out and blow $300,000 on a yacht, but you
probably won't hesitate to spend fifteen dollars on a good dinner. After all,
when you actually do accumulate a million dollars that euphoria you will
experience is a feeling you are creating. You are allowing the knowledge of
a fortune to trigger a pleasant emotional reaction. And you are in charge of
that trigger right now! The feeling of well-being is one you can create at
this moment, and the Million-Dollar Account is a tool to help you in that
effort. It's an adult toy, if you will, one you can have fun playing with and
use to learn some more about your money attitudes.
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THE OPULENCE ACCOUNT

This is purposely not one of your seven original accounts. It's designed to
be created only after you reach a specific goal with all your other accounts.
You can choose the goal, but doubling the original amount in all seven
might be a good guideline. Your Opulence Account is just that, and the
money in it so to be withdrawn regularly and used only to give you a taste
of wealth. This is means you must spend it on something you wouldn't have
normally done, something you feel it takes a rich person to do. This may be
renting a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur for a day, going to a $100-a-plate
charity dinner, flying to an island for the weekend, shopping in an exclusive
shop, buying custom-made clothes, or giving an expensive gift to a friend.

The main thing is to enjoy this conspicuous consumption and see what
you can learn from it. You may learn that you really don't have to be rich to
do some of these things. You may learn that some of these aren't as
desirable as you thought they were. Most of all, you spend at least some of
your money in the way an extremely wealthy person would. It's still another
preparation for your eventual prosperity, and another boost to the belief
that it's really going to happen for you.

THE PROSPERITY PIGGY BANK

If your Cash Flow Account is running low, and you need some cash in a
hurry. You may be tempted to stage a run on some of your other accounts,
particularly if you've put more money into them than you could easily
afford. Having a piggy bank as a first line of the defense can prevent your
using some of the money in the bank for purposes other than the
designated ones. If possible, get a piggy bank that will hold a large amount
of change as well as paper money. Also try to get one that is sealed, so that
you have to break it open in order to rob it. This will be still another
incentive for you to use your imagination to create more money rather than
depleting what you have already put away. Put all your loose change in the
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piggy bank every night, along with any small bills you can spare. You'll be
surprised at how quickly a substantial sum will build up. It will feel good
having it in there in case of an emergency.

SOME ADDITIONAL PROSPERITY BANKING TIPS

You may decide to have several of your accounts in one bank, especially if
there aren't a large number of banks conveniently located. It does pay,
however, to have your Financial Independence Account in a bank some
distance away. This will discourage you from making withdrawals. You can
always make your deposits by mail. Leonard Orr tells the story of wanting
to go and withdraw the $100 he had in a Financial Independence Account
so he could pay half his rent. On the way to the bank at the other end of
town, he came up with an idea to earn money instead. Leonard, in his
Money Seminars, also talks about the fact that, if he took that $100 out and
paid part of his rent with it, a month later the rent would be due again and
he wouldn't have $100 in the bank. So he suggests using your imagination
a month earlier to come up with the money some other way. This is part of
having a surplus attitude, rather than just making ends meet.

If you make a strong effort to produce some money when you're down
to your last thousand dollars, rather than down to your last dollar, you'll
change your whole financial pattern.

When picking banks, don't worry too much about how much interest
they pay. You won't get rich on interest. Convenience and a pleasant
banking environment are much more important criteria.

Don't get so bogged down in such rigid adherence to the concept of

seven or eight bank accounts that you don't enjoy the process. You may
choose to start one or two accounts and slowly work up to the
recommended number. Once you start practicing prosperity consciousness,
you will be able to produce substantially more income and may want to
have several Financial Independence and Sabbatical accounts. Feel free to
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mold this concept to your individual needs and desires. The idea is to give
yourself a specific direction, and a specific banking program, one that is
more functional and more fun than the traditional single bank account.

We often have not learned the simplest truths at an emotional level,

where we can apply that knowledge to change our lives for the better.
Leonard Orr tells of his three year struggle to build up a bank account,
never seeming to get it going, until he learned a basic truth: The only way
you can have less money at the end of the year than at the beginning is by
talking it out! Think about that for a while, and about whether you have
really learned it at an emotional level. This is the reason for the strict rule
against withdrawals from your Financial Independence Account. As long as
you never take any money out, that account just has to keep growing. It's
simple, common sense approaches like this that make the difference
between poverty and prosperity.

PROSPERITY PROCLAMATIONS

Now is a good time for you once again to experience two Prosperity
Proclamations related to banking. By now you may have practiced saying
them and writing them. There's a good chance, however, that they have
more meaning for you now that you understand the Prosperity Banking
concept. It is true, though, that the Prosperity Proclamations can be potent
even if, at a conscious level, you are not completely clear as to their
meaning. These, however, are among the simplest ones:

EVERY DOLLAR I BANK IS ACCUMULATED WEALTH FOR MY PERSONAL

PLEASURE

I think every bank should print this on every deposit slip and every
withdrawal slip, and display it in large letters over every entrance!
Obviously, every dollar you bank is building up your wealth. Just as
obviously, if you allow yourself to enjoy your money, it is there for your
pleasure. The importance of using this truth in a personal proclamation is to
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convince yourself, at a deep emotional level, that you are indeed
accumulating wealth, and that all your money can bring you pleasure.

NO MATTER WHAT I DO, MY FINANCIAL WORTH INCREASES EVERY DAY

This proclamation allows you to focus on the awareness that, as your

money earns interest, your financial worth increases. This happens when
you are working hard, when you are sleeping, loafing, playing, making love,
eating-- in fact, whatever you are doing day or night, each and every day.
Just accepting this fact can lead to a quantum leap in your prosperity
consciousness. One of the main MONEYLOVE concepts is that you are
already on the road to prosperity.

Before going on to the next chapter, repeat each of these two

proclamations out loud twenty times, and write each of them twenty times.
As simple as they are, it will take a while for your brain to absorb them
completely as a part of your inner knowledge and functional wisdom.

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 5

PROSPERITY
INVESTING

The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in
your pocket.
-KIN HUBBARD

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

-HENRY DAVID THOREAU

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The more prosperity-conscious you become, the better investments you will
make. Those who really don't believe in their eventual success will tend to
go after fast profits in an investment program that resembles nothing so
much as a nervous twitch. Those who have prosperity consciousness
approach investing with a calm sense of certainty more wealth is coming
their way.

The MONEYLOVE view of investing is that you can make the most
money when you invest for love rather than money, when you invest in an
idea rather than in a bunch of figures. For example, a good friend of mine
was invited to a backer's audition for a Broadway show. It was On the
Twentieth Century, written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, composed
by Cy Coleman, directed by Harold Prince, and starring John Cullum,
Madeline Kahn, and Imogene Coca. When my friend considered investing
$2000 in the show, because she loved the sampling she saw, many people
advised her against investing, citing the statistical truths that most shows,
particularly musicals, are flops, and that hardly any ever return the original
investment, let alone produce a profit. My friend, however, had just gotten
a more prosperous view of her life, which was paying off in increased
income, allowed her to think of the $2,000 as surplus money, and allowed
her to ignore all the "sensible" advice and become a backer of that show.

At this writing, just a few weeks after opening night, it looks like the
musical hit of 1978, and my friend could easily triple or quadruple her
money. The point is that she believed in the show and invested, not with
her mind on how much money she could make, but with a sense of
excitement at being a part of something as alive as a Broadway musical. A
couple of years ago I attended a backer's audition with some friends, and
the producers of the show spent most of the evening talking about how
much profit we could all make if we invested. The show wasn't bad, with a
clever story and lively music, but that approach turned us off. So far, it
hasn't been produced, and I presume any backers lost their entire
investments.
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 REAL ESTATE

Consider those two words: REAL, something that actually exists, genuine,
true. ESTATE, a person's property, social standing, ownership of land,
degree of prosperity. Those two words are used so often in our culture that
we've lost sight of the prosperous sound of them. There is a basic truth that
dictates that the prosperity-conscious investor should devote at least a
portion of funds to the purchase of real estate: Earth isn't getting any
bigger. Earth's population is.

Quite often what determines the difference between someone who

owns property and someone who doesn't is their attitude toward owning
property. If you've been conditioned to believe that renting an apartment is
easier than buying a house or condominium, and gives you more freedom
of movement, then you may not even have investigated the fiscal realities.
A woman therapist I know was told by her parents that it's always better to
own than to rent. At the age of twenty-nine, therefore, with a moderate
income, she owned five pieces of property, including two small apartment
houses.

Another woman I know, earning about $12,000 a year, bought an old

house in Richmond, Virginia, fixed it up while she was living in it, and sold it
at a healthy profit. She bought another one and found that her credit had
soared to the point where she could own two at a time. At last report, she
owned eleven houses, with people paying her more than enough rent to pay
off the mortgages and provide a healthy profit. Both these women were
going against the stereotyped programming that most women receive about
owning real estate. At an emotional level, they are told that buying a house
is an admission that you never expect to find a man to marry. At a financial
level, they are told that buying a house creates more problems than profits.
Though, in some isolated instances, both can be true, they usually are not.
Each of the women I mention really derived a sense of excitement and
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pleasure from owning their property, a sense of pride and self-esteem. And
this was prosperity consciousness of the highest order!

Check out your own attitudes about real estate. If you focus some of
your economic attention on owning instead of renting, you can soon stop
renting and start buying.

I personally suggest that Florida and California are the best places to
consider investing in real estate, for the simple reason that if everybody in
the United States who says he or she wants eventually to move to one of
those two states actually does, Florida and California will either have to buy
adjoining states to accommodate the crowds or put gates on their borders.
In any event, even if just a portion of those people planning to move West
or South to the fastest-growing states do so, the land values have to zoom
eventually. And with the colder winters that have recently been experienced
in the East and Midwest, and all the scare talk of a new ice age coming, the
immigration to the two sun states will accelerate at an even faster pace.
One note of warning, however: You must pay attention to basic value when
purchasing property in either Florida or California, where land values have
greatly increased. I'm certainly not the first person to realize there's a
potential huge profit to be made in real estate investments in those two
areas.

One tip I'd like to share with you comes from a number of people I
know who have made quick and easy profits by buying Florida
condominiums. Again, you have to make certain you are not buying at a
ridiculously inflated price. The idea is to find a condominium under
construction by a reputable corporation, with the completion date at least a
year away. Then you put down the minimum down payment. Chances are,
the price of the condominium units will go up as completion grows closer,
and you can sell out with a substantial profit on your own down payment.
With the help of a good lawyer, you can arrange to invest in several
condominiums at once, and multiply your profits. One friend of mine put
down $3,000 on a condominium priced at $32,000. It took a year and a half
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for the builder to finish the units, and they had soared to $39,000 by that
time. She was able to sell her unit, without putting another penny into it,
for a neat profit of $7,000, minus commissions, on her $3,000 investment.
This may be the best way to invest in condominium property, since I've
noticed, in Florida at least, that the biggest jump in price usually occurs
between the laying of the foundation and the actual completion date.

Real estate is an investment you should make only with surplus funds,
money you can afford to have tied up for a while. It is not as negotiable as
stocks, not as accessible as a bank account, and requires a degree of
patience and belief not needed for other forms of investment.

One of the myths that keep people from investing in real estate is that
all the good opportunities are long gone. Not true, as there are more real
estate opportunities now than ever before, with more possible uses for
land, and expanding metropolitan areas, and increased interest in living
closer to the land.

Some of the negative concepts about real estate are inspired by the
experiences of a lot of people's parents. I don't know if you'll identify with
this, but many parents talking about "Lost Opportunities in Real Estate,"
and how they could have bought a piece of land in the 1930s or 1940s that
multiplied in value a hundred or a thousand times. Usually this is followed
by a statement such as "But of course, who had even $200 to invest in
those days?" Who indeed! The truth of the matter is that these wistful
reminiscences are usually admissions of acute poverty consciousness. The
people involved could have come up with $200, if they had really believed
in the value of real estate, which they didn't at the time. No one did, which
is why it was so cheap. And most of those who bought real estate in those
days were more than happy to sell out at the first sign of profit. So few, if
any, people made the extraordinary profits indicated by the jump in prices
over a long period of time. And the biggest poverty-conscious part of it all is
that those real estate investments may be just as sound today, if not more
so.
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 Sadly looking back on lost chances can keep you from seeing the real
opportunities out there right now! I remember my parents talking in the
1950s about how they could have bought a lot in Wildwood Crest, New
Jersey, for about $150 in the late 1940s.When they were talking about it,
those lots were selling for several thousand dollars. If instead of talking,
they had bought one of the lots, even at its increased price, I probably
would be a millionaire now, instead of having to wait two years. That resort
had a boom period, which was inevitable considering its beautiful beaches
and the crowding of other Jersey shore resorts. It was just a matter of time,
and those same lots were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars! Today,
this minute, there are other obvious values in land, places that just have to
become more valuable as the increased population looks for new residential
and vacation areas. If you have the extra money, and the patience, you can
make a fortune in real estate.

STOCKS

The great myth about the stock market is that it involves hard-and-
fast financial rules, and logical reactions to economic conditions. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Most people investing in the stock market
don't know what the hell they're doing, and this includes a good number of
stockbrokers! A lot of people who lose money on the stock market like to
accuse brokers of padding their commissions by advising clients to buy and
sell at a frenzied pace. I’ve known a number of brokers, and it's been my
experience that they are not so much devious as stupid. Now that I've
antagonized an entire industry, let’s go on and examine the opportunities in
today's stock market.

First off, understand this: Most of the upward and downward swings
of stocks have more to do with emotions than any change in the companies'
value. Investing your money on this basis would be like betting on whether
an overworked executive was going to have a heart attack or nervous
breakdown. Putting your money into a stock in the hopes that the majority
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of people will feel better about the economy a year from now than they do
today is just plain dumb. You’d be better off going to the racetrack and
picking horses at random.

The best way to invest your money with prosperity consciousness is

to put your money into the stock of a company that is constantly and
consistently growing, and is doing something you believe in, whether it's
manufacturing a product you know and love, or planning exciting projects
for the future, or getting into new fields you can personally get enthusiastic
about. This will take you beyond mere profit making as a motive, and give
you a personal connection to the stock you buy.

THE LITTLE-OLD-LADY SYSTEM

This is a concept I've borrowed from Leonard Orr and checked out with a
number of perceptive and successful stockbrokers. So far, I can't find any
flaws in it, and it seems to be about as foolproof a system as any I've yet
encountered. It's based on the true fact that little old ladies are the ones
with huge investments in the stock market, and huge success. Brokers
often despair at the way these little old ladies buy stocks, and it must be
frustrating to the brokers to see their profits increase so rapidly.

What the little old ladies do that distinguishes them from most other
investors is to buy on the basis of the dividend a stock pays. Any broker will
tell you that this is not the way to make a profit. I agree that you're not
going to earn a fortune from dividends, but that's not the point. What is the
point is that the ratio of dividend amount to price of stock is an excellent
barometer of the basic value of a company. And a system focusing on this
obeys the one age-honored rule of the stock market: Buy low and sell high.
The way most people do themselves in on buying stocks is by investing all
their money when the market is going up, and not being able to buy the
many great bargains when it's going down. The LITTLE-OLD-LADY SYSTEM
(you can just call it your system from now on, if that title bothers you), with
some of my own modifications, is as follows:
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1. Find a company with at least $100,000,000 in an annual sales.
2. Make certain that company has a continuing record of increasing its
earnings each year over the past five years.
3. Make certain that company has paid a dividend for the past ten years.
4. Make certain that dividend will give you a higher rate of interest than the
bank in which you have your Investment Account
5. Make certain the company's stock fluctuates enough to give you an
opportunity to make a profit.
6. Don’t invest more than half of your investment funds initially.

An ideal situation would be to find a company that has at least

$100,000,000 in sales, with each year's earnings higher than the preceding
year for at least the past five years, and paying a regular dividend for the
past ten years, a dividend of .80 on a stock selling for $10, which has been
as high as $15 over the past year. There are a number of companies that
can provide you with this kind of opportunity. Find a reputable broker to
help you. The Standard and Poor's information sheets on each company will
provide a lot of this information. Ask your broker to let you see them.

Let's say you have found this ideal situation, and you have $2,000 in
your Investment Account. Take $1,000 and buy 100 shares of this
company, which we'll call Ideal Opportunity, Inc. The next part of the
LITTLE-OLD-LADY SYSTEM is simple:

1. BUY MORE WHEN THE DIVIDEND/PRICE RATIO GOES UP.

2. SELL WHEN THE DIVIDEND/PRICE RATIO GOES DOWN.

This is the one that will have stock brokers pulling their hair out. But if
you really have some prosperity consciousness, you won't allow their
opinion to upset or deter you. The system works like this: When the Ideal
Opportunity stock rises in price, it will be paying less than 8 percent on
stock bought at that increased price, so you sell it. When it falls in price, it
will be paying more than 8 percent on the decreased price, so buy more.
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The difference between this and the poverty consciousness way of buying
and selling stocks is that most people panic when the price of a stock
they've invested in goes down, and they frantically rush to sell it. If it's a
good investment today, it will probably be a sound investment tomorrow,
despite the emotional reactions of a large number of stockholders. Their
reaction is good for you, for it gives you an opportunity to pick up a stock
you've decided is a good investment at a much lower price.
Let's go over it again, more specifically this time. You buy the stock at
$10. If it goes up to $15, it would now be paying a dividend rate of a little
more than 5 percent, instead of the 8 percent at which you bought it. So
you sell, take a neat 50 percent profit! It doesn't matter that you would still
be earning 8 percent interest on your original investment. What matters is
that stock is now selling a rate that pays less than that amount of interest.
And this is your signal to sell, to take a profit. You can decide how big a
profit you want to take. In fact, I suggest having a clear vision of how much
you would be comfortable making on this stock, and selling when it reaches
that level.

On the other hand, if the price of Ideal Opportunity, Inc., drops to $8 a

share, it would now be paying a dividend of 10 percent to anyone now
buying it, so you take some of that unused money in your Investment
Account and buy some more, perhaps another 50 shares. If you had tied up
all your investment money at the beginning, you wouldn't have been able to
buy low. It's an important aspect of your new prosperity consciousness that
you see a drop in price as an opportunity to buy more of a good thing
rather than a repudiation of your judgment. Some people have so little faith
in their own judgment that they consider a drop in the price of a share of
stock as some personal failure, losing sight of the normally erratic patterns
of stocks.

One underrated and underused tool your broker has to offer you is the
stop-loss. This is a device whereby you can protect your profits. For
example if your shares of Ideal Opportunity, Inc., which you bought at $10,
went up to $14, you could put in a stop-loss at $12. This would mean that,
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should the stock start down, you would be sold out at $12, or as close to
$12 as possible. This would still give you a 20 percent profit. It doesn't pay
to keep your stop-loss too close to the current price, since a slight
fluctuation could get you out of a stock you want to hold on to for a while.
Probably a minimum of 20 percent below the market price would be a good
guideline.

USING PROFITS

For your prosperity consciousness, it's necessary to have a specific program

for using your profits. This sets your subconscious mind up for the arrival of
profits. One way to divide up profits after putting aside enough for taxes is
to put:

25 percent in your Investment Account

25 percent in your Financial Independence Account
25 percent in your Pleasure Account
25 percent in your Cash Flow Account

Another way of putting it is to say that a fourth of all you earn through
investments is for reinvesting, a fourth to go toward your permanent
wealth, a fourth to be spent on personal pleasure, and a fourth to help pay
for everyday expenses. This gets you away from the destructive habit of
building paper castles in the air. Being wealthy on paper doesn't count
when it comes to prosperity consciousness. It's important to get into the
habit of using your profits, of getting your hands on them, so that they are
real for you and can inspire you to even greater profits.

A relative of mine has been investing all his extra money in the stock
market for about twenty years. He's made and lost and made again a
fortune, but all on paper! He's never known the joy of treating himself to a
vacation on profits, of having an opulent meal on profits, of paying his rent
with profits, or of walking around with his profits in his pocket. He's even
had an almost fatal heart attack, worrying about those paper profits!
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 Many people have unhealthy attitudes about their investments
such as:

"I never make money in the stock market."

"With my luck, the company will go bankrupt!"
"I could have been a millionaire if only I'd taken a chance."

Even when said lightheartedly, this kind of statement can be death to

your prosperity consciousness. You're too valuable to treat yourself this
badly. I can't emphasize too many times that the subconscious mind cannot
tell the difference between fact and imagined fact. And this means it can't
take a joke! So don't kid about failure, or make self-deprecating
statements. These are particularly unhealthy if they are motivated by guilt,
by not wanting to admit you are doing very well.

Be an investor rather than a speculator. Don't worry about doubling

your money in a month or two. If it doubles in a year or two, you'll be well
on your way.

SELF-INVESTING

Another way to invest your money is in yourself. You have many

talents, and some of these can be turned into profits if you invest some
money in yourself. One way I've done this is to purchase a motor home
with my girlfriend to travel around and more heavily promote my books. A
friend of mine had her house extended to accommodate a huge kitchen so
she can bake specialty goods and market them to health food stores.
Perhaps your way of investing in yourself is to get some specialized
education that will enable you to increase your income. You are already
your most valuable property, and investing in property improvements is one
of the smartest moves you can make in terms of productively using your
money!

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 LEARNING FUND

Whenever I am going to invest in a new area, I set up what I call a

LEARNING FUND. This is money I am willing to risk so that I can learn
about this type of investment. I might lose some of it, but that is an
investment in my education, not a financial loss. Looking at initial losses
this way can help you keep on the path of prosperity. You are not going to
be as much of an expert at the beginning as after a few years of investment
experience. Learning is a trial and error business, and you may very well
have some temporary setbacks. Chalking these up to your Learning Fund.
Will give you a more realistic perspective on what's happening.

A prosperous investor I know does this another way. He calls his initial
investments "seed money" and he sees himself planting this money in a
new project. If the project doesn’t sprout, and he loses some or all of his
seed money, he doesn't feel it's a failure, and he considers himself
fortunate that he didn't put more substantial amounts of money into the
project.

Whatever you invest in, it is easier to deal with the normal ups and
downs emotionally if you have a purpose for your profits, and a healthy way
of looking at and labeling your losses.

SHORT AND SWEET

I wanted to make this chapter as short and sweet as possible, to take

out some of the mystery of investing and some of the complexities that
keep people away from using the many investment opportunities in today's
economic world. This chapter contains all you need to know to start on a
profitable investment program. If you want still more knowledge, fine;
there are many good books out on all aspects of investing. But don't use
the gathering of more knowledge to delay getting started. You can start
your investment program right away by deciding where you want to invest,

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how much you want to use right now, and what you'd like to do when your
profits start coming in.

PROSPERITY PROCLAMATION

The Prosperity Proclamation for this chapter is also simple and to the point:

ALL MY INVESTMENTS ARE PROFITABLE, EITHER IN MONEY OR VALUABLE

EXPERIENCE.

Invest some time in writing this one twenty times, and saying it
twenty times. Then decide that, if it feels right, you're going to say it to
yourself whenever you are considering an investment, or thinking about
something you've already invested in.

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 6

KEEPING AFLOAT
TILL YOUR SHIP
COMES IN

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in
parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
- RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income.

- LEONARD ORR

So far as my coin would stretch; and where it would not, I have used my
credit.
- WILLIAN SHAKESPEARE

How well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they
deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.
- THACKERAY

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

- THE LORD’S PRAYER

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Surviving until you become prosperous is not as hard in our current
environment as it was in former eras. There are no poorhouses nowadays,
no debtors' prisons, and plenty of ways for people with imagination to earn
their daily bread, even with a big piece of meat on it. Prosperity
consciousness is saying to yourself, "I'll make it, and the money will come,"
rather than "I wonder how I'm going to make ends meet until things get
better." Focusing your energy on what you have rather than what you lack
will free your imagination.

A great way to contribute to your self-esteem is to become aware that

there are many ways you can earn money. Make a list of ten ways you
could earn money right now, if you had to. These are not careers you would
necessarily find fulfilling, but just ways to feed yourself until your fortune
starts rolling in.

One young accountant I know quit his job and decided to meditate on
his future and on what he really wanted to do. He didn't have any savings,
and in order to explore the kind of work he eventually wanted to do, he got
a job as a counterman in a diner, as a temporary office helper, as a waiter,
as a scenery mover for a local theater company, and as a cook on a charter
sailboat. He held each job, which he considered "research", for only a week
or two. He decided that the sailing job was so much fun that he would like
to continue this. He borrowed enough money to buy a sailboat and offered
gourmet cruises to the Caribbean.

This former accountant’s business is now thriving, he is having fun in

the sun, and he is meeting a lot of wealthy people to inspire his own
prosperity consciousness. He always knows he can earn a living if this
business doesn't work out. Do you know this for yourself? Look in the want
ads of your local newspaper. As your prosperity consciousness emerges,
you might consider selling for some company. There are always lots of sales
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jobs, and with some self-confidence that you can project, you can always
earn a healthy amount of money selling.

But understand that you don't have to even go this far. We live in an
almost failure-proof society. I've said it several times, and it's worth
repeating: In this society you really have to be very stupid and work very
hard to fail.

USING MONEY THAT ISN'T YOURS

For some six years, I survived using other people's money. I consider
this an investment on their part, a bond of trust between us. I believed in
my eventual prosperity, and I assume some of the banks I dealt with had
this same faith. A struggling writer is not the best credit risk, but there are
ways to get around even this, and I will share some of them with you. But
before I do that, it's important that you develop a healthy respect for credit
and for yourself as a borrower. If you feel borrowing money is sinful, or a
sign of failure, consider the wealthiest people in our nation. Few of them
are debt-free. Many of them owe millions of dollars.

In fact, until you can borrow a million dollars in our economic

structure, you will not be considered as having arrived. People's owing
money is what keeps our economy going. The banks earn interest on those
debts, and they pay this interest to their depositors, and the depositors
spend that interest on consumer goods. It's just another way of circulating
money.

Of course, the trick is to borrow money when you don't need it. When
I was gainfully employed in broadcasting. I borrowed $600 from a bank. I
didn't need it at all, and I paid back the one-year loan in two months. This
gave me an excellent credit rating, and the bank offered me a $5,000 credit
line, on my signature alone. I lived off that credit line for a long time. As
long as I kept up the monthly payments, my credit was good with that
bank, even in periods when I earned little or no money.
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 Some things you need to know about credit:

1. When you borrow money, a creditor considers you an asset.

This surprises many people, but is a bookkeeping fact. As a debtor,
you become an account receivable, and the creditor can borrow money
against the money you owe, and consider that money as tangible assets.

2. Credit departments can be reasonable and help you solve

your problems.
This surprises even more people, many of whom consider credit
departments as the enemy. Not true--they're as anxious as you for you to
get your financial act together.

3. Creditors like to hear from you, and get worried

when they don't.
In order for you to continue to be considered as an asset, the creditors
have to have some indication that you will eventually pay up. If you have
given them the silent treatment, they can panic and start sending
threatening letters and making intimidating phone calls. It pays for you to
let them know you are planning to make a lot of money and will definitely
pay them as soon as possible. If you can send some small amount as a sign
of good faith, so much the better, but a letter will often hold them off and
keep them satisfied for months.

4. Nasty letters and phone calls are signs of impotence on the

part of creditors.
As in most such instances, if they really had much power, they
wouldn't have to get hostile. Most dunning letters and threatening phone
calls have no legal force behind them, though a lot of companies try to
create the illusion they do, and many even have subsidiary "law" or
"collection" firms that give you the impression they have passed on your
debt to a more authoritarian organization. One such creditor told a friend of
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mine, "We wish you would either declare bankruptcy, tell us when you'll
pay, or tell us you'll never pay, just so we can write you off the books."

5. If you don't have income or assets, there is nothing anyone

can do about the money you owe them.
If creditors go to court, which they try to avoid under all but the most
desperate circumstances, the most they can get is a judgment against you,
which will attach some of your "future earnings." In other words, the basic
rule still applies: They can't get it until you get it. I find that if you sincerely
tell creditors that you don't have cash now, and will pay your bill as soon as
you do have it, they'll leave you alone.

6. Anyone who loans you money is exhibiting faith in your

eventual prosperity.
Creditors want to believe you are going to succeed and be able to
easily pay them back. They realize they have little legal recourse if you
don't, so they really are trusting you to keep your word.

7. You may be doing your creditors a favor

by delaying payment.
For a long while, as I struggled toward prosperity, I used to take every
chunk of money I received and immediately use it up paying bills. As I
began to understand more about money, I realized this was foolish. Paying
bills so that I was broke again kept me focusing my attention on survival
instead of surplus, and made my payments few and far between. As soon
as I started changing this habit, and only paying a little bit when I got a
large amount of money and using that money instead to creatively produce
more money, I got out of the vicious cycle, and was able to pay back my
creditors at a much more rapid pace.

8. Borrowed money is income until you have to pay it back.

Part of the poverty consciousness "work ethic" is to consider owing
money as a horrible bad habit, and a burden that must be lifted as soon as
possible. But the money someone loans you is an act of faith, and even a
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gamble on the part of the lender. This is the awareness you should focus on
if you want to create the right emotional climate for paying the loan back as
fast as possible, and as easily as possible. It certainly behooves you to have
at least as much faith in your own pending prosperity as does your creditor.
One way to do this is to consider that money as an asset, just as the
creditor considers you as one, and not as a liability. When you pay it back it
is a current expense, not something you've been allowing to hang over your
head creating anxiety and discomfort for months or years.

9. Because of inflation, you usually come out ahead by

borrowing money.
Wealthy people have always known this and delay paying back
borrowed money as long as possible. If you borrowed a large sum of money
ten years ago, even considering interest payments, the money you pay off
that loan with today will be worth a lot less. Meanwhile, you've had use of it
all that time. If you used it creatively, it should have enhanced your earning
power in some way.

If your earnings have increased at a normal rate along with the

inflationary cycle, it would take you fewer hours today to earn the money
than it did ten years ago. You could really look at it as borrowing time. If
you have to work a month right now to earn $1,000, and borrow $1,000,
and get prosperous enough so you can earn $1,000 in a day or week, you'll
be well ahead of the game when you pay the loan back.

10. The more you convince yourself of your eventual

prosperity, the easier it will be to convince creditors, and the
happier they'll be to keep you on the books.
It sometimes seems as if creditors actually love having wealthy people
delay payment. They certainly bend over backwards to extend every
courtesy, and hardly ever resort to the nasty approach. Your creditors want
to believe you can easily pay them back. They love giving you the benefit of
the doubt if you can give them the slightest indication that your financial
status is on the upswing. They offer you lots of opportunities to practice
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your prosperity consciousness, and to use your creative imagination. And in
the final analysis, they cannot argue with the basic existential statement:
"When I get it, you'll get it!"

Some people beat themselves over the head with their debts, rather
than having the attitude toward creditors of gratitude for allowing them to
survive a bit longer, and buying them the freedom to become more
prosperous. A good attitude to have toward all creditors, regardless of the
amount owed, is: I WILL EASILY PAY YOU WITH A PORTION OF MY
FORTHCOMING SURPLUS.

Being in debt can help you produce more money. When I sold one of
my first books to a major publisher, I told that firm that I needed enough
money up front to pay off my debts for six months. I got it, and then wrote
the book in a month, thereby having five free months in which to relax and
not to have to consider myself as someone in debt. I also used some of that
money to help promote the book, thereby increasing my income. By telling
the publisher I needed to have my debts cleared up for six months to free
my mind to write, I also realized the value of having a free mind-and
realized as well that I could have freed mine even if they hadn't given me
the money, merely by changing my attitude about the money I owed!

I suppose the basic message here is to feel okay about yourself if you
borrow money, to consider your creditors as your helpers on the road to
prosperity, and not to let the fact you owe money get in the way of
prosperous feelings about yourself. One note, though: Don't get in the trap
of borrowing money just to hold off financial crisis. If you need $200 to pay
this month's rent, you would be much better off using your creative
imagination to produce that $200. The rent will be due again in another
month, so you may as well produce additional income now as then. If
possible, borrow money only when you want it for some purpose that will
eventually produce more income.

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 As you begin to think more prosperous thoughts, you'll be able to use
borrowed money to make tremendous profits. Borrowing for investments is
a sound practice, as long as you invest rather than speculate. Borrowing
money to put into your Financial Independence Account also makes a lot of
sense, since just having it there will produce a feeling of prosperity worth
far more than the difference in the interest you pay out over and beyond
the interest you earn.
Don't participate in the negative programming game of feeling guilty
about your debts. This is stuff others taught you. Just consider yourself as
prosperous as the many solvent businesses that are heavily in debt, and
the many wealthy people, and the biggest debtor of them all: the United
States government, which goes so far as to borrow money it knows it can
never pay back. This can be good for you, however, because it helps
produce the inflationary cycle that you can take advantage of to earn
greater amounts of money. Borrowing money can be a good investment.
Again, the money you pay back in the future should cost you less in terms
of earning hours than when you borrowed it. If you are learning anything at
all from this book, it should cost you a lot less of your time energy in the
future to produce the same amount of money. So, if you earn $12,000
a year now, and owe $1,000, it will pay you to wait until your income goes
up to $120,000 a year, so that it will cost you only a tenth of that time to
pay back that loan amount.

Stay away from companies that offer to consolidate your loans. All
they are doing is charging you a hefty fee to do what you could easily do for
yourself. They'll add up all your debts, figure out how much you can afford
to pay out based on your current income, and then write letters to your
creditors saying you can only pay back the loan at such and such a rate.
Your creditors will be just as willing to take less per month if you write them
yourself, and you'll save the fee.

Worrying about debts is one of the most nonproductive and

poverty-conscious things you can do. I never worry about debts. When I
was heavily in debt, I would have preferred not being in debt, but I realize
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that I wasn't going to get out from under unless I put my mind to work
instead of to worry.

Here's a useful technique in dealing with debt worries. Plan to focus

your attention on the money you owe once each month. Look over your
bills, pay the ones you can, express any pain, anger, or frustration you
have about not being able to pay them all, and put the rest in a drawer and
forget about them. Even if you have to jump up and down and scream to
purge yourself of worry over debt, do so. Then don't think about it for the
rest of the month. Understand that the bills in the drawer are fantasy once
they're out of sight, while the money in your pocket is reality. In
conjunction with this technique, you can write each individual concern over
money on a separate piece of paper, and stuff them all in that drawer with
the unpaid bills.

Remember, the best thing you can do for your creditors is stay
healthy and substantially increase your earning power. They are already
earning money off your indebtedness, and are more than willing to continue
doing so as long as they can justify their faith in you.

The thousands of banks, savings and loan associations, and credit

companies who are frantically trying to loan out their money are not doing
it out of the goodness of their hearts. They make money loaning it out, just
as you can make money borrowing it. This is Prosperity Circulation in
action. There are all sorts of positive aspects to owing money, and where
you focus your attention is what you get in terms of consciousness. You
owe it to yourself to focus on prosperity, and that's the only debt or
obligation you should be putting energy into right now.

GETTING STARTED

Remember that first admonition by William James for effecting personal

change: Start immediately. No matter what your current financial status,
you can start using the techniques and skills in this book. The less you start
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with, the more spectacular your accomplishments will be. When I do
MONEYLOVE seminars, the audience is usually divided between wealthy
people and people of little or no income, including a number of artists and
writers. I always find it fascinating that the lower-income members of the
audience seem to identify more easily with prosperity consciousness. The
wealthy, usually there because they are not enjoying their money, get
excited about the ideas, but it's a subdued excitement, born out of cynicism
and self-doubt. Often the wealthy participants in my seminars even display
an aura of desperation, as if to say, “I’ve worked hard, and accumulated a
lot of money, and it hasn't been worth it. Please show me a way to get
more out of life."

One couple of obvious wealth came up to me at the end of a seminar,

and the woman said, "My husband made a half-million dollars this past
year, but he still acts like he did when he was making fifteen thousand. I’ve
tried threatening him, telling him that if he didn't loosen up and start
enjoying our money, I was going to leave him and take him for every cent I
could get. But I love him, and I want us both to enjoy that money." There
were tears in her eyes. The husband's eyes were also moist. I agreed to
work with him privately. Part of that work involved giving him specific fun
things to do with his money. It was probably the hardest work he had ever
done, using his money for pleasure. And it took several months to get him
to a place where he could continue on his own. I think this illustrates that
lots of money is sometimes an obstacle to prosperity consciousness.

If you are used to very little money, you can get much more excited
about the prospect of more prosperity. Just as sunshine would not be so
sweet if it weren't for the night, prosperity wouldn't feel so good if it weren't
for the fact that most of us are not born into wealth. But it's the feeling
good that's important, and you can start right now, without earning another
penny.

Every time you are broke, you are getting a priceless opportunity
to use your creative imagination and prove how prosperous you really are.
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Never lose sight of the fact that you are a valuable, income-producing
property, worth investing lots of time and money in. All it takes is one push
of the starter button to get going. And the most exciting news of all is that
you get to push your own button!

PUSHING YOUR OWN BUTTON

We represent the highest form of life on Earth and, so far as we know

the highest form in the universe. And yet we are far from perfect. We have
inherited an abundant planet, and have created poverty as a physical
manifestation of emotional fears. This book is aimed at providing you with
resources in the form of new ideas, techniques, and habits. These resources
can return you to your natural state of prosperity. This book is just a seed.
You must make a decision to plant it in your subconscious, and nourish it
with positive action.

Getting started immediately means starting to appreciate the

prosperous things in your life right now. You are already rich in terms of
time. You couldn’t buy an extra healthy day of life for a million dollars.

A prominent stockbroker told me he can always tell the difference

between potential customers of wealth and those of more modest means.
He says the wealthy always say what they have to say in the shortest
possible amount of time, obviously considering their time valuable. Your
time is valuable, and you can add to that value by more effectively using
that time. Some ways to do this:

1. Whenever you make a commitment of time, ask yourself, “How is this

effort moving me closer to prosperity?”
2. Whenever you communicate with someone, get to the heart of the
matter.
3. Realize that scientists have used billions of dollars just to extend your life
and buy you extra time.

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4. Understand that a moment unpleasantly spent can destroy the benefits
of weeks of positive action.
5. Make your decisions as quickly as possible.

QUICK DECISIONS

A lot of people have difficulty with the last item on the preceding list,
making decisions quickly. This may be one of the greatest differences
between someone who is bogged down in poverty consciousness and the
prosperous thinker. Often it doesn’t matter what decision you make, as long
as you make it quickly. I have made decisions that turned out to be wrong,
and went back and did it another way, and still took less time than many
who procrastinated over the original decision!

You are exercising your brain’s lightning quick power when you make a
quick decision, and this is more important than the temporary results of the
decision itself. Your brain is capable of handling 140,000 million bits of
information in one second, and if you take hours or days or weeks to reach
a vital decision, you are short-circuiting your most valuable property! And
saying to yourself “I can’t decide” is exactly what creates your inability to
decide.

Having a sense of momentum in your life will help you use time more
effectively. And you’ll be able to create more usable time as you get more
involved and excited about your life. It’s a well-known fact that people who
are pursuing some task or activity that excites and interests them need less
sleep. If you are now getting eight hours a night, think what you could do
with two more hours a day, fourteen more a week.

Though it’s good to have as many alternatives in your life as possible,

sometimes these can use up too much time and dilute your energy.
Particularly if you have to focus a lot of attention on choosing among them.
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I’ve used the analogy of a trapeze artist not being willing to let go of the old
trapeze bar before grabbing the new one, but other people sabotage
themselves by filling their lives with a lot of new trapeze bars, to give
themselves a greater sense of safety. This can just as easily add to
confusion as to safety. If you take that extra moment to decide which bar
to grab, it could be your last moment. It probably pays, at the beginning of
building your prosperity consciousness, to have that clear vision focused on
one specific destination. The healthiest and most productive behavior seems
to be to have an awareness of your alternatives but to pay attention to, and
focus your energy on, just one at a time.

VIEW OF THE WORLD

The way you see the world is a direct reflection of your self-esteem. If
you see the world as filled with hungry people, you’ll never be able to throw
off the bonds of poverty consciousness. True, there are people starving in
the world today, but to say that this is a permanent condition, or that it’s
going to get worse, is taking a very narrow view of the situation. The
human brain has always managed to come up with solutions before, and
enough people of creative imagination are now working toward that end to
guarantee an end to hunger in our lifetime.

There are enough resources on the planet right now to richly feed every
man, woman, and child. Limited initiative and limited imagination have
prevented the harnessing of those resources, but this is rapidly changing.
Do what you can to help humanity, but understand that the best thing you
can do is to harness your own resources, and make the most of your own
potential, so that you will have an even greater effect when you do for
others.

If your view of the world includes a feeling that all the great ideas and
inventions have already been created, think again. This was also the
commonly held belief a thousand years ago, and a hundred years ago. In
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1900 people thought such inventions as the light bulb, telephone, and
automobile had taken humankind to the outer limits of inventive
accomplishment. They were wrong, and those who say the same thing
today are just as wrong! There has never been more opportunity for the
man or woman with clear vision, belief, and practical skills.

Give yourself a healthy and prosperous new view of the world. Each
day, experience as many of its wonders as possible. This is still an abundant
planet. Find the evidence of this yourself. Explore the towers of commerce;
walk into a stock brokerage house and see the signs of economic strength
and vitality; take a trip to the country and enjoy the splendors of nature;
and pay attention to all the truly alive people who populate your world, and
begin to see that this world of yours is really yours to view and do with as
you will!

Each time you encounter someone, you might silently say, “I am

wonderful, and so are you!”

Always remember, poverty is a manmade disease, and not based on

any natural laws.

PROSPERITY CURIOSITY

Curiosity is often cited as a vital factor in achieving wealth. I agree,

but there are different types of curiosity. Some types of curiosity bog you
down in endless detail. You don’t have to know the secret of life to enjoy it.
You don’t have to know how a radio works if you can hear the music. You
don’t have to know which ninety muscles your brain activates for every
breath you take in order to savor that breath. And you don’t have to know
the intimate details of the workings of your brain in order to tap into its
tremendous power. You can, however, be curious in a prosperity-conscious
way. Some useful questions to ask yourself:

1. How can I be more creative in my everyday life?

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2. What can I learn from my daily environment?
3. How can I apply some of the world’s great ideas to my own life?
4. How can I reach out to people in new ways?
5. How can I make this day different from every other day?

Looking at temporary setbacks with a sense of curiosity rather than

despair also increases your prosperity consciousness. Ask:

1. What can I learn from the way this turned out?

2. How could I have done it better?
3. What should I keep and what should I discard from this experience?
4. How can I use this result to further my prosperity plans?

Multimillionaire Charles Schwab once said, “I have failed 49 percent of

the time and succeeded only 51 percent of the time.” But that success rate
was more than enough to bring him all he desired. A baseball star achieves
heroic stature with a batting average of .400, meaning he missed the ball
six out of ten times! So stop putting yourself down for being human, for
experiencing what every successful human being has always experienced:
temporary setbacks that provide you with valuable learning material.

You now know all you need to know to achieve all the success in life
you could possibly desire. Wisdom, however, is not knowledge. Wisdom is
application of knowledge. The question to ask yourself, then, and maybe
the best example of prosperity curiosity there could be, is “What do I now
know that I can apply more effectively and successfully?”

YOU’VE ALREADY STARTED

The process of becoming prosperous has already begun for you. Just
absorbing the information in this book at a conscious level has effected
some changes at a subconscious level. There have been thoughts and
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concepts constantly repeated throughout these six chapters. The cells of
your brain most intensely record those thoughts and ideas that are most
often repeated. This is the way you can most successfully start pushing
your own button.

Giving yourself new prosperity attitudes and habits will prepare you
emotionally for the money that is certain to come your way. The seeds you
plant through positive action and positive imagination will grow quickly and
firmly. Watch the words you use, as they, too, take root. I remember as a
child my mother saying, “You talk so much, you’ll become either a lawyer or
a radio announcer.” When I got to NBC, I reminded my mother that those
words were probably directly responsible!

Still another prosperity technique you might use to focus more sharply
on the positive use of words is to buy a dictionary, or use one you already
have, and cross out every single negative word. Fail. Poor. Suffer. Cross
them all out. Maybe you can take a few minutes each night to work on this
project. Don’t rush. Really allow the emotional impact of what you are doing
to fill your being.

SOME SELF-STARTERS

` MONEYLOVE is filled with strategies and techniques and ideas, any of

which can help you get started. And each of these can suggest new ones to
you. Here are a few more.

1. Have a specific daily goal each day. This can be to come up with
a new idea, to learn a new word, to use your money in a new way, to meet
someone who can offer you advice or support. Thinking in terms of the
number 10 can be good stimulus. You might set daily goals to:

a. Put $10 aside.

b. Write 10 pages in a personal journal.
c. Spend 10 minutes in silent reflection.
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 d. Call an old friend and spend 10 minutes talking over old times.
e. Think of 10 positive things you can do in the next week.
f. Come up with 10 things that make you feel good and lift your spirits.

This last one is a great way to combat temporary setbacks. If you

always have ten ways to defeat gloom, you’ll never use up too much time in
self-pity. One way I prepare for those times when things don’t go just the
way I want them is always to have at least ten mystery novels I haven’t
read. I can lose myself in a good mystery no matter what is happening in
my life. I find that by deeply involving my conscious mind in whodunit, my
subconscious mind often comes up with a way I can do it better.

2. Become familiar with money. Have you ever really studied a

dollar bill? It’s a veritable gallery of fine art and religious and mystical
symbolism.

3. Become an expert in some area that now interests you. Learn

as much as you can about it. This will build your confidence and serve you
well even if you never get to use all the knowledge. But it must be a subject
you enjoy.

4. Start to act prosperous. Ask yourself, “Would I say this? Would I

do this? Would I feel this way, if I were rich?” People most often judge your
degree of wealth by the physical attitude you present. If you walk, talk, and
dress like a million dollars, the people you meet and deal with will assume
you already have it. For several hundred dollars, you can look the part.

5.Daydream. You’ll never achieve your fondest dreams if you don’t

give yourself conscious time to have those dreams. Play with some of the
fantasies in this book, invent some of your own.

Another MONEYLOVE FANTASY to try on for size: Imagine you knew for
certain that you were going to receive a million dollars in exactly one year.
How would this affect what you are now doing? How would you most like to
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use next twelve months preparing for your windfall? You won't have the
money, so the next year will change mainly because of a change in your
attitude. And that is what prosperity consciousness is all about!

6. Practice thinking big. Write a check for a million dollars. One man
I knew wrote just such a check and presented to his wife for her birthday.
He told her, “The pleasure I got from imagining what it would be like to
actually write you a check for a million dollars is all I need, to know for sure
I'll make it someday."

7, Realize you are the creator of your own personality, not

other people. Again, poverty comes from outside, prosperity from within.
We all have the capacity to become whomever we choose. This was never
brought home to me more clearly than as a shy nineteen-year-old radio
announcer in a new town. I decided to project another part of my
personality rather than the bookish bespectacled one I had projected at
home. I got contact lenses and some sharp clothes, and started feeling
more attractive and more sure of myself. I found out something amazing.
In a new town, with new people, there was no perception of me. They had
no memory of me as a shy kid with glasses, and so they were willing to
accept the image I sent out.

Maybe you can give yourself some similar experiences. Take a trip to a
strange town, and pretend that you have suddenly eliminated all your doubt
and fear, and allowed all your positive traits to come forward. This isn't
being phony, since you are merely expressing some of the unexpressed
parts of you. Shut down your own memories of the negative, poverty
conscious parts of you, and allow this new person to take hold. When you
return to your own environment, don't be surprised if your friends and
loved ones don't notice the difference right away. They are still focused on
the you that was, and it will take a while for them to recognize the change.
You won't have to beat them over the head with it.

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 As you get used to yourself as prosperous, confident, and imaginative,
others will begin to be impressed with these qualities. It took quite a while
for my old friends back home to see the changes in me. That wasn't
important, for I had made a new life for myself in my new town and with
my new strength. Others can only drag you down if you give them that
power.

One way to give others power over you is to tell them everything you are
doing to become prosperous before they are ready to hear it. Not everyone
can accept the idea of prosperity consciousness, and you are not doing
yourself a favor by trying to convince them. They'll be convinced soon
enough when the results start coming in, when it will be too late for their
negative comments to have any effect, and too late for their poverty
consciousness to interrupt your flow and energy.

Finally, realize that the truly prosperous individual is a giver, so practice

this aspect of your new lifestyle as well. Be willing to listen to others, offer
help, and to share prosperous ideas. if you are selling goods or services,
always give people more than their money's worth, and you will prosper
even more rapidly.

Don't sacrifice your own growth, don't waste your valuable time with
people who aren't ready to receive what you have to offer, and don't try to
change other people or the world. You can change only yourself, and that's
a lifetime job!

Also remember that it isn't money that brings the real satisfaction to a
prosperous person. It's the sense of doing something important, making a
valuable contribution.

Without this, money means nothing. With it, you own the world!

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 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

JERRY GILLIES

For up-to-the minute thoughts and ideas about prosperity, log onto Jerry’s
blog, with over 200 posts in its archive.

http://moneyloveblog.com/

For information on all of Jerry’s audios and Moneylove products, or just

to offer your comments and success stories, email him at:
[email protected]

LEONARD D. ORR

For more information on his prosperity consciousness concepts and lots

more of his cutting edge materials, just log in to:

http://www.leonard-orr-books.com/product-category/ebooks/

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