The "Magic of Believing"

This book was written a long time ago and I read it at my wife's behest in the early sixties. This book changed my life in ways I wouldn't have imagined before I read it. The simple concept here is that unless you believe in your own talents and abilities, you'll never do anything, He goes on and on at the beginning of the book telling you all about how people looked at small things and made big things out of them. Such things as the eight notes that made up the musical scale, from which all the world's musical masterpieces were created; the 26 letters in the alphabet, from which all the great writings in history have been written; and the three colors in the spectrum, from which all the great masterpieces of art have been created. It is this that affected me profoundly and started me on what was to become a five-year quest to learn as much as I could about "personal motivation" (and a lifetime of practicing what I learned) which resulted in my giving seminars and my company leading the nation in sales of carbon paper! By that, I mean real motivation. The kind that comes from within. Not the kind sales managers try to instill in you by "rah, rah" sessions, after which you go out for coffee. And by the time you return to work, it's gone. If you sincerely believe in yourself, you can ultimately do anything. But that motivation must come from within. It cannot be "instilled" from without. Bristol speaks about computers that would "take all the power put out by Niagara Falls" to stay cool enough not to melt. That no longer applies, since much better and smaller computers have been invented, using the 64k of memory that was available. Those massive computers in the past only had 64k of memory, for all their size. But imaginitive people who believed they could, linked these 64k modules together and made computers with unimaginable (then) power. Today, the computer that sits on your (and my) desk has more power than that building-large computer because of those people who believed in themselves and what they could do. So they did it. If you read only one "self-help book" in your lifetime (you won't), make it this one.