I have already recommended the book I have pictured above. The book was written in 1903. Click right here for my earlier review and comment, which mentions my father, who gave me the book on Christmas in 1961, just as I was about to turn 18 years old. At the time of my earlier mention of the book, I had not yet posted anything showing how the lesson of Allen's book motivated my father's incredibly successful life. Later, I did exactly that, and I invite anyone reading this to find out a bit about my Dad! Just click the link.
As you will note, the title of my blog posting today is not quite the same as the title of the book itself. This is to let you know that the book is most emphatically not delivering a message that is gender specific to males. Let us forgive our forefathers predecessors for their failure to understand that the language that we use, when we talk about the world, needs to be inclusive!
I have returned to James Allen's book in my blog posting today because The New York Times Magazine recently ran an opinion article by Sam Anderson, "Mind Reader," which made fun of the book, and suggested that it wasn't worth reading. Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine, and if he is correct, there has been a recent surge of interest in As A Man Thinketh, which Anderson describes as "a musty old book from 1903." The new "fans," Anderson says, are mainly male. Let me reiterate, this book is a book for everyone!
Anderson more or less ridicules Allen's book because he presents its basic argument as a claim that "you are your thoughts," which he reads to mean that "thinking" is "self-executing." I think this is a fundamental misreading. Thinking does not "make it so." Acting does!
What Allen's book claims is that we can do "anything." I happen to believe that is true, and invite you, again, to read about my father's experience in his life. My own experience has not been so different - thanks to my Dad.
The message of Allen's book isn't that "thinking" is all we need to do. It is, rather, an encouragement to "think" about what we want to do, and who we want to be, and what we really "have to do." Do not think yourself into a life limited by your own failure to appreciate "possibility."
Possibility is "my category" - and that is because (thanks to my Dad) that I read and believed what Allen says (and what my Dad said, and proved to me was true). We will not ever be able to go beyond what we think is our limit.
So, don't be someone who is self-limiting (particularly now, as we must face down various ways in which our world might be brought summarily to an end, should we not change our destination). If we don't think beyond the "realities" that seem so absolute, we will never know what is really possible.
Please do not think that you're going to change the world by "thinking" alone. "Think." Then "Act." That's what James Allen is talking about! As we thinketh, so we can "make it so."
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