July 21

“Don’t you know the world is full of problems?” asked the negative thinker. “But the world is also full of the overcoming of problems,” replied the positive thinker.

July 20

God answers prayer in three ways: yes, no, and wait awhile. If you receive a no answer, look for the lesson the no answer teaches. God sometimes shuts doors to lead you to the right open door. If you experience difficulty and hardship, perhaps it is because God wants to do something for you other than you expected or have yet experienced.

July 19

Practice changing critical attitudes toward your fellowmen. Get in the habit of looking for something to praise, something good to say. Once you start picking at people critically, you will find yourself criticizing everything they do. Reverse this mental attitude by finding something, however small, to praise in everyone. It will greatly add to your own happiness.

July 18

Life for most of us contains many tough and difficult problems; we need all the confidence and reassurance we can get. Nothing builds confidence and reassurance like a word of praise. Nothing restores our self-esteem and recharges our batteries like a little admiration. Why, then, needing appreciation ourselves so badly, do we deny it so often to others?

July 17

One of the greatest things you will ever be able to say in your lifetime is this: “I have realized the potential that Almighty God put into me.”

July 16

Deep within the individual is a vast reservoir of untapped power waiting to be used. No person can have the use of all this potential until he learns to know his or her own self. The trouble with many people who fail is that they go through life thinking and writing themselves off as ordinary, commonplace persons. Having no proper belief in themselves, they fail to utilize their talents. They live aimless and erratic lives very largely because they never realize what their lives really can be or what they can become.

July 15

What are the essential factors in creative and exciting successful living? Number one is to be chief executive officer over your life and over yourself. When you feel life is pushing you around, or you are being pushed around by a variable self, you are not happy or effective. But when you become supervisor of your life, there is no joy in the world equal to it or to the excitement and satisfaction you will feel.

July 14

Don’t be an if thinker; be a how thinker. The if thinker mouths, “If only I’d had a break.” The how thinker emphasizes the hows: “How do I compensate for this shortcoming?” or “How do I accomplish it?”

July 13

If a person habitually thinks optimistically and hopefully he activates life around him positively and thereby attracts to himself positive results. What you mentally project reproduces in kind. Positive thinking sets in motion positive and creative forces and success flows toward you.

July 12

The late Mrs. Thomas A. Edison told me that when her husband was dying he whispered to his physician, “It is very beautiful over there.” Edison was a scientist, with a factual cast of mind. He never reported anything as fact until he saw it work. He would never have reported, “It is very beautiful over there,” unless, having seen, he knew it to be true.