your ability to do the thing you
attempt is definitely related to the degree of your achievement.

If we were to analyze the marvelous successes of many of our self-made
men, we should find that when they first started out in active life they
held the confident, vigorous, persistent thought of and belief in their
ability to accomplish what they had undertaken. Their mental attitude
was set so stubbornly toward their goal that the doubts and fears which
dog and hinder and frighten the man who holds a low estimate of himself,
who asks, demands, and expects but little, of or for himself, got out of
their path, and the world made way for them.

We are very apt to think of men who have been unusually successful in any
line as greatly favored by fortune; and we try to account for it in all
sorts of ways but the right one. The fact is that their success
represents their expectations of themselves--the sum of their creative,
positive, habitual thinking. It is their mental attitude outpictured and
made tangible in their environment. They have wrought--created--what
they have and what they are out of their constructive thought and their
unquenchable faith in themselves.

We must not only believe we can succeed, but _we must believe it with all
our hearts_.

We must have a positive conviction that we can attain success.

No lukewarm energy or indifferent ambition ever accomplished anything.
_There must be vigor in our expectation, in our faith_, in our
determination, in our endeavor. _We must resolve with the energy that
does things_.

Not only must the desire for the thing we long for be kept uppermost, but
there must be strongly concentrated intensity of effort to attain our
object.

As it is the fierceness of the heat that melts the iron ore and makes it
possible to weld it or mold it into shape; as it is the intensity of the
electrical force that dissolves the diamond--the hardest known substance;
so _it is the concentrated aim, the invincible purpose_, that wins
success. Nothing was ever accomplished by a half-hearted desire.

Many people make a very poor showing in life, because there is no vim, no
vigor in their efforts. Their resolutions are spineless; there is no
backbone in their endeavor--no grit in their ambition.

One must have that determination which never looks back and which knows
no defeat; that resolution which burns all bridges behind it and is
willing to risk everything upon the effort. When