How Napoleon Hill Reframed Failure
While I’m not the biggest fan of “Think and Grow Rich,” some of Napoleon Hill’s later works express the wisdom he gained over a lifetime of boom and bust business ventures — this more mature and personal perspective I appreciate greatly.
“Failure” is Lesson Fourteen in Hill’s massive book “The Laws of Success in Sixteen Lessons.”
It was a subject he knew first hand, having his fortunes abruptly reversed many times over the years. There was a false arrest, The Panic of 1907, a deeply in debt business repossessed by the bank and several other quite dramatic financial upsets. I’ll spare you the details, because they sound all too much like today’s 6 o’clock news.
What’s this got to do with feel-good Law of Attraction messages?
Law of Attraction doesn’t say that your life becomes a permanent party on the beach.
It only gives you the keys to recovering quickly from any setback.
Hill explains these keys in his lesson. First: he reframes failure as “temporary defeat.” Second: he declares that all of his temporary defeats turned out to be “blessings in disguise.”
If you’re dealing with anything in business that your overly active mind would like to label a failure, use your higher consciousness to instead label it “temporary.”
That can take some persistence. But since spirit knows all conditions are temporary, the divine truth of this perspective brings a solidity and grace that all your frenzied self-critical thoughts can never produce. Stick with it.
Then decide that this condition will turn out to be a blessing in your life. I’m sure you can remember times when that’s exactly what happened for you after other setbacks, just as it did for Napoleon Hill.
When you decide this condition, whatever it is, WILL become a stepping stone to your ultimate success, you’re back in the flow of evolution and abundance. And Law of Attraction will match that signal.
Andrea
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