You Become What You Think About™

Earl Nightingale & Nightingale-Conant
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Weekly insights into success, personal development, and the power of positive thinking from one of the most influential voices in the field of motivational broadcasting. You Become What You Think About™ is a trademark owned by Nightingale-Conant. These episodes are from the Our Changing World series by Earl Nightingale. © Nightingale-Conant.

  1. 5d ago

    Earl Nightingale on Freedom, Courage, and the Truths That Guide Us

    Every once in a while, the world takes on the appearance that the whole business is headed for the dogs. It sometimes seems as though we're living in somebody else's idea of a big, unfunny joke. And just about the time things look the darkest, a great mind comes along and gets us back on the right track again. All of a sudden, we have our ambition back and know the excitement of working toward a future that looks bright with hope again. These great men are priceless. There's never been a time in history when there weren't enough of them to keep things in some kind of balance. Great men come in all kinds and sizes and in all sorts of occupations. Some have been scientists, inventors, philosophers, mathematicians, doctors. Some have been simple men in homespun clothes. They've been teachers and naturalists, but they've all had one direct line to the title of greatness. And you know what that was, and is, I think, anyway. I think it's the ability to see truth, the ability to cut through all the misleading, confusing, and obscuring camouflage and see the truth that always must be shining somewhere in the back. Not too long ago, I was off on one of my flying trips, and I got the chance to read Archibald MacLeish's play, The Secret of Freedom. Here's something you can't read through without getting a lump in your throat the size of a tennis ball and feel that stinging at the back of your eyes which tells you you're in the presence of truth and the clear, shining hope and faith that goes with it. Now, what makes this play great is not Mr. MacLeish coming up with the answer to utopia or springing some great new idea on us. No, what makes the play great, and what makes Archibald MacLeish great, is that they take us back to the great living truths that lie behind what we enjoy today and help us look forward to tomorrow. They keep reminding us that the greatest idea the world has ever known is individual liberty, and what's just as important, that men will keep popping up to remind us of that fact and help us protect it. He reminds us of the great Athenian statesman, for example, Pericles, who stood on a battlefield in the fifth century before Christ and said, "For you now it remains to rival what they have done, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom courage." And he reminds us of another great statesman, Abraham Lincoln, who stood on a battlefield 2,400 years later and who said, "We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth." Well, you'll have to see, hear, or read Archibald MacLeish's play, The Secret of Freedom, to enjoy the brilliance and clarity of this great mind weaving in the great minds of men in the past. It has so much in it, yet revolves around the simplest theme: a referendum on a school tax. There was another great movement that revolved around a simple thing like a tax on tea. That's the wonderful thing about the great truths we should live by. They apply to anything. There was another point Mr. MacLeish made in his play I thought you might be interested in. He said, "A man's face is his own fault after 40. What makes your face the way it is, is what you spend your evenings thinking." I'll be back in one minute. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, "No man has earned the right to intellectual ambition until he has learned to lay his course by a star which he has never seen, to dig by the divining rod for springs which he may never reach." This is Earl Nightingale. Thank you.

  2. Nov 1

    Earl Nightingale on Breaking Free from Alibis and Owning the Truth

    When I was a kid, back during the depression of the 30s, I used to wonder how human beings could let themselves get in such a fix. Here were people who were broke, but there was still as much money as there'd been a few years before. We were living in ugly and inadequate homes, yet there were lovely homes for sale. We didn't have enough food half the time, yet it was being grown in abundance all over the country. People didn't have much of an education, yet it was free, and they were surrounded by it on every side. Well, if you remember those days, maybe you remember being confused by the whole thing, too. Well, I used to ask the people, the way a kid will, why we were in the fix we were in, and then they'd do something that I suppose people have been doing since this whole thing began. Not knowing the answers, the real answers, that is, they blamed other people. They blamed the Republicans or the Democrats or Wall Street or a racial or minority group. They parroted answers they'd been told by people who didn't have any more sense than they had, and they looked every place for the answer but the right place. They never took a good long look at themselves. In other words, they had a convenient alibi for just about any situation. I think one of the reasons you see so many angry drivers and glum, surly expressions on people's faces is because they're giving the world an alibi but can't fool themselves with it. A human being will go to any length to keep from blaming himself for the fix he's in. He'll say he came from the wrong side of the tracks or never had a chance or didn't get the brakes or had to put his brother through school or he's got asthma, any one of a thousand alibis to keep from telling the truth. To keep him from saying, I'm in the fix I'm in because of my own mistakes or my own foolishness. Now here's where the real danger of an alibi comes into place. Once we start using an alibi, we're stuck with it. We've got to keep using it to keep from admitting we were lying to ourselves and to everyone else. And as long as we hang on to an alibi, we're stuck. If we'd admit the truth, we could say, well I've been something of a nitwit but at least I recognize that fact and I can now start off on the right foot. You see, it's almost never too late if we're truthful to ourselves. As Shakespeare put it, to thine own self be true and it shall follow as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man. From the beginning, the best starting point for anybody's philosophy is Socrates, know thyself. Because if you begin out of step, you've just got to stay out of step until you wake up to the fact that alibis don't make you look better in the eyes of others. But what's more important, they make you look smaller in your own eyes. If you've been standing in your own light, hiding behind some moth-eaten, worn-out old alibi because you've been timid about standing up on your hind legs and doing what you know you should be doing. If you've kept pushing that conscience that's been trying to get you straightened out and on the road to greater things you know you were meant for, it's a good time to put the excuse you've been using under the bright clear light of reason. It'll probably disappear and you can breathe easy again. I'll be back in just one minute. Max Muller once wrote, all truth is safe and nothing else is safe and he who keeps back the truth or withholds it from men for motives of expediency is either a coward or a criminal or both. This is Earl Nightingale, thank you.

  3. Oct 25

    Seeing With New Eyes: Earl Nightingale on Genius, Habit, and Change

    The great William James, in his Principles of Psychology, defined genius as little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. In his essay on habit, he referred to habit as the flywheel of society. It's what keeps us doing what we've been doing in the past. It makes us fear change, regardless of the present condition of our lives. And the genius, as defined by Dr. James, seems to be that rare bird who knows that change is not only good, but inevitable. He anticipates the inevitable. He is, perhaps, what makes change inevitable. He habitually looks at everything about him in an unhabitual way. He takes nothing for granted. He knows that whatever he sees that is made by man or served by man is imperfect, is always in a state of evolving. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine was looking for a site for a large luxury motel. He was in no hurry and spent months in a large West Coast city looking for the site that would probably best guarantee a good return on the really considerable amount of money he was going to invest and borrow. He found what to him was the perfect site. It was near a large university and at the confluence of five main roads, one of which was a heavily traveled highway. It was also within the city limits, which would mean a large local trade for the restaurant. There was only one hitch. On the site was an old brick building, an old manufacturing concern still in business. He called on the owners of the business and told them what he wanted to do. Since the city had, over the years, grown around the old building, he pointed out that it would be to their benefit to sell him the property at a price many times the land's original value and build themselves a new, more modern plant in a less congested area. They saw the sense of his plan and a way to pick up nearly half a million dollars for their property and closed the deal. He razed the old building and built his beautiful new motel. Later he discovered that many people in the motel business had looked upon that site as ideal for their purposes, but had written it off because it was already occupied. He thought, not with the old brick manufacturing on it, but instead with his beautiful new motel sitting there. He had looked at that corner in an unhabitual way. Everybody benefited, including the community, by his genius. Now, I think each of us can greatly increase the value of his life by taking to heart Dr. James' definition of genius, by looking at things about us in our home and particularly in our work with new eyes, with the eyes of creation. We can form the habit of seeing things not as they are, but as they perhaps will be, as they could be, as our changing world will insist they be in the future. Our lives are full of old brick buildings that have stood there for so long we don't really see them anymore. Or if we do, we just assume that they'll always be there. And maybe they always will if we don't do something about them. As the man said, if you're still doing anything this year the same way you were last year, you're behind the times. I'll be back in a moment. In case the idea impressed you as much as it did me, here's Dr. William James' definition of genius again. You might want to remember it. Genius is little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. This is Earl Nightingale, and thank you.

  4. Oct 18

    Earl Nightingale on Why We Marry Opposites—and Try to Change Them

    In all the range of things human beings do, I think one of the most interesting is marriage. Why do people marry the people they marry? A human personality is interesting because it's the only one of its kind on earth. No two people are exactly alike in the way they think and talk and do things, and according to the experts, we marry the person who has, or is, what we haven't got and wish we had, or is the type of person we feel we'd like to be. Well, it's something like that anyway. We seem to see in the person we want to marry qualities we don't have. Maybe you've wondered occasionally why the town's raving beauty usually marries a man who, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to have much to offer. He's usually a very plain, or maybe even a homely person, and he walks to the altar with the girl all the guys in town would give their eye-teeth to date. This has been particularly true of some of our most beautiful and glamorous movie queens, and everyone wonders why. Or the man who looks like a movie idol himself, the best-looking guy in town, and he almost invariably marries a rather plain-looking girl. Now, this has happened so much that finally the experts had to admit that plain girls have a better chance of marriage than the beautiful girls. Well, it all comes back to what we said in the beginning. Dating is one thing, but when it comes to marriage and picking a partner for life, we are least attracted by beauty and most attracted by certain personality qualities. Of course, this is a deep and labyrinthine subject involving all sorts of psychological stuff, such as marrying a father or mother image, or a person who's shy, sees in a person who's filled with self-confidence the qualities he needs most. You'll usually find a dominating type of woman, for example, marrying a man who seems to thrive on being dominated, and vice versa. But, and here's the most important part of all, we marry someone for something we see in them, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to change them so they'll be like us. The dominating woman, for instance, who marries someone she can dominate, spends years berating the poor guy because he won't stand up for his rights and be more of a dominant personality. The guy who fell in love with and married a girl who was shy and sort of self-conscious, but who had many qualities that made him love her in the beginning, keeps after her to get rid of the very qualities that attracted him in the first place. Then, too, once we're married, we have a tendency to take each other for granted. Once the license is legal and tucked away, we feel we can sort of relax and not pay so much attention to the person who was the most important thing in the world a short time before. Then other men admire a man's wife and wish they could be as fortunate when the time comes for them to marry, and the husband, grown used to the fine woman with whom he shares his household, seems to be most attracted, his eye at least, by other women, other wives. One of the most intriguing aspects of a man, and at times the most annoying, is that he seldom realizes how important are the things he has, until he's in danger of losing them. That is, unless he's a very unusual man. We marry the things we lack and need. There's no reason to suppose a few years later that our lacks and needs have changed. I'll be back in a minute. Marriage is like a job or a business. It will grow in exact proportion to the thought, consideration, interest, and enthusiasm we put into it. If things are not going too well, we can usually find the answers by examining ourselves. This is Earl Nightingale. Thank you.

  5. Oct 14

    The Nine-Inch Lifeline: Earl Nightingale on Planning a Life Well

    You'll have to excuse me, I've got a cold today. You know we're always trying to come up with new and better ways to motivate young people to give a little more care and attention to the intelligent planning of their lives, and we've hit on something that works pretty well. If you've got youngsters old enough to understand what you're talking about, here's a little illustration you might try, maybe at the dinner table when the whole family's gathered together. Get a line nine inches long on the sheet of paper. We'll call out a person's lifeline, each inch of that line representing ten years. The way medical science is going, most of our youngsters will probably live 90 years and maybe a whole lot more. With a line nine inches long representing a lifespan of 90 years, the first two inches of the line represent 20 years. So draw a little vertical line two inches from the beginning of the line. Now these are the formative years, these first 20, the years in which we lay the groundwork for much that's to follow. Now when you look at a line nine inches long, with just the first two inches marked off with a vertical line, you get a pretty good objective view of the fact that those first two inches, or 20 years, represent only about 22% of a lifetime. Yet the remainder, 78%, is to a large extent dependent upon what we do with those first 20. Now we might not know what we want to do as adults, we might be completely confused and in the dark about our ultimate career, but whatever line we choose, regardless of what it might be, will be helped by a good education. A good education cannot possibly hurt us, while the lack of a good education can most definitely hurt us, regardless of our ultimate choice. You take the time to make the boat seaworthy, so that it can stay afloat in any weather. Now this is not to say that education and training stop after 20 years, far from it. I feel certain that most of what a man knows by the time he's 45, he's learned out of school. But those first 20 years often exert an enormous influence on the years that are to follow. To a youngster, getting to be 20 years old, or 21, seems like an eternity. Yet the average man works for 40 years after leaving school, often much longer. Now because of this, the wise young person, boy or girl, plans for the whole of his or her life, whatever it might be. The wise young person builds the best foundation he can, upon which to build the structure of his life, if you don't mind my mixing my metaphors. Try the nine inch line with your kids and see what they have to say about it. See if it helps them to see their lives objectively and realize the importance of working a little harder now for the good things they'll want later on. Maybe your kids don't need this sort of thing, but there are millions who do. I'll be back in a moment. As Alexander Clarke put it, let us watch well our beginnings and results will manage themselves. That little bit of wisdom should be made a part of every youngster's education. This is Earl Nightingale, and thank you.

  6. Sep 27

    Find a Need and Fill It: Earl Nightingale on Seeing Opportunity

    These days we hear a lot about big business and how big it's getting. There's nothing wrong with big business, and one of the most interesting things about it is that every business, no matter how big it might be today, started small. One of the largest corporations in the United States was started with about $30,000 of borrowed money, and after 10 years of operation only had $6,000 in its account. But a good thing to remember too is that every business, no matter how big or far-flung, no matter how many thousands of employees and skyscraper office buildings it might have, got its start in the mind of one human being. Committees are all right, and groups are all right when it comes to solving problems, but every good idea had to start in the mind of one human being, and usually came as a result of something he observed. You could start a business of your own this year, which in 20 or 30 years could be a big, far-flung business too. These people who tell you all the good businesses are taken, or that there aren't any opportunities anymore, are full of hot air, and I have to admit that there are quite a few of them running around. They make you want to come up with Shakespeare's classic line, he jests at scars that never felt a wound. There are six words that lie at the root of any business success: Find a need, and fill it. Now the extent of your success will be determined by your ability to fill that need, and by the need's importance. Anytime you see a business that's thriving and successful, you must realize that it is filling a need. If it weren't, it would just stop and close up shop. And the size of a business is controlled only by the number of people it serves. For example, a store that can accommodate 500 people must be larger than a business that can accommodate only 100. I know a man who made a really big business running a gas station. One day he was watching a customer, and he noticed that while the man's car was being serviced, he just had to stand around and wait. He had money to spend, and there were undoubtedly things he'd like to buy, things he needed, if he could only see them. So my friend started adding these things, and he kept right on adding them until now he's had to add a big sporting goods store alongside of the now large and modern gas station. While your car is being serviced at his station, you can buy anything from a package of chewing gum to a $200 shotgun, or a boat and trailer, outboard motor, a box of chocolates for your wife. You can also cash a check anytime you feel like it, and he extends credit on everything. On a Friday or Saturday, he'll cash forty to fifty thousand dollars worth of checks on each day, and hardly anyone leaves without buying something, or at least having his car serviced. Now, my friend's business was no different from any other gas station in the country, but he thought about his business, and one day there popped into his mind an idea. He saw a need, and he filled it. I guess he could sell out today for around a half million dollars, when you figure all the properties bought and paid for during the years, and added on to his original small business. The fact is, there's more opportunity today, far more than there ever was before. We're completely surrounded by it. There's just one catch to it: We've got to be able to see it. I'll be back in just 60 seconds. A lot of people would like to try something better, but they're security conscious and worried. You know, there's no way in the world to get to second base, unless you take your foot off first, is there? This is Earl Lantingale. Thank you. Thank you.

  7. Sep 20

    Tell Your Own Fortune: How Thought Shapes the Life You’ll Live

    Way back in history, from the earliest times, people have been making their living and securing for themselves a modicum of fame by proposing that they can tell other people's fortunes. History tells us that even kings used to regulate their lives by the so-called wisdom of these canny opportunists. In ancient Rome, so-called wizards used to inspect the livers of freshly killed chickens looking for good or bad omens before the great and important Roman senators could even meet on a subject. Fortune-telling is about as old as the Roman race, I guess, but as I see it, the mistake has always revolved around the misguided notion that either someone else has to tell our fortune or we have to tell someone else's fortune. Now, the wisest men of all times have understood something that I don't suppose more than one or two people in a hundred have ever figured out for themselves, and that is that while it's just about impossible for us to tell the fortune of someone else, it is possible for us to tell our own fortune. That's right. Any person in full possession of his faculties can, to an altogether unsuspected extent, tell his own fortune right to the letter. Of course, I know you realize that I'm talking about those things that are within the areas of human control. But this gives each of us a really exciting future and an enormous amount of power. For example, a man can decide on the income he wants to earn, the place in which he wants to live, the job he wants to earn, and all kinds of other things in advance, and then reach him right on schedule, one after another, just as he foretold. Now, if this isn't telling your own fortune, I'd like to know what it is. I spent years studying this subject, and it all boiled down to one sentence, and that's that men become what they think about. You'll find that most people believe their lives are shaped by circumstances over which they can exercise no control. Well, that's a lot of nonsense, or as Shakespeare put it, our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. The greatest thinkers and leaders from ancient Greece right to the present time have agreed on one point, and that is that we become what we think about. That's right. Our environment, if we're old enough to have any control over it, is really nothing more than a mirror of our minds. The old Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said this way, he said, a man becomes what he thinks about all day long, and this has been repeated by all the wise men since. As William James of Harvard put it, if you would be rich, you will be rich. If you would be good, you will be good. If you would be learned, you will be learned. But wish for one thing exclusively, and don't at the same time wish for a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly. There's only one catch to this business of telling your own fortune. You have to want something very much. You have to want it enough to earn it. You have to want it enough to strive and suffer for it, to learn enough to be worthy of it. If you can qualify on these counts, you can tell your own fortune, just as the wise men and women of today are telling their own fortunes, and as the wise ones of every generation since the dawn of recorded history have told theirs. You will become what you think about anyway, whether you like it or not. So thinking becomes pretty important, doesn't it? I'll be back in just one minute. Philip Brooks once wrote, The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he's thinking and the deeds he's doing, where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows he was meant and made to do. Thank you.

  8. Sep 13

    Television’s Two Sides: Miracle Medium or Living Room Monster?

    In the long history of amazing technological developments, I guess one of the most wonderful and truly amazing is a thing called television. There was a time when I made my living by this wondrous medium, but I don't pretend to understand it. How they can send a moving picture invisibly through the air and through brick walls and steel and have it come out in a box in your living room is something too complex for my limited gray matter. And now they're bouncing TV signals off the moon or artificial satellites so that we can have worldwide live TV. Truly, this will have to be listed as one of the most amazing inventions of the 20th century. Now, people can sit in the calm, uncrowded comfort of their living rooms and for pennies of electricity see the greatest stars in the world on new and constantly changing programs. Not only that, but being a new multimillion dollar industry with hundreds of offshoots, TV has created thousands of new jobs, new manufacturing, distribution, and sales channels. Entertainment and education for us and our children are now awaiting only the turn of a knob and the illumination of a screen. I've often thought that television's greatest contribution is probably to older people in shut-ins, the lonely ones who each night can look forward to their favorite programs and thereby escape their somewhat limited worlds in the excitement and sound of this new two-dimensional miracle. But, I'll bet you knew this was coming, as Benjamin Franklin said everything in moderation. I've got nothing against the really great shows like the ball games and the fights and an occasional Western, but if we're not careful, this electronic pet can turn into a stalking, implacable monster. The experts tell us that television has precipitated the greatest mass escape and pleasure binge since the days of the Roman circus. In fact, a geneticist has said that perhaps in some future time, humans will not have two eyes anymore, but just one big eye, shaped like a television screen right in the middle of our foreheads and up sort of high since we'll no longer have any use for brains. They say that today's average man comes home, wolfs down his dinner, and rushes into the living room to watch his favorite TV shows. He turns on the set and then to the sound of music, loud voices, and the steady reverberating sound of gunfire, loses himself in other worlds that he must think are better than his own. If you'll define it, you'll realize that when you're watching TV, all you're really doing is watching other people earn good incomes following their own careers while you don't make a nickel and wind up with nothing more intriguing than red eyes and a hollow head. I say the world is vastly improved because they've perfected television. I'm glad they invented cars too, but I don't spend five or six hours every night driving around the block. When I want to go someplace, my car is there for me in the garage. When there's a show I want to see, my TV sits there. But I'll be darned if I'll waste three or four hours every night watching the thin consomme that's supposed to pass for nourishment. And you shouldn't either, unless, as I said earlier, that you have too much free time on your hands or you're a shut-in. And even then, you'll get a lot more good on the whole lot of books. You'll still have red eyes, but there'll be more protein in your brain cells too. I'll be back in just one minute. Every great technological development is like a big coin. It has two sides. The combustion engine is one of the world's greatest developments. But each year, it kills many thousands who haven't learned how to handle it yet. Maybe before we turn on the television set, we should ask ourselves, is this the best thing I can do this evening? Thank you.

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Weekly insights into success, personal development, and the power of positive thinking from one of the most influential voices in the field of motivational broadcasting. You Become What You Think About™ is a trademark owned by Nightingale-Conant. These episodes are from the Our Changing World series by Earl Nightingale. © Nightingale-Conant.

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