manage your environment: go first class

Your mind is an amazing mechanism. When your mind works one way, it can carry you forward to outstanding success. But the same mind operating in a different manner can produce a total failure.
The mind is the most delicate, most sensitive instrument in all creation.
The mind reflects what it's environment feeds it just as surely as the body reflects the food you feed it.
You are a product of your environment.
Environment shapes us, makes us think the way we do. Try to name just one habit or one mannerism you have that you did not pick up from other people. Relatively minor things, like the way we walk, cough, hold a cup; our preferences for music, literature, entertainment, clothing - all stem in a very large part from our environment.
Prolonged association with negative people makes us think negatively; close contact with petty individuals develops petty habits in us. On the bright side, companionship with people with big ideas raises the level of our thinking; close contact with ambitious people gives us ambition.
Experts agree that the person you are today, your personality, ambitions, present status in life, are largely the result of your psychological environment. And experts agree also that the person you will be one, five, ten, twenty years from now depends almost entirely on your future environment.
You will change over the months and years. This we know. But how you wll change depends on your uture environment, the mind food you feed yourself.

Recondition yourself for success
The majority of people are convinced deep down inside that they haven't got what it takes, that real success, real accomplishment, is for others who are lucky or fortunate in some special respect.
Rationalizing yourself in to a rut, which incidentally has been described as a grave with both ends open, can be as bad as wandering aimlessly, hoping opportunity will somehow, someday hit you in the face.
Many talented, intelligent people who elect to crawl through life because they are afraid to stand up and run.
People who tell you it cannot be done almost always are unsucessful people, are strictly average or mediocre at best in terms of accomplishment. The opinions of these people can be poison.
Develop a defense against people who want to convince you that you can't do it. Accept negative advice only as a challenge to prove that you can do it.
Be extra, extra cautious about this: don't let negative-thinking people-"negators"- destroy your plan to think yourself to success. Negators are everywhere, and they seem to delight in sabotaging the positive progress of others.
Negators are everywhere. Some negators, are well-meaning folks. But others are jealous people who, not moving ahead themselves, want you to stumble too. They feel inadequate themselves, so the want to make a mediocre person out of you.
Be extra careful. Study negators. Don't let them destroy your plans for success.
Birds of a feather DO flock together. How we think is directly affected by the group we're in. Be sure you're in the flock that thinks right.
In every group there are persons who, secretly aware of their own inadequacies, want to stand in your way and prevent you from making progress. Many ambitious fellows have been laughed at, even threatened, because they tried more efficient and produce more. Let's face it. Some folks, being jealous , want to make you feel embarrassed because you want to move upward.
Ignore such negative thinkers in your midst.
For often the remarks made in your direction aren't so personal as you might at first think. They are merely a projection of the speaker's own feeling of failure and discouragement.
Don't let negative thinkers pull you down to their level. Let them slide by, like the water from the proverbial duck's back. Cling to people who think progressively. Move upward with them.
You can do it, simply by thinking right.

Make it a rule to seek advice from people who know
Thinking must be given additional nourishment if we want to get better results.

Here are a few simple "do's" to help make your social environment first class:
1) Do circulate in new groups. Restricting your social environment to the same small group produces boredom, dullness, dissatisfaction; equally important, remember that your success-building program requires that you become an expert in understanding people.
Make new friends, join new organizations, enlarge your social orbit. Then too, variety in people, like variety in anything else, adds spice to life and gives it a broader dimension. It's good mind food.
2) Do select friends who have views different from your own. In this modern age, the narrow individual hasn't much future. Responsibility and positions of importance gravitate to the person who is able to see both sides. Get to know people of different religious faiths. Associate with opposites. But just be sure they are persons with real potential.
3) Do select friends who stand above petty, unimportant things. Guard your psychological environment. Select friends who are interested in positive things, friends who really do want to see you succeed. Find friends who breathe encouragement into your plans and ideals. If you don't, if you select petty thinkers as your close friends, you'll gradually develop into a petty thinker yourself.

Conversation is a big part of our psychological environment. Some conversation is healthy. It encourages you. It makes you feel like you're taking a walk in the warm sunshine of a spring day. Some conversation makes you feel like a winner.
But other conversation is more like walking through a poisonous, radioactve cloud. It chokes you. It make s you feel ill. It turns you into a loser.
Go first class: that is an excellent rule to follow in everything you do.