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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
In "He Can Who Thinks He Can & Other Books on Success," Orison Swett Marden presents a compelling exploration of personal achievement through the power of positive thinking and self-belief. The text employs a motivational literary style, blending anecdotes with practical advice, making it both an inspiring and actionable guide for readers seeking to elevate their lives. Marden's work emerges from the late 19th-century American success literature context, where the notions of self-improvement and individualism gained prominence amidst a rapidly changing society shaped by industrialization and the pursuit of the American Dream. Marden, a pioneer of the self-help genre, founded SUCCESS magazine and drew upon his own struggles, including humble beginnings and significant personal challenges, to craft a narrative that resonates with the striving individual. His philosophical underpinnings reflect the Transcendentalist influence of thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and the burgeoning psychology of success, positioning him as a trailblazer in the motivational genre. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking insight into the mechanics of success and personal growth. Marden's timeless principles encourage readers to harness their potential, making this work a vital resource for aspiring achievers who wish to transform their thoughts into reality. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN & OTHER BOOKS ON SUCCESS
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection presents a cohesive sequence of motivational writings by Orison Swett Marden, gathered to articulate a full, practical philosophy of achievement and character. Rather than offering fiction or dramatic works, it assembles a continuous course in self-mastery and purposeful living, designed to guide readers from inner conviction to outward accomplishment. The scope is deliberately comprehensive within its chosen domain: it frames success as a disciplined way of thinking and acting, and it arranges foundational topics—mindset, education, work, responsibility, vocation, and resilience—so that the ideas reinforce one another. The purpose is both inspirational and instructional, encouraging reflection while insisting on concrete, ethical action.
The texts in this volume are essays and brief, argument-driven pieces of practical counsel. Each chapter stands as a self-contained essay, yet they interlock to form a sustained program of self-development. There are no novels, plays, or poems, and no personal letters or diaries; the emphasis is on direct exposition, exhortation, and applied reflection. The writing blends observation, principle, and example to translate general ideals into actionable habits. Readers will encounter aphoristic insights, rhetorical questions, and illustrative scenarios rather than narrative arcs or fictional characters. The result is a lean, accessible body of prose intended for reading, rereading, and immediate application.
Across the collection, unifying themes emerge with clarity and persistence. Self-belief initiates action; disciplined effort sustains it. Learning is presented as a lifelong process that extends far beyond formal schooling. Freedom is treated as the condition and consequence of responsible living. Imagination and aspiration are dignified as catalysts for progress, while the daily spirit of one’s work is shown to shape outcomes as surely as skill. The essays explore how responsibility develops power, why purpose must be overmastering, how one’s vocation merits honest appraisal, and why integrity, originality, and resilience govern success more reliably than luck, entitlement, or temporary advantage.
Stylistically, the writing is direct, compact, and hortatory. Marden addresses the reader with energetic clarity, favoring short, vivid constructions and a cadence that builds momentum. The essays frequently advance by posing pointed questions, drawing pragmatic distinctions, and closing with an imperative that channels insight into action. Moral vocabulary—duty, character, purpose—is joined to practical advice, producing a tone that is earnest without abstraction. Repetition is used judiciously to engrain key principles, while concise examples demonstrate how those principles operate in ordinary circumstances. The hallmark is a confident insistence that inner posture governs outer possibility, reinforced through steady, concrete counsel.
These works remain significant because they synthesize an ethic of self-help with a program for day-to-day improvement. They speak to readers seeking traction rather than mere inspiration, providing a grammar of success that pairs aspiration with habits: focus, perseverance, responsibility, and integrity. The collection also endures as a touchstone in the development of modern personal-development literature, exemplifying a style that is practical, optimistic, and morally grounded. It neither isolates success from character nor treats character as a purely private concern. By linking inner discipline to social contribution and professional competence, the essays retain relevance across changing economic and cultural conditions.
The arrangement offers an implicit progression. It begins with awakening belief and energy, shifts to continual learning and the conditions of personal liberty, and then turns to the spirit in which one works and the power that comes with responsibility. From there it advances to purpose and vocational fit, asks what one is willing to uphold publicly, and considers happiness and originality as both means and ends. Later sections confront reversals—financial loss, misjudgment, misplaced dependence on luck—and insist on standards that prevent hollow or compromised success. Readers may follow the sequence end to end or enter at a chapter that matches an immediate need.
Read as a whole, the collection functions as a mentor in print. It addresses students seeking direction, professionals refining their craft, and anyone recalibrating amid setback or opportunity. The prose invites slow reading, note‑taking, and periodic return; its counsel gains force when tested in everyday decisions. While the tone is confident, the program is realistic: it assumes obstacles and prescribes habits that outlast enthusiasm. Approached with deliberate practice—identifying one principle per chapter and applying it over days rather than hours—the book becomes a living manual. For new readers and long‑time admirers alike, it offers a durable framework for purposeful success.
Historical Context
Orison Swett Marden (1848–1924), born in Thornton, New Hampshire, came of age amid the Civil War and Reconstruction, years that intensified American faith in self-help and mobility. Orphaned young and working on New England farms and in hotels, he pursued higher education at Boston University and Harvard University, earning advanced degrees before managing resorts in New England and Florida. An early manuscript was famously lost in a hotel fire in the early 1890s, but he rewrote his ideas into Pushing to the Front (1894). That Gilded Age debut set the template for themes coursing through He Can Who Thinks He Can (1908) and related essays on vocation, responsibility, and purpose.
Marden’s philosophy synthesized nineteenth-century moralism and emergent mind-cure currents. He drew on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance (1841), Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), while absorbing New Thought emphases on optimism and the constructive power of belief associated with figures like Emma Curtis Hopkins. In the ferment of postbellum industrial growth, his insistence that attitude governs achievement resonated with a vast white-collar readership. Titles invoking overmastering purpose, originality, and the spirit in which one works reflect a broader cultural shift toward personality and character as economic assets, aligning moral discipline with the demands of modern business and the opportunities of a national market.
The launch of Success Magazine in New York in 1897 anchored Marden within the era’s booming mass-circulation press. Leveraging cheap postal rates and national advertising, he profiled or corresponded with leaders such as Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, translating their habits into democratic lessons on standing for something, sizing up people, and taking responsibility. Success blended biography, advice, and applied psychology, expanding the reach of his books. The magazine’s fortunes mirrored the business cycle, surviving the Panic of 1907 with difficulty, yet it connected Marden’s collected essays to a network of readers eager for practical guidance in careers and enterprise across the United States.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an educational revolution: public high schools proliferated, the Chautauqua movement (founded 1874 in New York) popularized adult learning, and Carnegie libraries (over 1,600 built in the United States between 1883 and 1929) democratized access to books. Correspondence schools and night classes served clerks and shopworkers who read Marden. Within this ferment, Education by Absorption advocated self-directed study, while Originality and The Spirit in Which You Work echoed new disciplinary frontiers—William James’s psychology at Harvard (Principles of Psychology, 1890) and early applied psychology—that promised measurable gains through habit, attention, and will, reshaping the workplace ethos for a knowledge-based economy.
Marden’s oeuvre matured across volatile decades: the Panic of 1893, the Panic of 1907, and recurrent recessions underscored the precariousness of success. Essays such as Had Money, But Lost It, What Has Luck Done for You?, Success with a Flaw, and Getting Away from Poverty speak to readers navigating speculation, debt, and job loss in an era before federal safety nets. The Progressive Era’s regulatory turn—antitrust actions, the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and the income tax of the same year—formed the backdrop to his insistence on character over chance, encouraging disciplined saving, vocational fit, and resilience amid structural swings that shaped opportunity and risk.
An American cult of invention and display framed Marden’s celebration of dreamers. World’s fairs—from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to St. Louis in 1904—glorified technological progress. The telephone patent of 1876 (Alexander Graham Bell), Edison’s electrification, and the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 became case studies in An Overmastering Purpose and What the World Owes to Dreamers. As production scaled and electrified factories reshaped labor, purpose and originality were cast as antidotes to routinization. Marden’s profiles linked personal vision to national transformation, urging readers in offices, shops, and farms alike to translate imagination into enterprise amid the Second Industrial Revolution.
Progressive social reform also colored Marden’s rhetoric. Debates on child labor, settlement work led by Jane Addams in Chicago, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal (1901–1909) recentered citizenship and moral fiber. Essays like Freedom at Any Cost, Stand for Something, and Responsibility Develops Power framed individual advancement as inseparable from public virtue. Massive immigration through Ellis Island after 1892 diversified the workforce to which Marden addressed Does the World Owe You a Living?, emphasizing contribution over entitlement. Women’s expanding public roles and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 paralleled his interest in female readers, reflected in companion volumes such as Every Woman a Queen (1909).
Marden wrote into the First World War era (1914–1918), when loss and dislocation tested optimism yet amplified demand for constructive attitudes. His later books, including The Victorious Attitude (1916) and Ambition and Success (1919), extended motifs found throughout He Can Who Thinks He Can, integrating morale, habit, and service. His synthesis influenced later motivational thinkers—Dale Carnegie in the 1930s and Napoleon Hill in 1937—who adapted his blend of biography, suggestion, and disciplined practice. Rooted in New England striving yet national in scope, Marden’s collection distilled a Progressive dream: that psychological preparedness, ethical steadiness, and vocational clarity could navigate modernity’s upheavals toward purposeful, contributive success.
Synopsis
Chapter I. He Can Who Thinks He Can
Argues that belief in one’s ability ignites initiative and persistence, converting potential into performance. Confidence becomes a practical force that multiplies results.
Chapter II. Getting Aroused
Urges awakening ambition and decisive action, asserting that energy and resolve overcome inertia. Momentum, once started, attracts opportunities.
Chapter III. Education By Absorption
Advocates lifelong self-education through reading, observation, and association. Learning beyond school builds the judgment and breadth success requires.
Chapter IV. Freedom At Any Cost
Champions personal and financial independence, warning against bondage to fear, debt, and conformity. True growth follows from self-reliance and courage.
Chapter V. What The World Owes To Dreamers
Credits visionaries with progress and innovation. Encourages cultivating imagination to conceive and realize better possibilities.
Chapter VI. The Spirit In Which You Work
Maintains that attitude—enthusiasm, service, pride—shapes the quality and rewards of work. The right spirit turns tasks into opportunities.
Chapter VII. Responsibility Develops Power
Shows that taking responsibility strengthens character and competence. Bearing burdens prepares one for greater trust and leadership.
Chapter VIII. An Overmastering Purpose
Stresses the value of a dominant life purpose to focus effort and sustain perseverance. Single-minded aim coordinates talents and resources.
Chapter IX. Has Your Vocation Your Unqualified Approval?
Questions vocational fit and urges wholehearted endorsement of one’s work. Alignment of values and task fuels excellence and endurance.
Chapter X. Stand For Something
Calls for clear principles and moral courage. Influence and reputation rest on unwavering integrity.
Chapter XI. Happy, If Not, Why Not?
Explores happiness as a product of mindset, purpose, and habit. Offers practical ways to reduce worry, envy, and discontent.
Chapter XII. Originality
Encourages independent thinking and authentic expression over imitation. Individuality is presented as a competitive and creative asset.
Chapter XIII. Had Money, But Lost It
Reflects on fortunes lost to speculation, vanity, and weak character. Distills lessons for rebuilding on thrift, prudence, and discipline.
Chapter XIV. Sizing Up People
Discusses reading character and capability—signals of reliability, initiative, and honesty. Useful for hiring, partnerships, and leadership.
Chapter XV. Does The World Owe You A Living?
Rejects entitlement and asserts that rewards follow service and merit. Emphasizes initiative, industry, and contribution.
Chapter XVI. What Has Luck Done For You?
Reframes luck as preparation meeting opportunity. Advocates disciplined readiness to create one’s own breaks.
Chapter XVII. Success With A Flaw
Warns against one-sided achievement that neglects ethics, health, or relationships. Endorses balanced success as the only durable kind.
Chapter XVIII. Getting Away From Poverty
Outlines practical routes out of poverty—thrift, skill-building, steady work, and elevated aims. Stresses mindset, habits, and better associations.
HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN & OTHER BOOKS ON SUCCESS
Chapter I. He Can Who Thinks He Can
“PROMISED my God I would do it.” In September, 1862, when Lincoln issued his preliminary emancipation proclamation[1], the sublimest act of the nineteenth century, he made this entry in his diary—“I promised my God I would do it.” Does any one doubt that such a mighty resolution added power to this marvelous man; or that it nerved him to accomplish what he had undertaken? Neither ridicule nor caricature—neither dread of enemies nor desertion of friends,—could shake his indomitable faith in his ability to lead the nation through the greatest struggle in its history.
Napoleon, Bismarck, and all other great achievers had colossal faith in themselves. It doubled, trebled, or even quadrupled the ordinary power of these men. In no other way can we account for the achievements of Luther, Wesley, or Savonarola. Without this sublime faith, this confidence in her mission, how could the simple country maiden, Jeanne d’Arc, have led and controlled the French army? This divine self-confidence multiplied her power a thousandfold, until even the king obeyed her, and she led his stalwart troops as if they were children.
After William Pitt was dismissed from office, he said to the Duke of Devonshire, “I am sure I can save this country, and that nobody else can.” “For eleven weeks,” says Bancroft, “England was without a minister. At length the king and aristocracy recognized Pitt’s ascendency, and yielded to him the reins.”
It was his unbounded confidence in his ability that compelled the recognition and led to the supremacy in England of Benjamin Disraeli, the once despised Jew. He did not quail or lose heart when the hisses and jeers of the British parliament rang in his ears. He sat down amid the jeering members, saying, “You will yet hear me.” He felt within him then the confidence of power that made him prime minister of England, and turned sneers and hisses into admiration and applause.
Much of President Roosevelt’s success has been due to his colossal self-confidence. He believes in Roosevelt, as Napoleon believed in Napoleon. There is nothing timid or halfhearted about our great president He goes at everything with that gigantic assurance, with that tremendous confidence, which half wins the battle before he begins. It is astonishing how the world makes way for a resolute soul, and how obstacles get out of the path of a determined man who believes in himself. There is no philosophy by which a man can do a thing when he thinks he can’t. What can defeat a strong man who believes in himself and cannot be ridiculed down, talked down, or written down? Poverty cannot dishearten him, misfortune deter him, or hardship turn him a hair’s breadth from his course. Whatever comes, he keeps his eye on the goal and pushes ahead.[1q]
What would you think of a young man, ambitious to become a lawyer, who should surround himself with a medical atmosphere and spend his time reading medical books? Do you think he would ever become a great lawyer by following such a course? No, he must put himself in a law atmosphere; go where he can absorb it and be steeped in it until he is attuned to the legal note. He must be so grafted upon the legal tree that he can feel its sap circulating through him.
How long will it take a young man to become successful who puts himself in an atmosphere of failure and remains in it until he is soaked, saturated, with the idea? How long will it take a man who depreciates himself, talks failure, thinks failure, walks like a failure and dresses like a failure; who is always complaining of the insurmountable difficulties in his way, and whose every step is on the road to failure—how long will it take him to arrive at the success goal? Will anyone believe in him or expect him to win?
The majority of failures began to deteriorate by doubting or depreciating themselves, or by losing confidence in their own ability. The moment you harbor doubt and begin to lose faith in yourself, you capitulate to the enemy. Every time you acknowledge weakness, inefficiency, or lack of ability, you weaken your self-confidence, and that is to undermine the very foundation of all achievement.
So long as you carry around a failure atmosphere, and radiate doubt and discouragement, you will be a failure. Turn about face; cut off all the currents of failure thoughts, of discouraged thoughts. Boldly face your goal with a stout heart and a determined endeavor and you will find that things will change for you; but you must see a new world before you can live in it. It is to what you see, to what you believe, to what you struggle incessantly to attain, that you will approximate.
“Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string.”[2]
I know people who have been hunting for months for a situation, because they go into an office with a confession of weakness in their very manner; they show their lack of self-confidence. Their prophecy of failure is in their face, in their bearing. They surrender before the battle begins. They are living witnesses against themselves.
When you ask a man to give you a position, and he reads this language in your face and manner, “Please give me a position; do not kick me out; fate is against me; I am an unlucky dog; I am disheartened; I have lost confidence in myself,” he will only have contempt for you; he will say to himself that you are not a man, to start with, and he will get rid of you as soon as he can.
