Success Cybernetics (Unabridged edition) E-Book

Uell S. Andersen

• Herausgeber: David De Angelis
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Here’s a wonderful new system of self-development based upon the most recent discoveries of the brain sciences and their close relationship to the computer sciences.
In this book, U. S. Andersen shows you how your brain and nervous system are under the automatic control of your “Mental Computer”—and gives you scores of “computer instruction” techniques for programming this mental computer to automatically increase your skills and performance in any area you choose!
Just as a computer can be programmed, you, too, can rapidly program a “guidance system” and a “power mechanism” into your brain and nervous system—and quickly combine the two into an automatic data processing unit that instantly emits spontaneous success responses to all outside problems.
Cramming his book full of true case histories from his own experience in training people, U. S. Andersen gives you a unique approach to solving all your problems . . . handling people more easily . . . and building automatic success habits into your life through mental programming.
 
Within these pages you’ll discover:
 

• How to program your mental computer to unleash your greatest potential—under all circumstances and in any situation—and quickly become a winner!
•  How to create a power mechanism that turns on your energies and enthusiasm full blast. How to like yourself—enjoy yourself—while blasting full speed ahead to your targets! 
• How to program the Success Mechanism into your nervous system so that you respond to signals in the same manner as a guided missile. You’ll be astonished at the speed, power and control you’ll develop! 
• How to use programming techniques to constantly improve your skills and abilities, based on a breathtaking, new discovery about how the brain functions! 
• How to “compute” ideas that are productive and useful and put money into your pocket—and how to cast off worthless ideas! 
• How to run your mental data cards through your psychic “scanner” and find quick solutions to unsolvable problems! 
• How to “keypunch” your mental data cards to attract opportunity into your mental computer. Throw luck out the window once and for all. Become a magnet for enterprises that are destined for success! 
• How to operate your mental computer to gain lasting happiness—how to use it to make others happy—how to not only succeed, but how to have fun doing it! 

. . . plus much, much more!
 
Yes, just as machine “cybernetics” is revolutionizing the technological world, so brain “cybernetics” is revolutionizing the world of man’s performance . . . because it synchronizes your goals with the automatic responses which will achieve them for you.
Machine cybernetics already has taken man into outer space. Human cybernetics seems certain to uncover the vast potentials of his inner world— unlocking immense powers of the mind!
 

Leseprobe

SUCCESS CYBERNETICS

UELL S. ANDERSEN

Edition 2022 by ©David De Angelis

All rights a reserved

A Word from the Author

This book will shock you. It will make you roaring mad. It will absolutely delight you. It will make you laugh so hard you’ll hold your sides. It will intrigue you. It will get you so excited that you jump up and down. It will give you so much horsepower that steam will shoot out of your ears. It will open your eyes. You’ll see a brand new world. You’ll find a strange machine hidden in your head. And you’ll learn how to use that machine to help you get the things you want.

Two things this book won’t do: It won’t bore you, and it won’t make you sad. After you read it, you’ll be done with those forever.

It’s about a new science, but in a way, it’s about me. Training people is my business, and this new science enables me to do it. You’ll find me scattered everywhere through these pages, because I have to tell you what’s happened to me and what’s happened to the people I’ve trained and how I got to be the way I am and how they got to be the way they are—in order for you to see exactly how to use this new science to help you get the things you want. It can do that and more. It can help you be smarter, healthier, more vigorous, more skillful. It can help you be stronger, more self-reliant, more creative. It can help you communicate better, persuade better, lead better. It can help you overcome adversity, attract opportunity, achieve happiness.

If you’re a man, it’s going to be the best news you’ve ever heard. If you’re a woman, you may not like it. You’d better read it anyway. Because when it hits the market, there are suddenly going to be a lot of men around, and you’d better get used to how they’re going to behave. Once they get here, you’ll like the book. You’ll realize you’ve been missing something all along.

Don’t let the word cybernetics throw you. It’s just a word, and by the time you get through with this book, it won’t be any more complicated than cat. The important thing to understand right now is that it’s a method for becoming sane—very sane. Clear-eyed sane. Crystal-clear sane. It’s a method for seeing exactly what’s in the world and how to put the pieces together to get the things you want.

I don’t have to tell you that there are all kinds of people. All kinds is the kind that I’ve trained. I’ve trained presidents of corporations, scrubwomen, and waiters. I’ve trained actors and politicians, housewives and artists. I’ve trained mechanics and longshoremen, sailors and soldiers. I’ve trained lawyers and bankers, actresses and models. I’ve trained clerks and typists and secretaries and stenographers. I’ve trained cops and convicts, cowboys and lumberjacks. I’ve trained tool makers and architects, salesmen and engineers. I’ve trained bootblacks and ditch-diggers and news vendors and caretakers. I’ve trained cab drivers and bellhops and bartenders and belly dancers. I’ve trained pilots and stewardesses, government workers and club women. I’ve trained doctors and dentists, teachers and students. I’ve trained scientists and philosophers, writers and musicians. I’ve trained blind men and deaf men and men without legs.

That’s a pretty fair cross section. It entitles me to say I know something about people. What I know about them is this: They all can be better. They all can be saner, more effective, and much happier— and that’s just what they become with Success Cybernetics.

You won’t find this a treatise or an argument for a philosophy. You’re going to be in my head and in the heads of the people I’ve trained. You’re going to attend seminars and lectures, training programs and bull sessions. Sometimes you’re going to be me, sometimes somebody else. You’re going to sit in offices and bars and houses and conference rooms. You’re going to ride airplanes and automobiles, bulldozers and trucks. You’re going to see séances and magic, fraud and illusion. You’re going to laugh yourself sick at the things people do. You’re going to work in a logging camp, be a deckhand on a freighter. You’re going to pilot an airplane and get stuck on a wall. You’re going to shuffle cards and tell your own fortune. You’re going to get drunk and be struck by a thought. You’re going to think your way into the inside of trees. You’re going to have a diamond in your head that grows hour by hour. You’re going to watch a naked dancer jump over a table. You’re going to turn people into magnets and put a horse in an office. You’re going to fish and shoot ducks and set off explosions. You’re going to be hypnotized and wake up clear-eyed and grinning. You’re going to wake up sounder and saner than ever before. You’re going to find a world full of joy, drama, and laughter. You’re going to get yourself excited. You’re going to stay excited. And you’ll never be un-excited again.

Introduction

Here’s a wonderful new system of self-development based upon the most recent discoveries of the brain sciences and their close relationship to the computer sciences.

In this book, U. S. Andersen shows you how your brain and nervous system are under the automatic control of your “Mental Computer”—and gives you scores of “computer instruction” techniques for programming this mental computer to automatically increase your skills and performance in any area you choose!

Just as a computer can be programmed, you, too, can rapidly program a “guidance system” and a “power mechanism” into your brain and nervous system—and quickly combine the two into an automatic data processing unit that instantly emits spontaneous success responses to all outside problems.

Cramming his book full of true case histories from his own experience in training people, U. S. Andersen gives you a unique approach to solving all your problems . . . handling people more easily . . . and building automatic success habits into your life through mental programming.

Within these pages you’ll discover:

How to program your mental computer to unleash your greatest potential—under all circumstances and in any situation—and quickly become a winner!

How to create a power mechanism that turns on your energies and enthusiasm full blast. How to like yourself—enjoy yourself—while blasting full speed ahead to your targets!

How to program the Success Mechanism into your nervous system so that you respond to signals in the same manner as a guided missile. You’ll be astonished at the speed, power and control you’ll develop!

How to use programming techniques to constantly improve your skills and abilities, based on a breathtaking, new discovery about how the brain functions!

How to “compute” ideas that are productive and useful and put money into your pocket—and how to cast off worthless ideas!

How to run your mental data cards through your psychic “scanner” and find quick solutions to unsolvable problems!

How to “keypunch” your mental data cards to attract opportunity into your mental computer. Throw luck out the window once and for all. Become a magnet for enterprises that are destined for success!

How to operate your mental computer to gain lasting happiness—how to use it to make others happy—how to not only succeed, but how to have fun doing it!

. . . plus much, much more!

Yes, just as machine “cybernetics” is revolutionizing the technological world, so brain “cybernetics” is revolutionizing the world of man’s performance . . . because it synchronizes your goals with the automatic responses which will achieve them for you.

Machine cybernetics already has taken man into outer space. Human cybernetics seems certain to uncover the vast potentials of his inner world—unlocking immense powers of the mind!

Contents

A Word from the Author

Introduction

·1· How to Use the New Science of Success Cybernetics

·2· How to Find and Develop your Greatest Potential

·3· How to Set your Self-Concept to Switch on Success

·4· How to Design Your Own Automatic Success Mechanism

·5· How to Train the Success Mechanism into Your Nervous System

·6· How to Constantly Improve Your Skills and Abilities

·7· How to Rocket Your Brain Power up into Orbit

·8· How to Use the Technique of Imagineering Ideas

·9· How to Find Inside Solutions to Unsolvable Problems

·10· How to Push-Button People into Fast Action

·11· How to Persuade People to Point of View

·12· How to Dynamite the Success Block Between People’s Ears

·13· How to Quick-Shift Adversity into Achievement

·14· How to Make Yourself Into an Opportunity Magnet

·15· How to Use a Great Secret That Brings Lasting Happiness

·1·How to Use the New Science of Success Cybernetics

WHEN YOU SETthe thermostat on the wall of your room at seventy degrees and the temperature in the room falls below seventy, your furnace comes on. That’s cybernetics—the science of automatic control. It’s given us the automatic pilot, the fire control mechanism, the guidance system in missiles, the automated assembly line, and the electronic computer. It puts a brain in machines, a brain that responds automatically to signals, quickly and efficiently, performing hundreds of accurate calculations in a split second, and it’s taught us how to train the human brain and nervous system to the same kind of performance.

HOW TO PREACH SERMONS AND WIN FOOTBALL GAMES

Success Cybernetics is automatic control that hits a selected target. If the automatic control misses the selected target, that’s failure cybernetics.

There was this preacher who never could remember the names in his sermon, so he’d pin them inside his coat and refer to them as he preached. One Sunday, he started out by saying, “And the Lord created the first man, and his name was—Adam. Then the Lord created the first woman, and her name was—Eve. Then Adam and Eve had a son, and his name was—Robert Hall. Oops!”

There are computers which occasionally function like that, only they never say, “Oops!” A guy with a bank balance of $2.98 gets a statement that shows he’s got $298,000.00 in the bank. But it’s pretty tough to get that money out. Somebody is almost certain to wake up to the fact that the computer made a mistake, and the machine is then fixed. But there are people who keep acting their whole lives long as if Cain were Robert Hall or they’ve got three hundred thousand on deposit when they’ve got only three. But now they can be fixed too, in just the same way as the computer is fixed. With Success Cybernetics.

Success Cybernetics synchronizes goals with the automatic responses which will achieve those goals. If you aim at a target and hit it, your goal and responses are synchronized, and you’re using Success Cybernetics. If you aim at a target and miss it, your goal and responses are unsynchronized, and you’re using failure cybernetics. Everybody uses one or the other. I’ve had experience with both. I remember my experience with failure cybernetics well. I played on a Stanford football team that lost eight straight games.

Were our goals and responses synchronized? Judge for yourself.

Just prior to the last game of the season, we were going back to New York City to play Dartmouth, when one of the boys on the team came up to the coach and said, “Coach, this is the last game of the season. After this, we can break training, can’t we?” The coach looked at him with big, sad eyes. “What are you going to do now?” he asked. “Take dope?”

HOW TO BUILD TOWERS AND TURN ON THE COFFEE

There are success responses and there are failure responses, and no athlete ever became a winner by doing his training in night clubs. There was a sports writer on the San Francisco Chronicle who must have been a cybernetician himself. He wrote a column that was headed, “Stanford Team Six Inches from Success.” His subhead read, “That Six Inches Is Between Their Ears.”

It’s with the automatic responses that exist in the six inch span between our ears that Success Cybernetics is concerned. A computer can be built so complex and sophisticated that it can guide a missile to Mars and take pictures after it gets there, but if they put the wrong responses into that computer, it couldn’t turn on your coffee. The human brain is like that. No telling what it’s capable of. Nobody’s using more than a fraction of its potential. Don’t take my word. They’ll tell you that at every brain research laboratory in the country. But people train responses into the brain when they’re five years old, like crying to get candy, then wind up frustrated and surprised when that response doesn’t produce money when they’re thirty. That brain can make all the money its owner asks it to. It just has to be trained with success responses. It’s like the computer that sent the missile to Mars, but which most people use to turn on the coffee.

How many storage cells are there in the largest computer ever made? Forty thousand. How many storage cells in the human brain? Ten billion—two hundred thousand times the capacity of the largest computer ever built. That’s the kind of fabulous machine you and I carry around between our ears, and Success Cybernetics is concerned with training the responses into it that will enable the use of its full capacity. The cat’s now out of the bag. The brain builds towers as easily as it turns on the coffee. How you use it is up to you.

HOW TO TYPEWRITE AND PLAY THE PIANO

You see, over at IBM or Rocket-dyne or General Information Systems, when they want a computer to perform a certain job, a group of people sit around the room and design the attitudes and habits that will enable the computer to accomplish its goal. These People are called programmers, and the attitudes and habits they design are called a program. They install the program in the memory of the computer, and when they press a button, they get a success-response. If they don’t get a success-response, they don’t throw away the computer or say it’s stupid or hasn’t any talent or is a natural-born loser. No, indeed. They know there’s nothing wrong with the machine except its attitudes and habits, and they simply pull them out of the computer and redesign them until they get a success-response. In short, the machine functions only as well as its habits and attitudes, and now Success Cybernetics has proven that people are just the same way.

For example, when you first learn how to typewrite, you have to think, “Which finger hits which key?” and your typing is slow and full of mistakes. If you accept that as your standard and adopt the attitude that you’re a bad typist, you set that program into your nervous system and remain a bad typist as long as that program operates. But if you set up an attitude to become a good typist, that programs your nervous system so that your subsequent typing trains you into success habits. Then a day arrives when you can look at a sentence on a piece of paper or think of a sentence in your mind, and your fingers automatically transcribe that sentence onto the paper in the typewriter, responding to signals accurately and efficiently like the thermostat on the wall, the guidance system in a missile, or the program in a computer. The same thing happens when we learn how to play a piano, drive an automobile, fly an airplane, drive a golf ball. We set attitudes and habits into the nervous system and they determine the success of our efforts. Maybe it takes some off the frosting off the heavenly cake to regard the human body as a complex machine, but the moment we begin to realize it is, we are well on the way to getting its best performance. Mystics will still argue for a little man in the skull, and there he may dwell for all anyone knows, but his hand isn’t on the helm, there’s an automatic pilot, and the best he can do is to see that pilot is properly programmed to reach its goal. The brain and the nervous system comprise a computer-like machine and must be treated as such to achieve successful performance.

HOW TO PLAY CHESSWITH A LEARNING MACHINE

You say a machine can’t learn? Are you in for a surprise! It started in the laboratories of IBM. One day, a bunch of computer scientists were gassing about what computers could do, and one smart aleck chirped, “Wouldn’t it be something if we could teach this machine to learn?” That was a knee slapped. When they stopped holding their stomachs and started drying their eyes, the smart aleck continued, “Wait a minute. What causes learning? It’s just an attitude, isn’t it? And can’t we set an attitude into a computer? All we have to do is design a circuit that says, ‘Periodically, I’m going to go over the things I’ve done and throw out the things that didn’t work and keep the things that did work and try some things that look like they might work.’ Now that shouldn’t be so hard to do.” In an instant, the big joke became theory, and they set to work to build a learning machine.

When it was finished, they stored in its memory the standard moves of a game of chess. Then they called in ten chess players. Two of them were rank amateurs, two highly skilled professionals, the rest scaled between. They were told, “Boys, play the machine.” The boys played the machine. They all beat the machine. Then they were told, “Play it again, and again, and again.” And the third time around the computer beat the two amateurs, and the thirtieth time around it had beaten everybody but the two professionals, and here was a machine designed to learn and to keep on learning and to constantly improve its skills and abilities. Who can say as much for people?

It’s no great secret that IBM keeps this computer under wraps. It would throw so many vice-presidents out of work that we’d be up to our hips in private washroom keys. Is there any choice between a machine that keeps learning and one that has already decided to stop? IBM ran a few learning machines off the assembly line. The first one scared hell out of them. They decided to ask it a question to which nobody knew the answer. They asked it, “Is there a God?” The little slip of paper came out and said, “There is now!” Don’t panic—that’s apocryphal.

HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF, SOMETIMES IN AN INSTANT

Mainly, the learning machine woke up the psychologists, who had been slumbering peacefully for years. But since the machine had no id or childhood traumas and would not lie on a couch and free associate, they were at a loss as how to deal with it. Nevertheless, something had to be done. The machine could replace people, and they were people themselves. So they took their hats in their hands and humbly consulted the computer scientists as to whether this learning technique could be applied to humans. “Sure,” they were told, “it’s only an attitude.” The silt hit the fan.

What of the great god Freud and his mysteries? What of the labyrinthine depths of the subconscious mind? It was nonsense to think that something so simple could work with the complex Freudian mind. A dignified exit was in progress when a computer scientist remarked gently, “You fellows ought to have the machine’s attitude. It throws out the things that don’t work and tries the things that look like they might work.” A couple of guys at the rear overheard that remark. It started them thinking. They decided to do something about it, and the cybernetics of the mind was born.

Over at Columbia University they took a bunch of bad spellers and put them in a class and told them they were good spellers. Everybody began to spell better. They took a bunch of kids who couldn’t do math and told them they were good at it. Everybody improved at math.

They took some people who were lousy public speakers and told them they were good speakers. No more lousy speakers. Amazing. A person’s attitude determined what he could learn, just like the machine. But nobody believed it except the people who saw it. Why should they? Everybody is addicted to his own pet complexity. If you don’t believe that, have an attorney draw up some papers saying, “The cat caught the rat.” You’ll get fifteen pages which nobody understands.

So the Freudians continued to pour out their jargon—id, ego, super-ego, ad infinitum. The kid who was a bad speller had suffered a trauma when he misspelled a word and the class all laughed, The cyberneticians were only curing the trauma with support psychotherapy, and without a license to practice to boot. Let them try out their nonsense on some psychotics, then they’d see. The cyberneticians obliged. They went to a funny-farm and told a few inmates, “You’re sane.” The inmates became sane. Ten thousand tomes on psychology became obsolete overnight, and a grinding of teeth sounded in scent-laden offices from Los Angeles to New York. No sense probing the past when the issue was clear. Attitude determines human performance. If the performance is poor, just change the attitude. That doesn’t take five years at twenty-five dollars a week. You can do it yourself, sometimes in an instant.

HOW TO GET BLACK EYES AND BECOME A BAD SALESMAN

The only thing difficult is that attitudes become habits, and the only problem with changing them is that we use them to think. That’s the trouble with us humans. We think that we’re thinking when we’re making elaborate rationalizations to justify our responses, which are often bizarre and produce continual defeat.

Here’s a kid five years old who goes out in the street and gets in a fist fight and comes up with a black eye and runs home crying. Next week another fight, another black eye. The week after that, he comes up with a bloody nose. It gradually dawns on him that it might be a good idea to stay off the street. So he stays away from the other kids. He keeps his mouth shut if they talk to him. He sits in the corner at parties. No black eyes. The attitude works fine. And so he keeps on using it day after day, month after month, year after year. Just like learning how to typewrite, just like learning how to play a piano, just like learning how to drive a car, he builds a habit into his nervous system—an automatic response.

Then this kid gets to be thirty years old, and he takes a job as a salesman. The first day out, he raises his hand to knock on a door and suddenly feels sick to his stomach. It must be the flu, he rationalizes, and goes home to sleep it off. Next day, he doesn’t make it out of the car, because reading in the paper that there’s a financial recession, he rationalizes: What’s the use in calling on anybody, they won’t have any money. That gives him time to examine his product carefully, and he rationalizes a lot of flaws in it, so eventually he doesn’t leave the house at all. Why should he? Nobody would buy the product anyway. And all the time he believes that he’s thinking.

Eventually his sales-manager calls him in and asks him how he expects to sell anything when he never sees anybody, and this kid, grown to thirty but still using attitudes and responses that kept him from getting a black eye when he was five, recites a tale of woe and hardship likely to bring tears to anyone’s eyes but a sales-manager’s, perfectly logical, perfectly reasonable, seemingly factual, and completely hogwash. It is the same kind of logical garbage that drowns us with words in newspapers, books, and magazines, and gives people the illusion that they’re thinking when they’re only reacting and often most poorly. Just “the cat chased the rat,” blown up into fifteen pages of logical obscurity. Reason is a smokescreen. People don’t think, they react. And they react the way they’ve been trained to react. And when they react poorly they explain it with reasons. Ipso facto, we get the ego and id and the Oedipus complex and power drives and deprivation complexes and penis envy, which make mighty fine fiction if you’re allergic to fact.

HOW TO DANCE AROUND A CAMPFIRE WITHOUT BRINGING

RAIN

People are what their experience has conditioned them to be. If experience has conditioned them to failure responses, they must be reconditioned to success responses in order to achieve goals. This is not done by investigating the past. Who cares what caused it? What changes it is what matters. And changing it is done in the present.

Let’s face it. Short of physical disability, which is the province of physical medicine, the only reason people wind up on the psychiatrist’s couch or in a mental institution is because they’re trying to reach goals with failure responses. That produces frustration. Frustration unglues the brain and nervous system. It can be laid to the will of God or the Oedipus complex or astrology or just plain bad luck, but that doesn’t cure it. The only thing that cures it are success-responses. And success responses can be trained into the brain and nervous system in the very same way that failure responses were trained into it. Pavlov proved it. It’s being done every day with rats, dogs, horses, and people. Why is it ignored? For my money, it’s for the same reason that an Indian dances around the fire to bring rain. No self-respecting rat would continue such efforts in the face of centuries of frustration. He has no imagination.

That the Indian kids himself is clear to most people. What isn’t clear to most people is that they too kid themselves anytime they justify continuing a habit that produces failure. Either they become frustrated, or if they rationalize the failure, deluded. In either case, they’re nonfunctional, just complex machines programmed for failure. Yet today anyone can change failure habits to success habits. That’s Success Cybernetics.

The nervous system is a habit robot. It makes automatic responses to signals the same way as the thermostat on your wall. If it doesn’t turn on the furnace, it needs better habits.

HOW TO TALK TO A BRAIN

Cyberneticians are tenacious guys. When they found out you couldn’t always make a good speller out of a bad speller by telling him he was a good speller, they looked into the matter further, making continual comparisons between the nervous system and the functioning of a computer. The problem was how to get success experience into the nervous system when failure experience had become a habit. A guy with a nervous system trained to failure was on a treadmill. He continued to produce more failure experience and ingrained his failure habits even further. If he was young enough, you might get him to change his habits by telling him he was different, but for most people habits were so deeply ingrained that they couldn’t be changed by words or will power. The only thing that could change them was new experience. It was the old ploy about leading a horse to water but not being able to make him drink.

Then somebody got to thinking about machine language and the fact that it was only electricity. At the input terminals of the computer, words and numbers are converted to electrical current which circulates through the machine, is modified by the attitudes and responses of the machine, then is delivered to the output terminal where it once again is converted into words or numbers. “Hey!” he cried, “that’s the same way the nervous system works! At the input terminals of the senses, sights and sounds are converted into electrical current. Electrical current circulates through the nervous system and is modified by attitudes and responses, then is delivered to the output terminals of the lips, tongue, voice box, hands, fingers, and feet, where it is converted into actions.” This was interesting, sure enough.

HOW TO READ A NEW KIND OF STOCK MARKET GRAPH

Then the cyberneticians got real cute. They decided to investigate what went on in the brain when it was having experience. They got some people together, attached electrodes to their heads, led the electrodes to an encephalograph machine so they could record the brain waves, then had a lot of odd events transpire in the room. A woman screamed, somebody fired a gun, a dog ran across the room. Then everyone clustered around the brain wave graphs to see how the brain had reacted. What they saw looked like a stock market graph.

“I’ve got an idea,” somebody hollered. “What we’re looking at on that paper was caused because a portion of the brain was tickled by electricity, right? Light from a dog was converted to electricity at the retina, passed over the optic nerve and tickled a tiny portion of the brain, and the person saw a dog. The dog was in his head, even though it was caused by a dog outside his head, true? Now what would happen if that person imagined a dog?”

Everyone began talking at once, but the upshot was that nobody could account for the imagined dog on any other basis than that the same tiny portion of the brain was tickled by the same kind of electricity. Presto! They whipped blindfolds over the eyes of the people who had electrodes on their heads and asked them to imagine a gunshot, a woman’s scream, and a dog running across the room. Then they recorded the brain waves of the imagined experience and compared it to the brain waves of the real experience. The two brain waves were absolutely identical!

They sat down weakly and considered this revolutionary fact: The nervous system didn’t know the difference between a real and an imagined experience! Therefore it followed that imaginary experience was just as much a conditioner of attitudes, responses, and habits as real experience! Therefore it appeared that a person could condition himself to success responses by using his imagination to create success experience!

HOW TO SHOOT GOLF, PLAY CHESS, AND MAKE BASKETBALL

SHOTS

They put this theory to test at the University of Chicago. They called in some kids from the undergraduate school, divided them into three groups, had them throw basketballs at a basket, then scored their ability to make goals. Then they took the first group and told them, “We want you kids to come out to the gym for one hour a day and practice throwing the basketball through the basket.” They took the second group and told them, “We want you kids to forget about basketball. Don’t touch a basketball. Don’t even think about it.” They took the third group and told them, “We want you kids to get by yourselves for one hour each day and imagine yourself successfully throwing the basketball through the basket.”

At the end of thirty days they gave the three groups another test. The kids who had actually practiced one hour a day showed an increase in performance of twenty-four percent. The kids who hadn’t practiced at all showed no increase in performance. And the kids who had practiced one hour a day only in their imaginations showed an increase in performance of twenty-three percent! There it was. The nervous system didn’t know the difference between real experience and imagined experience. Successful performance in the imagination could create success habits.

Here’s a conversation with Johnny Wooden, head coach of the national champion U.C.L.A. basketball team. Question: “Johnny, do you ever have your boys mentally rehearse their shots?” Answer: “It’s my first rule. Unless a kid can clearly visualize the basketball going through the basket, there’s no chance he can throw it in when he has to.”

Artur Schnabel rehearsed piano playing in his head; Capablanca rehearsed chess playing in his head; Ben Hogan rehearsed golf shots in his head; every successful artist, athlete, businessman, salesman, whether he’s aware of it or not, constantly rehearses successful performance in his head. That’s what builds into him the habitual attitudes and responses that cause him to perform successfully in actual situations. And every failure, whether he’s aware of it or not, is constantly rehearsing failure performance in his head. That’s what builds into him the habitual attitudes and responses that cause him to perform unsuccessfully in actual situations. And I’m not talking about positive thinking. All the positive thinking in the world won’t make the basketball go through the hoop if you throw it out the window. I’m talking about conditioning success responses into the brain and nervous system through mental rehearsal.

HOW TO USE SOME STUFF YOU DON’T REALLY NEED

The story is told of a positive thinker who fell out of a fifteenth story window. Every time he passed a floor, people on that floor could hear him say, “So far, so good.” Same as the Indian dancing around the campfire to bring rain, right? Maybe it keeps him stupidly happy, but he’s in for a surprise. It won’t rain, and the ground is moving up fast.

The trouble with positive thinking is that most people think it’s magic. They think you can move the world with thought. They sit in their rooms and try getting things done by being optimistic. So what happens? Nothing. Just the Indian endlessly dancing around the campfire.

The only thing positive thinking can move is you! And the way it moves you is the way it conditions your responses. If you think you’re going to move the world by being optimistic, you naturally do nothing. You don’t even throw the basketball out the window. You let it sit on the floor and try to wish it through the net. The guy in the funny-farm who thinks he’s Napoleon is a positive thinker for sure. The only difference between him and the Indian is that he’s in and the Indian is out. In view of their results, both are somewhat over-optimistic, proving that attitude is not everything. Right action and realistic goals are just as important. Since the Indian and the pseudo-Napoleon have neither, their attitudes produce only illusion.

Goals, attitudes, and actions can be called a man’s motivation.

Some people have trouble with that word. I remember coming back to Detroit with the Detroit Lions after we’d won a surprise victory over the Chicago Bears, and walking into the old Savarine Hotel to be greeted by the old janitor who was all smiles. “You won!” he exulted. “How did you do it?” I answered, “Because we had motivation.” That old man scratched his head and looked puzzled. “Motivation?” he asked. “What position do he play?”

You can be assured it’s an important position. But psychologists persist in looking for motives in motivation, rather than regarding it as the sum total of a man’s habits. They tell us some people are motivated by love. I once heard of a man who wanted to learn a little something about love. He bought a big book called How to Hug. He didn’t learn much. It turned out to be Volume 6 of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some good signal response might have saved him a few bucks. What difference does it make why people do things? They do them out of habit, that’s all we have to know, and the habits are either success habits or failure habits, and if they’re failure habits they can be changed to success habits by creating success experience in the mind.

HOW TO MAKE A BIG SCORE FAST

A number of years ago I ran my first seminar. Thirty salesmen and five sales-managers were in the group. They were being told about success habits and failure habits, and during a coffee break one of the sales-managers came up to me, chuckling. “You know,” he said, “I’ve got a guy working for me that’s a living example of what you’ve been talking about, though I never understood him before. When he came to work for me, I thought I’d found a gem. He was personable, intelligent, well-educated, and fine looking. I trained him for three months and gave him the best territory in the company. He should have made $30,000 a year. He worked there a year and made $7,000. The head office threw a fit and told me to fire him. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I gave him the worst territory in the company. I figured he’d quit and I’d be saved the embarrassment of firing him. He worked in that bad territory a year. He made $7,000. Boy, I thought, this guy’s really caught fire. I brought him back in and gave him the best territory.

He worked there a year. You know what he made? $7,000!”

Here was a guy whose nervous system obviously was conditioned to an income of seven thousand dollars a year. When that sum was reached, rationalization set in. He was like a powerful car capable of going one hundred fifty miles per hour, but he was running around with a governor on his engine that kept him from going over thirty. Failure habits take many forms, and one of the most pernicious is putting a low ceiling on performance.

Those early training programs were fun because when we pulled off a miracle we got excited; later it became matter-of-fact. That guy who never made more than seven thousand a year is now making more than thirty thousand a year because his sales-manager put him through Success Cybernetics and conditioned his nervous system for achievement. And that sales-manager doesn’t harangue his salesmen or scare them or beguile them with prizes. He trains them in success habits, and he runs the top division in the country.

HOW TO PLAY MUSICYOU’D LIKE TO PERFORM TO

So how does Success Cybernetics train people to achieve success? First, it has them set goals. Then it has them list the actions that will achieve those goals. Then it has them list the attitudes that will allow them to take those actions. Actions are a guidance mechanism. Attitudes are a power mechanism. Together they make up a success mechanism, just as is programmed into a missile or the memory unit of a computer. Cybernetics Success Training installs the success mechanism into the nervous system by practicing it until it becomes habit.

First, the success mechanism is carried about on a card, and the person conscientiously performs the actions and adopts the attitudes each day. Second, he rehearses the actions in his mind until he can clearly visualize them. Third, he rehearses the attitudes in his mind until he can clearly feel them. Fourth, he repeats the elements of his success mechanism to himself at night before falling asleep, thus giving each of the elements the suggestive power of auto-hypnosis. And fifth, and most important of all, he creates only success experience in his mind.

Simple, isn’t it? Conditioning is always simple. Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate when a bell was rung. No food was present, but they salivated anyway. Automatic response is the hallmark of the nervous system, and it can be trained any way we choose.

Why do I say that the most important element of Cybernetics Success Training is to play only success experience in your mind? Because if you allow failure experience to transpire in your mind, it conditions your nervous system for failure. Sometimes I have people imagine they’ve got two record cabinets in their heads. One group of records carries success experience. The other group carries failure experience. If they find themselves playing failure experience on the imagination’s turntable, they simply switch records. The nervous system responds according to what it has experienced.

HOW TO HOLD ONTO YOUR HEAD

Pause to reflect on the number of people who are trying to get themselves back on the beam by reviewing failure experience. This is called psycho-analysis. They go over and over the same failure experiences—defeat, guilt, sadness, loneliness, and nausea. So what happens? They condition their nervous systems for more failure. If finally they can be talked into accepting their failure, they are discharged as cured. That’s like curing a broken leg by cutting it off. Not that that isn’t sometimes tried. They’d amputate our heads if the cyberneticians would let them. That’s a sure way to eliminate worry.

So how do you use Success Cybernetics? First, you make up your mind that you can condition yourself into any attitude, response, or habit you desire. Don’t worry about that. You’ll be firmly convinced by the time you finish this book. Secondly, you create for yourself a personal success mechanism consisting of the goals you want to achieve and the attitude-habits and the action-habits that will achieve them. Effective attitudes are derived from an expansive self-concept. An expansive self-concept attacks. A limiting self-concept retreats. We’ll go into details about this in later chapters. Finally, you train the success mechanism into your nervous system by daily practice, both mentally and physically.

Meantime, remember these four mental conditioning laws: 1. You are what you concentrate on. 2. What you concentrate on seems real. 3. What you concentrate on grows. 4. You always find what you concentrate on.

In these four laws lies the power of cybernetics to condition the nervous system to success.

·2·How to Find and Develop your Greatest Potential

PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE possible what hasn’t happened to them. This little axiom accounts for all mediocrity. A guy once stood on a street-corner and tried to sell twenty dollar bills for a dollar. Nobody would buy them, and he wound up in jail. Everyone is always gushing because so-and-so has such talent. Mozart wrote sonatas when he was eight years old. His father was a musician. The world calls Mozart a musical genius. But this maestro of the keyboard would never have learned how to play chopsticks if he’d been born in darkest Africa and had never seen a piano. A man is the product of how he reacts to his environment. Sure, heredity counts for something. If you’ve got two heads, you have to wear two hats.

HOW TO GETA BIG PRESENT WITH A BLUE RIBBON

Ever hear of anyone climbing a mountain who didn’t want to? Then why should you believe that people become excellent by accident? People become excellent by first believing that excellence is possible to them, then doing something about becoming excellent. Some people sit at the foot of the mountain and try to wish themselves up to the top. Others keep looking at the top of the mountain and figuring out reasons why the thing is too high. Some postpone the ascent until they get around to it or are sure they won’t fail. Still others keep their eyes on the ground at their feet. This allows them to find worms.

Notice how a man gets to the top of the mountain. He first sees it is there. He secondly sees it is possible to climb. Third, he decides to get to the top. And fourth, he starts climbing. This simple sequence of events accounts for the development of all skills and abilities.

Not long ago I went to a benefit show with a friend. During the performance, a guy juggled fifteen plates in the air. It looked like an invasion of flying saucers. Afterwards, I asked, “Wasn’t it remarkable how well he juggled those plates?” My friend answered laconically, “What was remarkable was not how well he did it, but that he could do it at all.”

That set me to thinking. Here’s a kid who learns how to juggle two plates. Whatever possesses him to think he can handle fifteen? Then it came to me. He tries to handle one more. Before he can become a fifteen-juggler he has to become a three-juggler, then a four-juggler, and so on. And now he’s become a fifteen-juggler, by a process of juggling one more plate. A man climbs a mountain by taking one more step. And people rise from mediocrity to excellence by the same step by-step process.

Ah, the agonies of the poor souls who wish they had talent. They act as if excellence were a package under the Christmas tree, and Santa Claus a fink for leaving them out. Everybody got the same present, with a blue ribbon too—a billion dollar computer between his ears. All anyone has to do is program it for excellence. It’s got capacity to spare.

HOW TO DISCOVER AMERICA, OR ANYTHING ELSE

Iran a seminar for middle-management executives. One walked around for two days wringing his hands. “If I could just discover my talent,” he moaned, “then I could really take off.” I kept telling him, “One doesn’t discover a talent, one decides on it.” But he had me tuned out. He liked the problem better than the solution. Finally, it bugged me. If he insisted on a search, I’d give him one.