Law of Success (21st Century Edition)

CONCENTRATION 729

2. Keep your attention firmly concentrated on your new path-
   building, and forget all about the old paths. Concern yourself only
   with the new ones that you are building to order.


3. Travel over your newly made paths as often as possible. Create
   opportunities for doing so, without waiting for them to arise
   through luck or chance. The more often you go over the new paths,
   the sooner they will become well worn and easily traveled.


4. Resist the temptation to travel over the older, easier paths you
   have been using in the past. Every time you resist a temptation, the
   stronger you become and the easier it will be for you to do so the
   next time. But every time you yield to the temptation, the easier it
   becomes to yield again and the more difficult it becomes to resist
   the next time. This is the critical time. Prove your determination,
   persistency, and willpower now, at the very beginning.

S. Be sure you have mapped out the right path as your Definite

Chief Aim, then go ahead without fear and without allowing your-

self to doubt. Select your goal and make good, deep, wide mental

paths leading straight to it.

As you will have observed, there is a close relationship between
habit and autosuggestion. Through habit, an act repeatedly performed
in the same manner has a tendency to become permanent, and even-
tually we come to perform the act automatically or unconsciously. In
playing a piano, for example, the artist can playa familiar piece while
his or her conscious mind is on some other subject.
Autosuggestion is the tool with which we dig a mental path,
Concentration is the hand that holds that tool, and habit is the map
or blueprint that the mental path follows. An idea or desire, to be
transformed into terms of action or physical reality, must be held in
the conscious mind faithfully and persistently until habit begins to
give it permanent form.