BELIEVE IT’S POSSIBLE

The number one problem that keeps people from winning in the United States today is lack of belief in themselves.
ARTHUR L. WILLIAMS
Founder of A.L. Williams Insurance Company, which was sold to Primerica for $90 million in 1989

Napoleon Hill once said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” In fact, the mind is such a powerful instrument, it can deliver to you literally everything you want. But you have to believe that what you want is possible.

YOU GET WHAT YOU EXPECT

Scientists used to believe that humans responded to information flowing into the brain from the outside world. But today, they’re learning instead that we respond to what the brain, on the basis of previous experience, expects to happen next.
Doctors in Texas, for example—studying the effect of arthroscopic knee surgery—assigned patients with sore, worn-out knees to one of three surgical procedures: scraping out the knee joint, washing out the joint, or doing nothing.

During the “nothing” operation, doctors anesthetized the patient, made three incisions in the knee as if to insert their surgical instruments, and then pretended to operate. Two years after surgery, patients who underwent the pretend surgery reported the same amount of relief from pain and swelling as those who had received the actual treatments. The brain expected the “surgery” to improve the knee, and it did.

Why does the brain work this way? Neuropsychologists who study ex-pectancy theory say it’s because we spend our whole lives becoming condi¬tioned. Through a lifetime’s worth of events, our brain actually learns what to
expect next—whether it eventually happens that way or not. And because our brain expects something will happen a certain way, we often achieve exactly what we anticipate.

This is why it’s so important to hold positive expectations in your mind. When you replace your old negative expectations with more positive ones— when you begin to believe that what you want is possible—your brain will actually take over the job of accomplishing that possibility for you. Better than that, your brain will actually expect to achieve that outcome.

“ YOU GOTTA BELIEVE”

You can be anything you want to be, if only you believe with sufficient conviction and act in accordance with your faith; for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.
NAPOLEON HILL
Best-selling author of Think and Grow Rich

When Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Tug McGraw—father of legendary coun¬try singer Tim McGraw—struck out batter Willie Wilson to earn the Phillies the 1980 World Series title, Sports Illustrated captured an immortal image of elation on the pitcher’s mound—an image few people knew was played out exactly as McGraw had planned it. When I had the opportunity to meet Tug one afternoon in New York, I asked him about his experience on the mound that day.

“It was as if I’d been there a thousand times before,” he said. “When I was growing up, I would pitch to my father in the backyard. We would al-ways get to where it was the bottom of the ninth in the World Series with two outs and three men on base. I would always bear down and strike them out.” Because Tug had conditioned his brain day after day in the backyard, the day eventually arrived where he was living that dream for real.
McGraw’s reputation as a positive thinker had begun 7 years earlier dur¬ing the New York Mets’ 1973 National League championship season, when Tug coined the phrase “ You gotta believe” during one of the team’s meetings. That Mets team, in last place in the division in August, went on to win the

Adapted from “Placebos Prove So Powerful Even Experts Are Surprised: New Studies Explore the Brain’s Triumph Over Reality” by Sandra Blakeslee. New York Times, October 13, 1998, section F, page 1.

National League pennant and reach game 7 of the World Series, where they finally succumbed to the Oakland A’s.
Another example of his always optimistic “ you gotta believe” attitude was the time, while he was a spokesman for the Little League, that he said, “Kids should practice autographing baseballs. This is a skill that’s often overlooked in Little League.” And then he smiled his infectious smile.