Yeah, you can handle these Six Enemies.

Napoleon Hill is one of most read writer of self-help books, whose words have positively influenced millions of people worldwide. His books, lectures, magazine articles, and audio and video programs have shown them the way to personal and professional achievement.  Has identified six dreaded enemies who always come in the way of us and our success. Most of us have one or more than one of these six dreaded enemies standing in front of us with their guns aimed at as and shoots us dead at the slightest opportunity.

These enemies reside inside our minds, they play games with our insecurities, prejudices and biases; connive with them to stop us from achieving whatever we aspire to achieve in our lives.  They are like that imaginary man and the little girl who were living with John Nash, who thought they were real people and was dictated by them, only much later in his life he realizes that they were only present in his imagination, they don’t have any existence outside his mind. John Nash was suffering from a psychological disorder called schizophrenia, but though most of us are not suffering from this disease, but somewhere we tend to behave like a schizophrenic person and believe in the existence of these enemies. We start trusting them more than anyone else. For us they become more convincing then the entire world of our well-wishers and friends.

These enemies are Fear of poverty, fear of death, fear of ill-health, fear of the loss of love, fear of old age, fear of criticism. You would say these fears are real and they do happen to all of us at time or the other, yes they do, but you would find numerous examples in the world where any of these could not stop people from achieving their success and goals. No one probably could get an illness more dreaded then what Prof. Stephen Hawking had, Nick Vujicic doesn’t have any limbs since childhood. He was born with the state which is dreadful for all of us. For him that stage was normal, at least he thought so, that is why he achieved what any limbed person could achieve and many limbed persons could not achieve even with their perfect abilities.

While discussing the way to encounter and win over these enemies, Napoleon Hill asks you to do little investigation; he wants you to find out from where you got these hanging on your back. There are certain attributes and characteristics that we are born with, that we are hard-wired with, that we have inherited from our parents, but there are certain other attributes that we inherit from our society, surroundings, company and friend we keep, even the most loved ones with all good intentions can also give us those attributes. It’s called social heredity. Social heredity is everything we are taught, everything we learn or gather from observation and experience with other living beings.

Resources can never be distributed equally in society, there would always be disparity, there would be always be 20% of people enjoying 80% of wealth and 80% of people sustaining with 20% of world’s wealth. But this has always been the case with this world, due to man’s greed, due to insecurity, due to lack of community feeling. But since time immemorial we have people who refused to be bogged down by poverty and went on to achieve their almost impossible goals. An industrious person and person with rich consciousness can never have the fear of poverty. If you have belief and trust in your dreams and goals and have the will to work to achieve them, you will not have this fear. Poverty doesn’t stop you from doing what you wish to do, but the fear of poverty certainly does that. The biggest example to prove this point Is the Punjabi and Sindhi immigrants who fled from Pakistan after partition, they were forced to leave their belongings and wealth there. The millionaires became paupers overnight. But if you do a random survey anywhere in India, among the people who came from Pakistan you would find most of them are reasonably rich and running their businesses and most have reached to their earlier level of prosperity. These are the people who believed that poverty would not hurt you if you have faith in your dreams and are ready to work to achieve it, but the fear of poverty would certainly hurt you big time. If you think about it, it is not actually fear of poverty but lack of will to fight poverty. The ghost of poverty vanishes the moment you get up, tie your shoes and are ready to go.

Will talk about the other enemies and share the technology to handle them in my next posts.