Faith: The Second Principle

(We’re taking our yearly trip through THINK AND GROW RICH, arguably the best and most influential “success” book ever written in the English language.)

Faith: Visualizing and Believing in the Attainment of Desire

“The emotions of faith, love, and sex are the most powerful of all the positive emotions.” — Napoleon Hill

It isn’t an accident that the eighth step of the Hero’s Journey is called “The Leap of Faith.” Nor is it an accident that the “C” in M.A.G.I.C. is “Confidence/Conviction.” Faith. Those who have a visceral agnostic or atheistic reaction to the word can simply shift it from “Faith in an external supernatural entity” to belief in your own deep potential, or the integrity of your allies, or the natural pattern of life. But it needs to be SOMETHING other than your ego, or you are pretty much screwed.

Every story of shining success also contains a point where it feels that all is lost. The ego has been shattered. In a film like THE MATRIX the hero might literally “die”. Remember that? And when Trinity whispers in his “dead” ear that the Oracle told her she would fall in love with The One, and that since she loved him, that meant he was a special being, not controlled by the rules of the Matrix?

She believed in the Oracle (belief in allies?). Therefore she believed in what her heart said (belief in self) and therefore in him. He, plausibly, dying from his virtual wounds, believed in HER, trusted that she could be believed, released his illusions of self…