The Power of Positive Thinking
How Guideposts Grew from 40,000 to 2,000,000 Subscribers — Book Review
This is a true story I have summarized from the book, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. It’s powerful how one positive thought allows you to make the leap.
Subscribers Lost and Found
After the World War II ended, Peale and his friends wanted to establish a magazine of the new age. They viewed it as a new self-help, nonprofit, nonsectarian and independent magazine on print.
Their intention was simple. By publishing inspiring and uplifting stories, people could share how they lived through hardships and difficulties. It gave people a medium, a platform, a channel to share faith and find hope in life, through God and His Laws.
In 1945, Guideposts was founded in New York.
What Peale had was the granular idea of building a great magazine. There was no financial backing to the magazine. Everything else was borrowed. The typewriter. The chairs. The tables. Even the office. They rented the office above a grocery store in the village of Pawling, downtown of New York.
Guideposts initially amassed a subscription of 25,000 readers. All of the subscribers’ contacts were typed into a list on a piece of paper.
In 1947, a fire broke out in the office. The paper list was burnt away in the fire. To their dismay, they had no carbon copy of the subscriber list.
Lowell Thomas, a patron of Guideposts, talked about this unfortunate event on the radio. Luckily enough, old subscribers returned. New subscribers were added. There was now an impressive total of 40,000 subscribers.
Yet it was still not enough. At least not to Peale. Peale and the publishers were eager to disseminate and distribute the magazine across the whole country, to an even broader audience.
The publishing company had been operating on the premise that Guideposts magazine would always be sold for less than its cost. However, they had trouble paying bills and soon found themselves in debt.
The Minute You Can See Them In Your Mind, You Will Have Them
At this critical point, Peale and his company had a meeting with the magazine’s benefactors and sponsors. One of the benefactors was an altruistic woman who had generously contributed $2000 to Guideposts in its earlier days. During the meeting, she said matter-of-factly,
“I suppose you would like me to make another financial contribution. I am not going to give you another cent.”
Peale and the rest stared silently at her.
“I am going to give you an idea,” she paused, “a creative idea.”
Everyone in the meeting room gasped. They could not believe an idea could pay their company bills.
“How many subscribers do you need to keep the magazine going?” she asked.
Peale replied very frankly,
“100,000.”
She continued with an air of confidence,
“visualize 100,000 people being creatively helped by this magazine and you will have them. In fact, the minute you can see them in your mind, you will have them.”
Reverse Your Mental Process
One word that has been overused in Peale’s meeting was “lack”.
Lack of money. Lack of subscribers. Lack of sponsors. Lack of office space. Lack of equipment. Lack of resources. Lack of new stories. Lack of faith.
There was an obsessive focus on lack, not abundance.
The gist of the benefactor’s creative idea was: reverse your mental process.
Flip the way you think. Reverse all the negativity that may cloud your thought process. Change your default thinking to positivity and optimism.
What is the one thing you wanted so badly? Picture what it would be like and feel like to have it. Inscribe the time, date and venue in your mental picture. Enhance the mental picture by making it as lively as possible, because anticipation builds excitement.
Reverse engineer the process of attainment and actualization. Imagine yourself at the very end of actualization with as much clarity and vividness. Figure out what gets you there by backward deduction. When you see it the reverse way, it is actually a rare opportunity.
By the time it was 1952, Guideposts already had 500,000 subscribers. Today it has a wide circulation of 2,000,000 in the United States.
Book available on Amazon.
Originally published at showdeyang.com
