Fundamental to success in any vocation whatever is self-confidence. Unless a man believes firmly in his ability to succeed he can not achieve much. And, unfortunately, the tendency of many people is to personal underestimation. Looking about them, in fact, the generalty of men fix their gaze wonderingly on some outstanding figure in their line of work, some acknowledged leader.

Control of the thinking is one of the primary actions of the mind and, like all such actions, can no more be described than one can tell another how to see or how to move. It is possible to say, "Look there," or, "Hand me the book," but it is impossible to instruct another how to see with the eye or how to move the hand. The three mental actions which are essential to this mental training are how to think, how to stop thinking any particular thought which may be in the mind, and how to change the thinking from one thought to another.

Alarm Clock : Your Subconscious is the most wonderful thing in the human mind, and perhaps in all the world we know; for it is the omnipotent part of man and controlling your subconscious is one of the most important things you will ever learn. A single illustration will suffice to show this transcendent quality.

Did you ever go to bed at night desiring to awaken at a certain hour in the morning! The time may be altogether different from your usual arising hour, but is it not a fact that whatever it is, you generally awaken exactly on the dot.

Perhaps more often than otherwise discordant thinking is provoked by some incident, condition, or thing external to one's self. The connection in the mind between thoughts and their causes is very close, but there are two kinds of these thoughts, -- those which are simply thoughts about the occurrence without any quality of discord whatever, and those which are also thoughts about the occurrence but which are discordant in their character.

Spirit Limited In the Flesh : The spirit in man is for the time being limited by the flesh; the cocoon of man, if you please. The same God spirit which presides in the individual, handicapped as it may be by the fleshly tabernacle, will some time leave the body and go into another and higher sphere of development, as the butterfly leaves the cocoon.

J. D. 0. Powers in "Mind Power Plus" follows the same line of reasoning, thus: When doctors and psychologists speak of the effect of the mind on the body and the health of the body they are dealing with definite facts and with laws capable of scientific proof. For it is known now that the subconscious mind, which is at once the master of the body and the servant of consciousness, is the bridge between the body and the mind and always acts upon the law of attraction.

To say that men of genius owe their achievements chiefly to the extent to which they supplement conscious effort by subconscious mental action, is by no means to say that a man of genius is essentially of different constitution from the ordinary man. Every man, as a matter of fact, has some degree of access to his subconscious, in his waking as in his sleeping moments.

Most people go through life without doing much thinking really worthy of the name. They constitute by far the largest of the three classes into which all mankind may be divided. The first of these is made up of people who think energetically and effectively, testing every proposition by the principles of logical reasoning. The second class comprises people whose thinking, as a rule, is colored and weakened by their prejudices and prepossessions.

Intelligent affirmation (suggestion), thinking intelligently and strongly of the thing desired, soon becomes the predominant thought in the subconscious mind. This predominant thought becomes the pattern or blueprint which in time is materialized--inwardly and objectively--into the reality of the picture or blueprint of the predominating thought. In other words, whatever we think of oftenest and most strongly, we get (this summarizes the law of attraction).

Said an old Hindu sage who lived so long ago that his name has been forgotten: " Let the wise man without fail restrain his mind." His counsel would have been better if he had said: " Let the wise man without, fail control his mind;" and perhaps that is what he meant, for his real meaning may have been lost in erroneous translation. Ever since his time, and probably for a long while before, there have been men who recognized with more or less distinctness and earnestness the advisability of mental control.