As a Man Thinketh

How did a pamphlet from more than a century ago become the root text for a whole generation of success writers, Dale Carnegie's included?

James Allen was born in England in 1864. When he was fifteen, his family's business collapsed and his father died, so he left school to work. He taught himself while holding down various jobs, and he was nearly forty before he could write full-time. As a Man Thinketh came out in the early 1900s and runs only a few dozen pages. The title comes from Proverbs: "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he."

The whole book says one thing: your circumstances are the fruit of your thoughts.

Your mind is a garden. If you don't plant flowers, it won't stay empty. Weeds will grow on their own. Thoughts become habits, and habits harden into circumstances. So instead of complaining about the soil, look at what you're planting every day.

Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself. This is my favorite line. Hard times aren't the cause. They're a mirror.

You can choose the cause, but you can't control the effect. Allen sees this as the line between free will and fate. I'd put it more bluntly: starting is the part you control, and results are the part you don't. Put your energy into the end you can actually start.

Thoroughness means doing small things as if they were the most important things in the world.

This book made me uncomfortable, because it kept holding up a mirror. When I hit the passage about how a vision that stays a dream is just a castle in the air, I thought: that's me. I struggle to act, and I give up halfway. When I read that a person becomes their own master once they realize they can tend the soil and seeds inside them, I told myself: I'm going to take back control of my life.

To be fair, not every line holds up. Blaming poverty and illness on "wrong thinking" is unfair to a lot of people living through real hardship. I treat it as a reminder, not a science. Its real use is pulling your attention back from "What's wrong out there?" to "What can I do?"

Read it if you've been blaming your surroundings lately. You can finish it in an afternoon.

Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.