(Excerpted from The Secret of the Ages by
Robert Collier, originally published in 1926.)

What is the eternal question which stands up and looks you and every sincere man squarely in the eye every morning?

"How can I better my condition?" That is the real life question which confronts you, and will haunt you every day till you solve it.

To begin with, all wealth depends upon a clear understanding of the fact that mind--thought--is the only creator. The great business of life is thinking. Control your thoughts and you control circumstance.

Just as the first law of gain is desire, so the formula of success is FAITH.

Believe that you have it--see it as an existent fact--and anything you can rightly wish for is yours. Faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

It is now a good many years since Professor Joseph Henry made his famous experiment with a charged magnet, which revolutionized the electrical practice of his age.

First, he took an ordinary magnet of large size, suspended it from a rafter, and with it lifted a few hundred pounds of iron.

Then he wrapped the magnet with wire and charged it with the current from a small battery. Instead of only a few hundred, the now highly charged magnet lifted 3,000 pounds!

Your magnet is your subconscious mind.

Impelled by strong desire, it can bring you a reasonable amount of the good things of life. But charge it with a strong current of faith, of belief in its power, and there is no limit to the good things it will bring to you.

You have seen men, inwardly no more capable than yourself accomplish the seemingly impossible. You have seen others, after years of hopeless struggle; suddenly win their most cherished dreams. And you have probably wondered, "What is the power that gives new life to their dying ambitions, that supplies new impetus to their jaded desires, which gives them a new start on the road to success?"

That power is belief—faith. Someone, something, gave them a new belief in themselves, a new faith in their power to win—and they leaped ahead and wrested success from seemingly certain defeat.

Do you remember the picture Harold Lloyd was in [Grandma’s Boy, 1922] showing a country boy who was afraid of his shadow? Every boy in the countryside bedeviled him. Until one day his grandmother gave him a talisman that she assured him his grandfather had carried through the Civil War and which, so she said, had the property of making its owner invincible. Nothing could hurt him, she told him, while he wore this talisman. Nothing could stand up against him. He believed her. And the next time the bully of the town started to cuff him around, he wiped up the earth with him. And that was only the start. Before the year was out he had made a reputation as the most daring soul in the community.

Then, when his grandmother felt that he was thoroughly cured, she told him the truth — that the "talisman" was merely a piece of old junk she'd picked up by the roadside—that she knew all he needed was faith in himself, belief that he could do these things.

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