How To Embrace Change

The Importance of Change
by Napoleon Hill

Excerpt on the importance of change from You Can Work Your Own Miracles
by Napoleon Hill

Of the utmost significance is the fact that the Creator provided man with the one and only means by which he has broken away from the animal family and ascended into spiritual estates, where he may be the master of his own earthly fate. The means thus provided is the law of change. By the simple process of changing his mental attitude, man can draw for himself any pattern of life and living he chooses and make that pattern a reality. This is the one and only thing over which man has been provided with irrevocable, unchallenged, and unchallengeable powers of absolute control - a fact which suggests that it must have been considered by the Creator to be the most important prerogative of man.

Dictators and would-be world conquerors come and they go. They always go because it is not a part of the overall plan of the universe for man to be enslaved. It is rather a part of the eternal pattern that every man shall be free, to live his own life his own way, to control his thoughts and his deeds, to make his own earthly destiny.

That is why the philosopher, who looks backward into the past to determine what is going to happen in the yet unborn future, cannot get excited because a Hitler or a Stalin momentarily basks in the light of his own ego and threatens the freedom of mankind. For these men, like all others of their ilk who have preceded them, will destroy themselves with their own excesses and vanities and their lusts for power over the free world. Moreover, these would-be stranglers of human freedom may be only demons who unwittingly serve as shock troops to awaken man from his complacency and make way for the change that will bring new and better ways of living.

Nature leads man through change after change by peaceful means as long as man cooperates, but she resorts to revolutionary methods if man rebels and neglects or refuses to conform to the law of change. The revolutionary method may consist of the death of a loved one or a severe illness; it may bring a failure in business, or the loss of a job, which forces the individual to change his occupation and seek employment in an entirely new field, where he will find greater opportunities which he would never have known if his old habits had not been broken up.

Nature enforces the law of fixation of habits in every living thing lower than man, and just as definitely enforces the law of change in the habits of man. Nature thus provides the only means by which man may grow and evolve in accordance with his fixed position in the overall plan of the universe.

Thomas A. Edison's first major adversity was experienced when his teacher sent him home after only three months in a graded school, with a note to his parents saying he did not have the capacity to take an education. He never went back to school - a conventional school, that is - but he began to school himself in the great University of Hard Knocks, where he gained an education which made him one of the greatest inventors of all times. Before he was graduated from that university he was fired from one joy after another, while the hand of Destiny guided him through the essential changes which prepared him to become a great inventor. A formal schooling perhaps would have spoiled his chances of becoming great.

Nature knows what she is about when adversity, physical pain, sorrow, distress, failure and temporary defeat overtake one. Remember this and profit by it the next time you meet with adversity. And instead of crying out in rebellion, or shivering with fear, hold your head high and look in all directions for that seed of an equivalent benefit which is carried in every circumstance of adversity.

Source: You Can Work Your Own Miracles. Napoleon Hill.
Fawcett Columbine, New York. Pgs. 33 & 34.