What will PMA do for You?  

By Daniel R. Murphy 

A small boy immigrated to the United States early in the 19^th Century. Born in poverty his family barely eked out a living in Pittsburg as the young boy went from one job to another, making pennies a day.  

One of the most consistent and powerful characteristics of this little boy named Andrew was that he had a tremendous positive attitude. He fully intended to succeed in all that he did and his attitude always displayed that certainty.  

Andrew went on to become one of the richest men in America and before he died he gave way most of his vast fortune. Among the many things he gave to us all were libraries throughout the nation. Andrew Carnegie was the epitome of a positive mental attitude, or PMA. 

Before he died Carnegie became a mentor to a young journalist named Napoleon Hill. He commissioned Hill to visit every successful man in the nation and after twenty years of serious study to develop the science of success. Hill took the challenge and some twenty years later published the Laws of Success. He gained yet greater fame for his next book called Think and Grow Rich.  

When most men would retire Hill entered into a partnership with W. Clement Stone, another great disciple of PMA and the two of them preached its importance for another decade.  Stone built an insurance company starting out with nothing more than $300 in the depth of the depression and built it into one of the most successful insurance companies in the nation. 

In asking the question of what PMA can do for you Hill simply asks you to answer this question: 

Who would you rather spend time with: someone who is pessimistic, suspicious and sullen or someone who is optimistic, confident and gregarious? 

The answer is obvious. You would rather spend time with, work with, and live with a person with PMA! Anyone would. And that same positive mental attitude that makes us want to spend time with that kind of person also causes us to enter into business with them, buy from them, sell to them, and do all sorts of things that bring that person wealth, success and achievement.  

You can choose to have PMA. You can work on it every day. You can benefit from PMA just as Andrew Carnegie, Napoloeon Hill and W. Clement Stone did.  

We become what we think about most of the time. -- William James, the father of American Psychology.  

Inspired by Napoleon Hill's Keys to Positive Thinking, Napoleon Hill and Michael J. Ritt, Jr.