The successful person learns how to transmute stumbling blocks into stepping stones. He begins with the greatest hurdle, the basic fears.

These fears are the major causes of failures, physical and mental ailments, divorces, and lack of achievement. However, if recognized and properly evaluated, these fears may serve beneficial purposes for the person who has them under control.

Measure yourself courageously against them. You may make discoveries that will give you a new way of life and success such as you may never have dreamed of attaining.

1. THE FEAR OF POVERTY. The mind attracts that which it dwells upon. The persons who condition their minds for the acceptance of poverty by fearing it and expecting it to be with them always will never be its master. The successful person conditions his mind for financial success by deciding how much money he desires and keeping his mind fixed on this sum until he creates ways and means of getting it. You can't think in terms of poverty and hope to become financially independent.
2. THE FEAR OF CRITICISM: The major reason why so few people become top-ranking successes is their fear of what "they" will say if new and advanced ideas are adopted. Criticism can be of great benefit to the person who will use it to carefully analyze himself to determine how much of the criticism is accurate. Resentment of criticism is a sure way to tie one to a low station in life. The person who is headed toward success in the upper brackets of achievement welcomes honest criticism. He often pays high salaries to professionals who do just this. Honest criticism always is beneficial to the person who accepts it as an inspiration for self-improvement.
3. THE FEAR OF THE LOSS OF LOVE. This basic fear is at the bottom of most cases of jealousy. More often than not it has no real justification. But, justified or not, it is a sure killer of success opportunities.
4. THE FEAR OF ILL HEALTH. The doctors have a sixty-four-dollar word for this fear which is responsible for a large portion of their work. It is "hypochondria"--imaginary illness. Sound physical or mental health cannot exist with the individual who lives, talks and think in terms of ailments.
5. THE FEAR OF OLD AGE. The successful person transmutes this fear into a priceless benefit by recognizing that the Creator has wisely arranged for all individuals to trade their youth for priceless experience. The fact that a large majority of the greater successes of the world were attained by men and women who had passed the age of fifty should help anyone to master this fear and divert it to beneficial ends.
6. THE FEAR OF DEATH. This is the "grandfather" of all fears. The successful person properly relates himself to this fear by accepting it as inevitable. He keeps himself so busy in his chosen calling that he has no time to devote to trying to solve the riddle of the hereafter. He leaves this to those who make it a profession.

All of the basic fears can be mastered and directed to useful ends by the person who conditions his mind to draw upon and use the powers of Infinite Intelligence through applied faith. He will recognize that there is a need for fear or else it could not exist. He will also recognize that every experience, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, can be made beneficial by the person who relates himself to it in a spirit of understand and reliance upon applied faith through the power of prayer.

Go back into your own past experiences of adversity and you may observe that the passing of time has proved that some of your failures and defeats where only blessings in disguise. It is often difficult to find the seed of an equivalent benefit when you are too close to the wound of an unpleasant circumstance, but TIME, the great universal healer, often reveals this seed and converts it into a priceless asset.

Lloyd Collier of Whiteville, North Carolina could not have considered himself unfortunate when he was stricken with total paralysis from the waist downward. Instead, he looked for the seed of an equivalent benefit and found it. He became a watchmaker.

Today he owns one of the finest jewelry stores in the South. He married one of the most attractive young women of his town and has two charming children. His home is one of the loveliest in the area. Not once has Lloyd complained that life has been unkind to him. And most important of all, he has a positive mental attitude toward all the circumstances which touch or influence his life. He accepts his affliction only as a testing device of his faith and belief that he can do whatever he desires to do.

When the great Chicago fire destroyed Marshall Field's store he said, "On this very spot I will build the world's greatest retail store." And he lived to see his affirmation become a reality. The spirit of courage and faith which built the store still prevails, to this day, in the great Marshall Field store in Chicago.

Your greatest riches often do not reveal themselves except in the hour of adversity.

The person who is in complete harmony with the Infinite cannot be handicapped by any sort of fear. He has access to a power that is greater and he knows how to draw upon it for all of his needs.

Analysis of men and women in the upper brackets of success, in a variety of callings, reveals the astounding fact that each individual attained success in almost exact proportion to the adversities and defeats which had been met with and overcome.

Source: Success Unlimited. March, 1956