Professor Lappin

Acquisition Of Human Thought

6 September 2000

You are everything that is, your thoughts, your life, your dreams come true. You are everything you choose to be. You are as unlimited as the endless universe. This is the short motivational quip that begins and ends Shad Helmsetter’s bestseller What To Say When You Talk To Yourself. If you were to buy a copy of this book, you would have to venture into the self-help section of the bookstore: a multi-billion dollar industry aimed at reprogramming the incessant negativity which most Americans have been prone to from quite an early age. In fact, you would find books entitled The Power Of Positive Thinking (which, incidentally, up until the recent Harry Potter splurge, spent the most amount of time atop the New-York Times best-seller list than any other book), Self Talk Solution, How To Win Friends And Influence People, the list goes on and on and on. Take your pick, but they will tell you the same thing: repetition of positive thought optimizes one’s approach and rewards from life.

Imagine one word, one small two-letter word, having such a powerful impact on the way we live. Imagine that word being told to us over 148,000 times from the time we are children (according to behavioral researchers). After this much repetition, the word "NO," usually uttered quite emphatically and sternly, would seem to define our approach to life. That is, a cloud of negativity would encapsulate one’s mentality and dissuade any idea of betterment through dreaming, through goal setting, or any other action that needs merely one iota of positive reinforcement. To bolster this point, how about the statistic that over 77% of what we think is negative, counter-productive, and, in some way working against us.

What do all these statistics, opinions, books, and mental attitudes mean? What I am trying to establish, as Jacob Bronowski did so abstractly yet so eloquently, is the value of the special gift humans have in self-talk. That is, the intrinsic power a human has over himself by means of what he chooses he wants to do, how he wants to act, and the way he wants to live. This "internalization," the name Bronowski attaches to it, is a unique trait humans possess in that it allows liberation from instinct, from pre-programmed thoughts, goals, and lives to which other animals are subject to. It is a gift, a resource left untapped by the majority of individuals and it seems to be a consensus among all these best-selling authors that internalization is equivalent to a vat of pure potentiality inside oneself that has the capability to supply one with enough focus and vision to succeed at whatever is chosen–if it is chosen at all.

So let me finish as I began, as Helmsetter began and closed too: