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This is where you will win the battle - in the playhouse of your mind.
Sep 10, 2025
Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'
Your most important sale in life is to sell yourself to yourself.
Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent.
Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.
If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.
You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search.
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible.
Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.
Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and ‘natural’ as opposed to self-conscious and studied.
Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively.
You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.
Happiness isn't something that happens to you. It is what you yourself do and determine upon.
Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow - after you have done your best to achieve success today.
For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.
The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique'.
the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine
Our self image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.
If cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control.
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.
Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have not goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.
What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live - with your self-respect alive and growing.
Use the word 'cybernetics', Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments.
The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
First-order cybernetics is the science of observed systems; Second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems.
Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.
Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise and go ahead.
Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism.
The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence
Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity.
Times will change for the better when you change.
According to the science of cybernetics, which deals with the topic of control in every kind of system (mechanical, electronic, biological, human, economic, and so on), there is a natural law that governs the capacity of a control system to work. It says that the control must be capable of generating as much "variety" as the situation to be controlled.
I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.
When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative "success mechanism" within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or "willpower.
The 'self-image' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.
To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior.
Cybernetics is NOT the banana.
Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward.
You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possilble. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs.
Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.
We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.
We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.
Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.
Accept yourself as you are. Otherwise you will never see opportunity. You will not feel free to move toward it; you will feel you are not deserving.
An idea accepted as true from any source can be every bit as powerful as hypnosis.
Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.
To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
To many of us now, computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A. But as surely as America's pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century, the same pioneer spirit today is opening up on another vast front of opportunity, the frontier of high technology.