Looking back on my own life I can see that some of the happiest years were those when I was struggling through as a medical student, and living from hand to mouth in my early days of practice. Many times I was hungry. I was cold and ill-clad. I worked hard a minimum of about 12 hours a day. Many times I did not know from month to month where the money was coming from to pay my rent. But I did have a goal. I had a consuming desire to reach it, and a determined persistence which kept me working toward it.

I related all this to the young business executive and suggested that the real cause of his unhappy feeling was not that he had lost $200,000, but that he had lost his goal; he had lost his aggressive attitude, and was yielding passively rather than reacting aggressively.

"I must have been crazy," he told me later, "to let you convince me that losing the money was not what was mak­ing me unhappy—but I'm awfully glad that you did." He stopped moaning about his misfortune, "faced about," got himself another goal—and started working toward it. Within five years he not only had more money than ever before in his life, but for the first time he was in a business that he enjoyed.

Practice Exercise: Form the habit of reacting aggressively and positively toward threats and problems. Form the habit of keeping goal-oriented all the time, regardless of what happens. Do this by practicing a positive aggressive attitude, both in actual everyday situations which come up, and also in your imagination. See yourself in your imagination taking positive, intelligent action toward solv­ing a problem or reaching a goal. See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, grappling with them in an aggressive and intelligent manner. "Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom them­selves, either in imagination or practice," said Bulwer-Lytton, the English novelist