Transformational Lives: What the World Needs Now

I have come to the end of a long series of articles based on and summarizing Napoleon (Why do I always think of Napoleon Solo when I type that name?) Hill’s book, Think and Grow Richrn.
I started the series with mixed motives, to be quite honest. At this stage in my life, when I am unemployed and my business is still lurching along on the ground preparing for take-off, growing rich sounds pretty darned good.

Since my life skills tend to be of the cerebral – not to say impractical – variety, thinking and growing rich sounded even better.

I read the book and found myself thinking, Huh? What’d he say? What do I need to take away from this rather heavy reading?

While I’m pretty good at thinking, my mind tends to work like a sieve: thoughts sift through and the bigger ones stick but a lot of them just filter through and go on into the ether. Or wherever.

There is, in Hill’s book, some golden grains of wisdom but there is also an awful lot of chaff: anecdotal material that you had to be there, in that era, to appreciate, out-moded ideas, pate
alism, chauvinism, and moralizing or just plain sermonizing.

So I decided to paraphrase it, modernize it, make it more accessible for women as well as men. I did this primarily so that I could understand it. The further I got along and the more I understood, the more I began to realize that others might benefit from a re-vamping of the book.

You see, my motives were not entirely selfish. Being an idealist, I even had some altruistic motives for growing rich. I want to help make this world we live in a better place. That’s why I entitled the first half of the series “How to Build a Better World.”

The further I got in the process and the more clearly I understood the basic premise of the book, the more I began to realize that Hill’s book could have a transformative effect. I entitled the last half the series “Transformational Income.”

American Baby Boomers, those born after 1946 and before 1964, may remember Dusty Springfield singing the song, “What the World Needs Now.”

That song was sort of a hippie theme song for a time because the lyrics say, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.”

The world does need love. That is true in any time, but it doesn’t go quite far enough. What the world needs now is not everyone reproducing like bunnies and naming the resultant offspring names like Moonglow and Chance.

What the world needs now is your goodness. What the world needs now is your wisdom. What the world needs now is your hope and faith and your awareness that what the world needs now is God in all of God’s varieties, in all of God’s revelations.

What the world needs now is the acknowledgment that God’s many faces may be different for each of us but that God is, nevertheless, present and at work in our world.

What the world needs now is the knowledge that the one face of God that all of us can see and understand is love – not the libertarian “if it feels good, do it” love of the nineteen-sixties but love that is willing and able to :

* accept differences

* acknowledge similarities

* look beyond exte
als

* reprove the arrogant

* encourage the timid

* bind up wounds

* forgive slights, oversights, and intentional hurts

* heal bodies, minds, souls, and relationships

The kind of love that, in fact, that we, as Baby Boomers, are mature enough, wise enough, to provide.

With that in mind, I invite you to read all these articles. I invite you to Think and Grow Rich. I invite you to help to build a better world and to transform not only your own life, but the lives of others.

Dusty Springfield was right after all: What the world needs now is love.