Dorothea Brande’s Wake Up And Live

Dorothea Brande wrote an interesting book on success titled Wake Up And Live, it is not your usual type of read. In this book that is as enjoyable as its formula is simple Brande tells the story of her discovery and shows how her eight-word technique can be applied across different areas of life. Below are a few paragraphs which will give you a brief insight into what the book is about. The book contains useful concepts on psychology that can transform your mind if applied correctly.

“There is a simple, practical procedure which will turn us around and set our faces in the right direction. It is the formula, as we have said, on which, consciously or unconsciously, every successful person acts. On the other hand, since it takes little time and soon brings its own evidence that, simple or not, its consequences are frequently amazing, it should be worth trying. A richer life, better work, the experience of success and its rewards: those ends are surely worth one experiment in procedure.”

“All the equipment needed is imagination and the willingness to disturb old habit-patterns for a while, to act after a novel fashion long enough to finish one piece of work. In any case, some results from the experiment will be seen at once. Often these first results are so astonishing that to enumerate them here might alienate readers of a sober mind. The process is straightforward and uncomplicated. It is worth trying, for it has worked in hundreds of lives.”

“America, the much-vaunted Land of Opportunity, can show so many men and women of middle age wasting themselves in drudgery, filling positions which bring them no joy, and looking forward to a future which at it’s happiest promises years of monotony, and at its worst, the nightmare of poverty-ridden unemployment.”

“Most of us disguise our failure in public; we disguise it most successfully from ourselves. It is not hard to ignore the fact that we are doing much less than we are able to do, very little of what we had planned even modestly to accomplish before a certain age, and never probably, all that we had hoped.”

“It ought to be part of education to see that each child should understand the necessity of finding this clue to his future, and be shown that it is sometimes thrown into confusion by hero-worship, or by the erroneous notion that what is an item in the success of one must be present in the success of each of us.”

“Fortunately, it is not at all necessary to be put under the sway of another’s will in order to do our own work. The solution is far simpler. All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.”