Fifty years of listening to troubled people has made me familiar, I think, with just about every human problem under the sun. But there’s one so prevalent that I consider it the basic human sickness. It’s the problem of the person who is living far below his potential and knows it; who is deeply unhappy, but can’t seem to do anything about it.

Usually, from where the counsellor sits, the person’s difficulties don’t seem so overwhelming – but the sufferer is convinced he can’t cope with them. Although he seems to have normal intelligence, adequate education and all the necessary attributes for successful living, he can’t summon them to his aid. His life is blurred, out of focus, without power or purpose.

Always, you find three deadly characteristics in such people: inertia, self-doubt and aimlessness. One autumn day, walking alone around our local golf course (I was hoping to scare up some sermon ideas), I came upon a young man raking leaves off green. I knew him slightly and I asked how things were going. He shrugged. "As you can see," he said, "I’m not getting anywhere."

"Where do you want to get?" I asked. He looked at me glumly. "I don’t really know," he said.

"What do you do best?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I’m not sure that I’m much good at anything."

"Well, what gives you the most satisfaction?"

He frowned. "No special thing."

"Look," I said, " I’ve asked you three of the most important questions anyone can be asked, and I’ve had three completely fuzzy answers. When you go home tonight, I want you to sit down with paper and pencil, and don’t get up until you’ve answered my questions. Then let’s meet here tomorrow at this time and we’ll take it from there."

Somewhat hesitantly, he agreed. When we met the next day, he told me that he liked to work with his hands, not his head; that he thought he might have some mechanical ability; and that what he wanted most in life was some sense of purpose or direction. Shortly thereafter, he got a job in a roofing-materials factory. Did he become president of the company? No, but today he is a foreman, living a happy and productive life. All he needed was a push to stop leading an unfocused life.

I meet people like that young man so frequently that I have developed a set of guidelines to help anyone, young or old, who feels the need to bring himself into sharper focus. There are eight points in all, and they add up to quite a stiff course in self-discipline. But anyone who makes a sustained effort to apply them will become a happier, more forceful, more effective person.

1. Pinpoint your primary goal in life: It’s not enough to say, "I want to be happy" or "I want to make money" or "I want to be a better person." You must determine exactly what you want, and when you need to say, "I intend to be a registered nurse in three years," or sales manager of this company, or editor of this newspaper, or buyer for that store, in four, five, or six years.

Write down a short summary of your goal and the achievement date; put it beside your bed and read it aloud to yourself every morning when you wake up. Vagueness is the invariable hallmark of the unfocused mind. Get rid of it.

2. Use imagination to fan desire: There’s no use pinpointing a goal in life unless you want it enormously. Daydreams and wistful wishes are not enough; there must be intense, burning desire. Nobody can put this hunger into you; you have to develop it yourself by constant, vivid imagining of the benefits that achieving your goal will bring. Ask anyone who has achieved outstanding success in any field. He will tell you that clarity of purpose and intensity of desire are the chief ingredients of the magic formula. Unless you care, you won’t get there.
3. Expect to pay for what you get: If you set a high goal, you will have to pay a high price. You will have to work, take chances, make sacrifices, and endure setbacks. You won’t be able to afford the luxury of laziness or the delights of frequent distraction. When setting your goal, remember that unless you’re willing to apply the price you’re wasting your time.
4. Send the right signals to your unconscious mind: This is crucial. The unconscious is a great dynamo, but it is also a computer that has to be properly programmed. If fear thoughts, worry thoughts, failure thoughts are constantly channelled into unconscious, nothing very constructive is going to be sent back. But if a clear, purposeful goal is steadfastly held in the conscious mind, the unconscious will eventually accept it and begin to supply the conscious mind with plans, ideas, insights, and the energies necessary to achieve that goal.
5. Be willing to fail – temporarily: A man who made a long term study of highly successful people in various fields told me that he noted they had only one trait in common: persistence. They kept picking themselves up and returning to the fight long after most men would have given up.

In a sermon not long ago, I condensed the life history of such a man. This man failed in business in ’31. He was defeated for the state legislature in ’32. He failed again in business in ’34. He had a nervous breakdown in ’41. He hoped to receive his party’s nomination for Congress but didn’t in ’43. He ran for the Senate and lost in ’55. He was defeated again for the Senate in ’58. A hopeless loser, some people said. But Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860. He knew how to accept defeat – temporarily.

6. Believe in the power of thought to change things: It’s very hard for most people to realise that the most powerful force in the world is an idea that has taken root in a human mind. But it is.

Some times ago in Australia, I met a remarkable man named Bert Walton. He told me that he had started out in life by failing at one school after another, then at one job after another. He was working for the Australian division of an American corporation – and going downhill at that – when a man came out from the parent company to talk to Australian employees. One sentence in the man’s talk struck Walton with enormous impact: You can – if you think you can.

"I suddenly realised," Walton told me, " that the reason of failure was my habit of thinking of myself as a failure. The concept created the condition – not the other way round. So I decided to change the concept. I said to myself: ‘I think I can become manager of this company for New South Wales. In fact, I think I can become manager for the whole of Australia.’ Well, it took a long time and a lot of work, and there were a lot of setbacks, but that’s the way things turned out. Then I got into the department-store business, and I said to myself, ‘I think we can build this business into one of the big chains in Australia.’ And eventually that happened too. I’m a very ordinary man, but I got hold of one extraordinary idea, and hung on.’

What happened to that man? The idea, like a burning glass, focused the rays of his personality on a definite goal with such intensity that hitherto inert elements burst into flame. The idea is not a new one. The Bible says over and over: "If we have faith, nothing shall be impossible unto you." A staggering promise, certainly, but profoundly true.

7. Never build a case against yourself: Just last week, a man came up to me and asked if we could talk. He had a stooped dejected look. And he sounded defeated. "I’m a salesman," he said. "I make a living at it, but my work is of no importance. I’m depressed and miserable most of the time. Can you help me?"

"No," I said. "I can’t crawl into your head and rearrange the machinery. But perhaps I can tell you how to help yourself. In the first place, stop cringing. Stand up straight. Next, stop running down your profession. In our society, salesmen are the ball bearings on which industry moves, without them, the economy would grind to a halt. Finally, why don’t you stop looking at yourself from a worm’s viewpoint and look at yourself from God’s? You are His child. If you are important to Him – and you are – what gives you the right to go around proclaiming your unimportance?"

We talked a bit more; then he thanked me, and went away looking thoughtful. I hope he had learned or begun to learn, the importance of not building a case against himself.

8. Stop short-circuiting yourself with alibis: Unfocused people do this constantly. They say, "The timing is wrong" or, "I’m not really qualified." They play the if-only game: "If only I had more money, or more education… if only I weren’t so tied down…" The alibis go on and on, and they just reinforce the three deadly characteristics – inertia, self-doubt, aimlessness. To become a focused person you have to control self-limiting thoughts. "I don’t believe in circumstances," George Bernard Shaw once said. "The people who get on in this world are the people who look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them."