CHANGE—THE ONLY PERMANENT THING IN THE UNIVERSE
by Napoleon Hill

THE LAW of change is one of the great miracles with which the Creator has blessed humans and every other creature. Change is an important tool in human progress. Yet, it’s the one thing against which many people fight hardest. The law of change is, however, inexorable. Uncounted civilizations of Mankind have died for violating it. For the law reads that just as the physical world must undergo incessant change, Man’s social and cultural world must progress or die.

But the law is a blessing. Without it, Man would still be an animal. With it he can map his own earthly destiny and create the ways and means of attaining it. It is the device by which the habits and thoughts of men continuously reshape themselves into a better system of human relations, leading toward harmony, better understanding and closer brotherhood.      

You can use the law of change to achieve your individual aims of material success. Fatalism is insufficient. You must take positive steps to make events work out the way you want them, in full faith that they will come to pass if your goal is a proper one.      
 
Recognition of the law of change can ease the blows that life deals out to you. Even the loss of a loved one will be softened by acknowledgment that grief itself is something that must pass away.      

Instead of resisting the law of change, make it work for you. When Woodrow Wilson first advocated formation of the Federal Reserve System, many bankers cried out loudly against what they considered an unnecessary change from the old tried and true methods.

But others, far more foresighted, knew that the old order was bound to pass away. The result was the organization of a financial system that has saved many banks in times of emergency.

Henry Ford should have known more certainly than any man of his time that the law of change demands persistent progress. But he once lost sight of the fact—and almost lost his business.      

A stubborn man, Ford refused to believe that the Model “T” could ever be supplanted despite warnings from associates. Competitors proved him wrong and Ford’s sales dropped dangerously before he realized his error and recouped with new, modern models.      

Constant repetition has not blemished the truth of the old statement that “Time and tide wait for no man.” And Shakespeare said: “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”      

You must be prepared to seize the opportunities offered you by the irresistible law of change—or doom yourself to failure.

Source: Success Unlimited, August 1962, p. 31.

Terrie