Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

BECOME AN INVERSE PARANOID
The multimillionaire W. Clement Stone started off selling newspa-
pers on the streets of Chicago at the age of 12. He went on to build
Combined Insurance Company of America, and died recently at the
age of 100 worth more than $800 million. He was a great inspira-
tion to thousands of people, and was famous for his habit of being
an “inverse paranoid.”
A paranoid is someone who believes that people are conspiring
against him or her. An 
inverse
paranoid, in contrast, is a person who
is convinced that the world is conspiring to make him or her 
success-
ful
. An inverse paranoid insists upon interpreting everything that
happens as part of a great plan leading to success. W. Clement
Stone used to respond to every difficulty with the emphatic state-
ment, “That’s good!” Then he would concentrate his attention on
finding out what was good about the situation. And he always found
something, even if it was just a valuable lesson.
If you change the definition of a problem to a 
situation
, a 
chal-
lenge
, or an 
opportunity
, your response to the problem will be posi-
tive and constructive, rather than negative and angry. If you look at
every problem as a potential opportunity, you will almost always
find within the problem an opportunity or benefit that you can take
advantage of.
Norman Vincent Peale used to say, “When God wants to send
you a gift, He wraps it up in a problem.” The bigger the problem
that you have, the bigger the gift—in the form of valuable lessons,