Book Summary

Genius is not a gift you were born with or denied. Elsie Lincoln Benedict strips the mystique off it completely in How to Get Anything You Want, and what is left is almost too simple to argue with. The genius, she says, is the one who cannot be kept away from the work. Not the most talented. Not the most credentialed. The one who forgets to eat, who treats the toil as play, who you would have to physically drag from the thing. The difference between the genius and the failure, she writes, is less in their abilities than in their attitude toward those abilities — the genius encourages the want, the failure inhibits it. ...

Don't try to kill the feeling. You cannot, and the attempt is what does the damage. Elsie Lincoln Benedict states the law flatly in How to Get Anything You Want: every intense impulse refused a natural outlet will find an abnormal one. The energy does not vanish when you sit on it. It goes underground, ferments, and comes back up somewhere uglier than where it started. You know the shape of this. The anger you swallowed in the meeting comes out sideways at home. The ambition you were told to tamp down turns into a low, chronic resentment. The grief you refused to feel shows up as a stiff neck and a short fuse. The impulse was looking for a door. You bolted the front one, so it took a window. ...

You met someone and disliked them on sight, for no reason you could name. Elsie Lincoln Benedict has a name for it, and it is not a flattering one. In How to Get Anything You Want she lays out three kinds of stored feeling that fire your reactions before logic arrives. Fixed fears, the scars from old pain. Fixed faiths, the wins that still warm you. And fixed fancies — the instant, inexplicable likes and dislikes that arrive whole, with no argument attached. ...

Choose, and then stop mourning what you did not choose. That is the cost Elsie Lincoln Benedict names in How to Get Anything You Want, and she does not let you dodge it. Success, she writes, requires a willingness to give up what you want for what you want more. Not what you do not want — what you genuinely want, set down on purpose, so your hands are free for the thing you want more. ...

What do you actually want — not on the vision board, but underneath it? Elsie Lincoln Benedict argues in How to Get Anything You Want that beneath all your stated goals sits one driving want she calls the supreme subconscious wish. A single great want that dictates every major choice you make, whether you have ever named it or not. And here is the part that stings: when one of your goals collides with that buried wish, the wish wins. Quietly. Every time. ...

When you wait for proof before you prepare, you have the order backward — and Elsie Lincoln Benedict spends a whole lesson telling you so. Her image in How to Get Anything You Want is a dinner. How often, she asks, do you hear of a guest of honor failing to show up to the reception thrown for them? We get there somehow, she says, when the preparations have been made for us personally. Success, she argues, behaves the same way. It is a guest of honor — and it flatly refuses to go where no preparations have been made. ...

Your life fits you. That is the uncomfortable claim at the center of How to Get Anything You Want, and Elsie Lincoln Benedict will not soften it. She says the outer conditions of your life are garments — made by you, when you least suspected it, in exact accordance with the pattern you carried in your subconscious. The bank balance, the calendar, the quality of the people around you: not a pile of accidents, but a suit cut to a pattern you stored downstairs without reading it. ...

Stop trusting what you tell yourself you believe. Elsie Lincoln Benedict says the thing plainly in How to Get Anything You Want: the feeling, not the thought, is your predominant attitude toward any person or task. Your real position on a thing is not the position you reasoned your way to. It is the one that shows up in your chest before reason arrives. You can think you want the big project. You can think you respect the new partner. You can think you are ready for the leap. And underneath all that thinking sits a feeling that disagrees — and the feeling is the one running your life. ...

You will not get to choose most of what happens to you. The deal falls through. The hire quits. The market turns the week you launch. Benedict grants you all of it, and then takes back the thing you thought you had lost: the event was never the part that mattered. In How to Get Anything You Want she reaches for the laundry. Picture a package of bluing dropped into a tub of wash water. One small dip, and the whole tub takes on the color — and every garment that comes out of it carries that tint. Your subconscious is the tub. The bluing is your reaction. And here is the line that should stop you: the event itself never goes into the water. Only your reaction to it gets dipped. ...

Why does the positive thinking never quite take? You have done the affirmations. You have read the right books, kept the gratitude list, repeated the mantra in the mirror. And the year still came back the shape of your fear. Elsie Lincoln Benedict has a picture for that, and it is the most useful thing in How to Get Anything You Want. She calls the subconscious a cannon — built on the boomerang principle. Every shot you fire comes back to your own feet, and it does not come back alone. It returns laden with results, realities, actual occurrences. The thoughts you load are the ammunition. But the mood you carry is the aim. ...