Wake Up and Live

Dorothea Brande (1893 – 1948) was a well-respected writer and editor in New York. She was born in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago, the Lewis Institute in Chicago (later merged with Armour Institute of Technology to become Illinois Institute of Technology), and the University of Michigan. Her book Becoming a Writer, published in 1934, is still in print and offers advice for beginning and sustaining any writing enterprise.

She also wrote Wake Up and Live, published in 1936, which sold over two million copies. It was made into a musical by Twentieth Century Fox in 1937.
While she was serving as associate editor of The American Review in 1936, she married that journal's owner and editor, Seward Collins. Collins was a prominent literary figure in New York and a proponent of an American version of fascism, which he explored in The American Review.
Dorothea Collins died in New Hampshire.
Why do we fail?
Because, besides being creatures subject to the Will to Live and the Will to Power, we are driven by another will, the Will to Fail, or die.
There is a simple, practical procedure which will turn us around and set our faces in the right direction.
The procedure is simple; the first steps of putting it into practice so easy that those who prefer to dramatize their difficulties may refuse to believe that anything so uncomplicated could possibly help them.
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. How long that period is will vary, of course, with the work to be accomplished, and whether it is all dependent on oneself or of the unwieldier type which the executive and administrator know, where the factor of other human temperaments must be taken into account.
Here are the twelve suggested steps that millions have followed and that anyone who wants success should follow, too:
1. Spend one hour a day without speaking except in answer to direct questions.
2. Think one hour a day about one subject exclusively.
3. Write a letter without using the first person singular.
4. Talk for fifteen minutes without using the first person.
5. Write a letter in a placid, successful tone, sticking to facts about yourself.
6. Pause before you enter any crowded room and consider your relations with the people in it.
7. Keep a new acquaintance talking exclusively about him/herself.
8. Talk exclusively about yourself for fifteen minutes.
9. Eliminate vague phrases like “I mean” and “As a matter of fact” from your conversation.
10. Plan to live two hours a day according to a rigid time schedule.
11. Set yourself twelve instructions on pieces of paper, shuffle them, and follow the one you draw.
12. Say “yes” to every reasonable request made of you in course of one day.
Excerpted from

"Wake Up and Live" by Dorothea Brande







“Act as though it were impossible to fail,” as Dorothea Brande said.
THE STRANGEST SECRET
by Earl Nightingale




Flesch–Kincaid: 10.5

When a shy, timid wallflower is told in hypnosis, and believes or "thinks" that he is a bold, self-confident orator, his reaction patterns are changed instantly. He currently acts as he currently believes. His attention is given over completely to the positive desired goal—and no thought or consideration whatsoever is given to past failures.

Dorothea Brande tells in her charming book, Wake Up and Live, how this one idea enabled her to become more productive and successful as a writer, and to draw upon talents and abilities she never knew she had. She had been both curious and amazed after witnessing a demonstration in hypnosis. Then she happened to read one sentence written by psychologist F. M. H. Myers which she says changed her whole life. The sentence by Myers explained that the talents and abilities displayed by hypnotic- subjects were due to a "purgation of memory" of past failures, while in the hypnotic state. If this were possible under hypnosis, Miss Brande asked herself—if ordinary people carried around within themselves talents, abilities, powers, which were held in and not used merely because of memories of past failures—why couldn't a person in the wakeful state use these same powers by ignoring past failures and "acting as if it were impossible to fail?" She determined to try it. She would act on the assumption that the powers and abilities were there—and that she could use them—if only she would go ahead and "ACT AS IF"—instead of in a tentative half-hearted way. Within a year her production as a writer had increased many times. So had her sales. A rather surprising result was that she discovered a talent for public speaking, became much in demand as a lecturer—and enjoyed it, whereas previously she had not only shown no talent for lecturing, but disliked it intensely. Maxwell Maltz PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS [1960]