He began testing pebbles on the first day he arrived. He devised a simple but effective plan to avoid picking up the same pebble over again. When he picked up a cold pebble, he would throw it into the sea.

Years passed. Every day, he picked up pebbles and threw them into the sea. He made his living by fishing and spent his nights sleeping under his torn, damp blanket on the cold beach. With each pebble that he threw into the sea, his hopes diminished. One day, one fine day, indistinguishable from the blur of other days that had passed before, he picked up a pebble, a warm pebble, an extraordinarily warm pebble—and threw it into the sea.

Your mind, once filled with inspiration, can become dull and useless once you lose touch with your attention and awareness.

After years of picking up pebbles and throwing them into the sea, his mind had become dull with conditioning, his motion of throwing automatic. Lulled into habit, his senses had become dull, his sense of discrimination tarnished. Because he had become the slave of autonomic responses, he lost what he had spent years looking for.

The poor man ended up becoming poorer still—although he had found a secret which would have made him fabulously rich.

He should have succeeded because he followed numerous success principles. He took a risk when he bought the book. He focused on its most vital information. He acted on this information by gathering his resources and heading out to the scene of the action.

On the shore, he devised a simple and elegant strategy. And, with single-minded intensity, he persisted, working on his chosen task methodically, relentlessly.

He made only one single mistake: he succumbed to habit and he did not think about what he was doing. His attention had wavered, his focus lost. His loss of awareness was his undoing.

Awareness, then, is the key ingredient to making all the success principles come to life.

You can do everything right, but fail, if your mind has lost its sharpness, become dulled by routine. He had no-one and nothing to blame but himself, and his only failing was that he had failed to be awake, alert to his golden moment. Similarly, we are all responsible for ourselves, and cannot blame others for our loss of opportunity. It is our alertness, our depth of awareness that makes for success or failure, happiness or despair.

James Allen, who wrote the masterpiece, As a Man Thinketh, talks about the vital power of the mind in creating success. “All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct results of his own thoughts. In a justly ordered universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute. A man’s weakness and strength, purity and impurity, are his own, and not another man’s; they are brought about by himself, and not by another; and they can only be altered by himself, never another. His condition is also his own, and not another man’s. His suffering had his happiness are evolved from within. As he thinks, so is he as he continues to think, so he remains.”

We neglect our minds by allowing them to be conditioned, by habits, by environment, by our social systems, and when things go wrong, we blame it on others, or events outside our control, but, in truth, we are the one’s responsible...for our minds are perfectly capable of rising to the occasion, of creating original thoughts based on fresh perceptions. Those who use the mind well may produce sublime works of art or science, create great fortunes, and discover new worlds. An alert, well-ordered mind is a powerful asset.

In your own life, do you neglect your mind?

Do you, for example, ask your mind for terrible things? Thoughts create effects, on your body, in your personal interactions, and in the environment. They are dynamic. Even a passive thought is having some kind of effect on your internal organs or the way your biochemistry works. Do you ask your mind for ill-health, poverty, fear, ignorance, bad habits, incompetence, and misfortune? If you are experiencing any such conditions it is because you have specifically directed your mind that way. Or do you, simply, not use your mind to create your reality, but merely respond to your environment, acting reflexively, without original thought or perception, without much awareness, lulled into a mind-numbing routine.

The mind is vital to creation. If it is used well, it can produce thoughts that create a magical reality around you. However, if, for one reason or another, you have become a slave to habits, to autonomic thought processes, to reflexive behavior and unoriginal thinking, then your thoughts will produce poor results in your life, and, like the protagonist in the story, you might throw away a fortune.