Within all of us lies a hidden power. This hidden power could be the one thing you need to bring about your greatest successes. For many, this power is often underused and underdeveloped. For the mass of highly successful people, it is used every day.

Known as the “workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man”, the imagination is the workshop of the man. The term imagination simply means the faculty of imagining something that could be, without seeing it first. Imagination is when we form mental pictures of a future desired result, invention, business concept, service, organization, movement, etc.

Every great person has used the faculty of imagination and harnessed its power to accomplish. Imagination is one of the critical success factors in life, yet, sadly it often goes untapped for many of us.

The truth is that we can all develop our imagination to greater capacities if we just knew a little bit more about how our imagination works and how to use it!

Two Primary Forms of Imagination

There are two forms of the imaginative faculty according to Napoleon Hill: Synthetic Imagination and Creative Imagination.

Synthetic Imagination

Through the synthetic imagination, we make connections between concepts, ideas or plans from past experiences/knowledge and put them in new combinations to essentially “create” something new from something old. The synthetic imagination helps us to process old information based upon new information and bring the thoughts together to form a more complete idea. When a problem cannot be solved by synthetic imagination, we have the great opportunity of developing and harnessing our creative imagination.

Creative Imagination

Through the creative imagination, we make a connection with new thoughts altogether. Judge where these new thoughts come from yourself, but what happens with the creative imagination is new. A new concept, thought, idea or plan comes out of seemingly “nowhere” as a hunch or moment of inspiration. Our creative imaginations only work as well as our conscious minds are working at a very rapid rate. We must be thinking accurately and clearly to use our creative imagination with its greatest potential.

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” – Albert Einstein

The Great Untapped Resource of Many

If we do not know very much about how to use our imaginations for achievement, we have most likely allowed it to become weak and inactive. But just like exercising a limp or underused body to make it strong again, we can revive and make our imaginations more alert.

The best way to get started using the power of imagination for achievement is to make use of your synthetic imagination and start using your conscious thinking to it’s greatest capacity.

To use your synthetic imagination, spend some time everyday thinking and planning your future, starting with today. Just think! Just beginning to think and plan will wake up your imagination and cause it to seek connections from the past to new ideas to bring your plans into a reality. Reading is also important for the synthetic imagination. We can not connect old ideas to new ones if we never fill our minds with new ideas!

Making use of your conscious thinking simply means solving today’s problems with rational and common sense solutions. Some challenges we face day to day can easily be dissolved through rational problem solving and planning with common sense. Once we begin using our conscious minds at our highest rates, we can tap into our imaginations for the missing pieces.

Remember that ideas are the beginning of all great achievement. There are ideas lying dormant within all of us that can be connected and brought together with new ideas to form great ideas using the synthetic imagination. The creative imagination can help us most when our synthetic and conscious thinking has brought us as far as we can go. Then, we have to rely on inspiration and creative imagination to help us.

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” – Carl Sagan

There is a reasoning capability within every person. This reasoning capability is really simple.  Reason, in its most basic definition, means “a basis or cause, as for some belief, action, fact, event, etc”. In other words, reasoning is how you come to a conclusion based upon the information you input into your mind, whether through experience, circumstance, books, articles, mp3′s, or podcasts.

As you bring into your mind new information, how you reason with that new information to form conclusions is very important. It’s important because when you reason and come to a conclusion, it will in time become a belief. If you reason correctly, you will form accurate conclusions. If you reason incorrectly, you will form faulty conclusions.

Your conclusions become your beliefs. Once again, if your conclusions are incorrect because your reasoning is not right, your beliefs will be incorrect. If your beliefs are incorrect, your life will suffer. You will not be successful. If you want to see success beyond your wildest imagination, you have to start with reasoning correctly because your beliefs determine your feelings.