For a long time I believed in the concept of becoming what you think about.
Or as Mike Dooley says, “thought become things”.
But not entirely.
A big criticism of The Secret was its lack of attention to the action part.
Follow your bliss and the money will come.
Not if following your bliss means sitting on your meditation cushion all day visualising your perfect life.
I think if that is all you do, you will have a long wait for your dream to materialise.
You have to go with what makes sense for you.
Bill Harris of Centerpointe was in the film but he didn’t get to talk about one of his main precepts.
The only reason that someone will give you money is if you give them something they want more than the money.
You have to provide value somehow.
For some people, logic has no place in all this, but this idea seems entirely logical to me.
By all means, visualise your goal and put it out to the Universe, but then go and do something.
I am writing about this now because I just read a book that puts a totally different spin on things.
It’s not a metaphysical book. It is a business book.
It called Work the System and the author is Sam Carpenter.
He is from the Woodstock generation and he bought into the dream that things could change.
But he realised that what happened at Woodstock was a blip, a momentary piece of magic that could never be sustained.
When his business was on the verge of collapse for the umpteenth time and he was convinced that this time it was terminal, it freed him to think in different way.
What he came up with pretty much aligns with something else that Bill Harris says.
He talks about your Internal Map of Reality.
Your model of the world that exists in your head. Your set of beliefs, values and filters that create your illusion of what is real.
The problem with this is that it is created when you are a toddler and not under your conscious control.
It might have served you then but there is a good chance it doesn’t serve you as an adult.
Sam Carpenter, coming from an engineering background, puts it slightly differently.
His insight was to view everything as a system. His business, his relationships, his life.
Each of these is a primary system made up of smaller subsystems. These run like clockwork most of the time and do what they are set up to do.
Again, if the results appear chaotic sometimes, it is because they weren’t set up consciously.
What you need to do is take an elevated view. Step out of the situation and look at it from a higher perspective.
Then you can identify each of these subsystems and check them over.
If they no longer serve you discard them. The rest need to be simplified and adjusted so that there output is in accordance without the needs of the primary system.
A set of perfect subsystems leads to a perfect primary system. i.e. Your business or your life.
Sam no longer believes in “follow your bliss and the money will come”.
Now he says, “get the mechanics right and your bliss will come”.
He has achieved this for himself, cutting his work week from 80 hours to 2 hours and making more money in the process.
Now I like to dream and visualise how things can be as much as the next person, but I also like a healthy dose of logic.
The pragmatic approach of finding a way to give value and setting up the systems to do it satisfies my logical brain.
I like to set my intentions and then demonstrate my belief to the Universe by setting to work on something practical.
As Mike Dooley also says, “do whatever you can, with whatever you’ve got, from wherever you are”.
Do you agree? Let me know below.