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Tag: success

  • In 1910 someone discovered the science of getting rich

    In 1910 someone discovered the science of getting rich

    Wallace Wattles argues in his book “the science of getting rich” that the universe is abundant and desires to lavish its riches upon us. It appeared in print in 1910 and inspired Rhonda Byrne’s ‘The Secret’. You will also find it for free at Project Gutenberg.

    What you’ll find inside:

    The power of positive thinking

    Wattles advocates for the power of positive thinking and constant focus on one’s goals to attract wealth and success. His mantra start with the following sentence and he repeats it throughout the book.

    „Man can form things in his thought, and by impressing his thought upon formless substance can cause the thing he thinks about to be created“

    Source:
    The Science of Getting Rich
    Wallace D. Wattles

    This might sound familiar, if you read “the secret” or are familiar with the idea of “law of attraction”. But to believe that good things are coming your way in a sense of “Just make a wish” is not what the author is up to.

    For him it is about priming yourself towards what you truly desire. To create a clear and definite mental image of the things you wish to have, to become or to do. Basically he asks you to focus on what you want with all you have. According to him, it is not about how hard you focus, but how firm you believe is.

    Transform from Competitive to a Creative mind

    Wattles states one prerequisite that is true today, as it was 100 years ago: it is to pass from the competitive to the creative mind.

    Have you ever wished for something so bad, that you were envious of others? Or have you wished to be able to do something and you tried so hard, that you didn’t recognised the solution at hand? This is the mindset that Wattles wants you to pass since it is not in harmony with the “formless intelligence” as he calls it.

    Gratitude is for him the key to align your creative mind. When you are grateful, you crowd out envy and competition. Being grateful will make you aware of your life situation and all the positive things around you. This will allow the creative energy to flow through established channels of natural growth and industrial and social order, as he states.

    This sounds very similar to thought shared by Ken Honda in his book “Happy Money“. He also emphasises on gratitude when it comes to your income, but also spending. Also in the book “Psychology of Money” you will find references towards greed vs. learning what you actually really desire.

    Believing is not enough, be useful

    While the creative mind is what enables the law of attraction, it does not imply that you get what you want. “The secret” by Bryan stops here and states, that it is enough to believe and you shall receive. Wattles believes in taking inspired action and living in harmony with nature’s intentions to achieve prosperity and personal growth.

    „In order to receive his own when it shall come to him, man must be active; and this activity can only consist in more than filling his present place.“

    Source:
    The Science of Getting Rich
    Wallace D. Wattles

    Wattles also has a timeless answer how to be active. According to his instructions, you should give everyone a use value in excess of the cash value you receive. If you think about it, he encourages you to contribute to abundance in life. So every of your transactions makes for more life.

    I would simplify this by stating that instead of just being and wishing, you could be useful to others and add your value to life. Being grateful will make you see what you have to offer already today, even if this might not seem much to you, it might mean the world to me or others.

    Conclusion

    • Be aware if your mindset is in the competitive or creative.
    • Establish an habit of gratitude. This can be in form of a question what you are thankful for in the evening or by saying thank you to yourself every time you do something that creates value e.g. spending money or finishing a craft etc.

    Further reading:

  • Planning personal growth done right?

    Planning personal growth done right?

    When you are young and see your future self thriving, achieving dreams, and growing into the person you aspire to be. Once you grow older, you might catch yourself saying “I had big plans”. Or even be sad about the fact, that your plans didn’t work out yet.

    What you’ll find inside:

    Most of the people I know get the planning wrong, as their plans don’t survive reality. It is not only the plan itself, but the process of planning itself. It helps you figure out if what you’re doing right now makes sense.

    You don’t have to be smart, but have a plan

    People often think success comes from being intelligent. But having a good plan can be just as important, or even more important. While smart people think fast, a plan offers structure and direction. It is a blueprint for anyone, regardless of their intellectual abilities, to achieve their goals.

    With defined steps in place, you can navigate obstacles with confidence and focus, ensuring that your efforts are aligned with your objectives. Having a good plan and thinking ahead means you don’t have to rely on sudden, brilliant ideas. It shows that steady, step-by-step efforts can make up for not being the smartest.

    Gru on planning, but missing execution step

    You plan, God laughs

    The trouble with plans is that only those that work in the real world are helpful. Exactly this is the hard part of planning and we will get to that.

    But even bad plans are better than nothing. Because the process of planning is equally important as the plan itself. Crafting a plan helps in cultivating valuable skills such as discipline and time management. When you work with a plan, you are more likely to develop a problem-solving mindset, as the process requires thinking ahead and analyzing potential outcomes. This strategic approach encourages continuous learning and adaptability, which are crucial traits in any field.

    Hope for the best, plan for the worst

    Even if you don’t have all the answers at the onset, a plan allows you to identify resources and support systems you may need, ensuring that you are not working in isolation. Planning helps us do things better. It shows that anyone can succeed if they organise, try hard, and keep going.

    What makes a good plan?

    Our future is filled with unknowns – this is reality for all of us. A good plan does not pretend this was not true. It embraces the this fact with room for errors. Because the more you need specific elements in your plan to be true, the more fragile your plan becomes.

    Margin for mistake can come in different forms for you plan and planning process:

    • Loose timeline: Not relying that e.g. you have to master a skill by a defined deadline. If you do, this will be a bonus on top, but if you don’t, there should not be extra punishment.
    • Flexible thinking: This could be a wiggle room for interpretation of your personal growth aspiration. Loosing five pounds in three months might be harder to achieve than becoming someone that lives healthy. See also goals vs system oriented thinking.
    • Use of resources: Be it time, money, machines or other people – you can adopt the way on how you make use of it. Being cost-effective or extravagant might help in overcoming the challenges you might face.

    I got it wrong for so many years that leaving room for error has nothing to do with being conservative. Conservative thinking is about avoiding a certain level of risk. You do not want to limit yourselves, especially if it is about personal growth plans.

    Following this advice you are planning for what is not going according to your plan. I feel that especially the wiggle room for mistakes in planning is under appreciated. If considered well it will raise your odds to succeed by allowing you to stay on course with your plan. It allow you to change course without abandoning the whole plan and start over again or even worse quitting.

    But keep in mind: Even your best plan is just an idea unless you put it into action.

    Conclusion

    • A plan is the lynchpin between your intention and the actual action. 
    • Plans are only useful, if they can survive reality. And all our future reality is filled with unknowns.
    • Many plans don’t work out not because they’re bad, but because they’re just okay when they actually need to be perfect.

    Further readings:

  • Embrace Failure To Achieve Victory

    Embrace Failure To Achieve Victory

    As I watched my son take his first unsteady steps, I couldn’t help but be aware of the potential pitfalls and dangers around him.

    It was in these moments, observing my son growing up, that I began to truly understand why failing is the most normal thing in the world and starting to ask myself the question why we as grown-ups have such a hard time when it happens to us.

    What you’ll find inside:

    About trial and error while growing up

    Childhood is a continuous journey of trial and error. Every new skill, every milestone, we achieve through a series of attempts and failures. Even though my son figured out to e.g. open the door, he continued to experiment and explore different ways to achieve what he had in mind.  While researching on this topic, I learned is totally a normal thing for kids. They take the risk of failure just to explore whether there is an alternative to get things done.

    Continuous retry and failure of Patrick Star

    When we grow older our capability of handling failures changes the same way as experience success. There is a correlation when I think about it. 

    Latest in Kindergarden, kids start comparing themselves with others and potentially get the feeling that winning or being successful increases their acceptance amongst their peers and hence increases their social worth. This follows through in several aspects of today’s society. Being the smartest and getting the confirmation with excellent grades. Being the best by getting the confirmation of winning a tournament. Even team sports like soccer have their individual champions. Or what about social proof on social media by comparing who has the most followers? 

    Failure is a universal experience

    But everyone fails at some point, in some way. It’s the common thread that binds us all, from the toddler learning to walk to the CEO launching a new venture. Some of us are in a state of constant failure due to how they set goals. Yet, despite its universality, we often stigmatise failure.

    When I failed in my early days I remember that I was told to know better, since I was old enough to do better. In the majority of cases there is no „well done for trying“. We fear failure and avoid it because we feel ashamed when it happens.

    Avoiding to do something new because of fear of failure is a missed learning opportunity.

    Sometimes, our fear of failing is so intense that it stops us exploring new opportunities. The purpose of the emotion fear is to make us alert. But this emotion can actually hold us back in our comfort zone when we have the chance to grow and broaden our horizons.

    Stop the fear roller coaster and start fresh

    I reflected on all my main failures in the past and there were many from what I can tell. And since I tend to be hard on myself, I also asked a friend to share his point-of-view on my failures.

    Once I acknowledged, that my failures are not a reflection of my worth, but were an opportunity to improve, things got a lot easier. And with things I mean my approach to try our new stuff and experiment with my existing behaviour and habits. But getting to accept failures being part of the game is the hard part. How to get to this state is very individual. I will share with you what worked for me, as someone who was thought that failure are bad and to be avoided. 

    It all started with reflecting on my son’s behaviour of incautious learning. Be it learning riding a bike, swimming or building lego robots at some point, he got so frustrated that what he did was not according to what he had in mind, that got very angry and eg. Threw his half way built robot across the room. The robot was broken, he started crying because he was angry about the it and about himself on what he just did.

    It was a personal failure for him. He had a clear expectation in his mind, how the robot would look like and it didn’t match reality. Once we talked about that it is not OK to throw things around and all the emotions that overwhelmed him, he again started calmly to build the robot again – with a better version, as he stated. 

    From that I derived three actions to myself when it comes to personal failing: 

    1. Every time I fail emotions like frustration or anger are necessary vents to steam off. I let it happen. If possible, I try to direct these emotions into some kind of constructive activity. I figured that journaling it out of my head or any kind of immediate physical activity releases the initial spike of stress. 
    2. I reflect on why it is a failure and why I see it as such. Is it because of my own expectation towards the outcome or are there expectations by someone else. Especially if it me setting the bar high I ask someone who I trust for help to reflect. Depending on the topic this is my wife, friend or even good old internet.
    3. I accept failure by asking myself, if I tried with all I have. Sometime this is not case, then I need to understand why in order to improve the next time. But if I honestly answer this with a yes, I come to peace with the myself and my failure. 

    Don’t just “try again” or “try harder”

    If you are missing the standard phrases of „stand up, dust yourself off and try again“, it is because I believe they are too generic to be shared with anyone as actionable advice. Even for things you really want, it is too naive to blindly follow this advice. Some times it is better to quit, than wasting energy on a something with low probability of achievement and the early you know, the faster you can focus on something else. 

    For me, the main factor in deciding whether to try again is if it boosts my energy level. Consider my love for making music and playing the guitar. It feels so exciting and powerful to be the one creating the sound, melody, and rhythm.

    However, learning to play “Nothing Else Matters” has been a frustrating journey. I often fall short of my own expectations during practice because it just doesn’t sound like the original. Still my energy level increases with every try. That is why I see it as an important reflection point before trying again.

    If I give it my all, maybe even multiple times, and it leaves me feeling drained, I’m perfectly fine with accepting that this as a failure and moving on to something else. But stepping back and don’t trying again, doesn’t mean that you lost for ever. Just this time it didnt work out.

    From this failure, I learned something valuable. I was brave enough to try, and that courage will make it easier for me to attempt new things in the future.

    Summary: on failing and why it is the path to go for winners

    • Accept that failing is part of the game in everything you and also others do in life. 
    • As long as trying makes you feel engaged and brings positive energy you are on track.
    • Once trying is just a sucker of your energy change the approach or try something else.

    Further readings: