Blueprint >> Law of Attraction

Disclaimer: This document is in raw form as I process and distill 4 years-worth of my personal development notes. Expect some typos and cryptic language for now. I will be updating frequently and polishing up.

Prescription: Understand the law of attraction. Apply the law of attraction.
Related Concepts: Positive Thinking, Constructive vs. Destructive Thinking, Mind Power

What is Law of Attraction?

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Why is it Important?

Law of attraction gets you to think constructively about your goals, eliminating toxic victim-thinking. Law of attraction helps you realize your goals and eliminate worry.

Law of Attraction Videos

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Law of Attraction: Key Points

There is a lot of miss-information and pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo out there about what the law of attraction. The metaphysics behind it is usually completely screwed up. Regardless, the law of attraction is a very useful principle if understood and applied properly.

Definition: focus on what you want rather than on what you don't want. Make a small mental note of the things you don't want, but don't spend your time and willpower ruminating about them. That's it, not a complicated idea.

Law of attraction is about making a distinction in your mind about the quality of your thoughts. Are your thoughts constructive or destructive? (positive or negative) Constructive thoughts are much more powerful than destructive ones.

On a fundamental level, what you think about affects how you behave and how you feel. And your feelings affect your behavior as well. If you are constantly thinking about the things you don't want in your life, you are perpetuating victim-thinking, which makes you not take the actions you need to be successful. You are also playing defensively and making yourself feel bad by focusing on the negative. To be successful, you need vision. Vision is positive, not negative. No one has ever accomplished anything grand by acting out of fear. You want to feel inspired, not threatened.

Any at given time, the way the world appears to you, and makes you feel, is a function of where you direct your focus and the thoughts you have. There are many great things right now in your life that you could be focused on. There are many bad things right now in your life that you could be focused on. If you have a mental habit — and that's just what it is — of focusing on the negatives in your life, you will be unnecessarily unhappy and resourceful. More than that, your unhappiness, anxiety, doubt, and unresourcefullness, will create a self-fulfilling prophecy effect! Fear and worry attracts failure, and more fear and worry into your life. Confidence attracts success, which creates more confidence.

Counter-intuitively, there is no need to focus on the negative. Worrying about a problem seems like it will lead to a solution, and sometimes it does, but many times it just makes the problem worse. Rather, let go of the problem and focus only on the solution. This can be difficult to do if you've been problem-focused your whole life. You need to un-train your negative thought habits.

Imagine this real-world scenario: you're about to go give a speech in front of a large audience. Your job depends on it, so of course you start paint gloomy scenarios in your head of how it could go wrong: What if I forget my lines? What if I run out of time? What if I freeze? Your defacto intention becomes: Please, Don't screw up this speech. But all this negative thinking has made you feel anxious now and full of doubt. So when you do get up on stage, your performance will be negatively affected by your thoughts and feelings, and you will tragically attract the very thing you wanted to avoid. You have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Alternatively, if you focused on all the ways you will ace the speech, you will walk on stage with confidence and your chances of delivering a good performance will have improved. This is why world-class, Olympic athletes visualize successful performance right before they go out to perform. It helps them create a positive self-fulfilling prophecy.

Law of attraction applies to goal-setting: always set your goals in the positive. What is it you want? Forget what you don't want. Any negative goal can be easily flipped into a positive one. So do it! Catch yourself making negative goals and immediately flip them around.

Law of Attraction myths:

• That thoughts directly attract external, material things to you. E.g., that thinking about a new BMW is the mechanism by which you get it.
• That thoughts have direct influence on the world around you through some mystical, force-like properties of the natural world.

Demystifying the law of attraction: things don't just get attracted to your thoughts by some magical cosmic force. Strip all the new-age garbage out of concept and you get:

• Thinking constructively puts your focus on the things you have control over.
• Thinking constructively gets you to take more positive action.
• It feels better to dwell on the positive, and feeling good makes you more resourceful.
• Thinking about what you want forces clarity, which is an important first step in getting it.

Try going one full week only thinking about the things you want, and never the things you don't want. Monitor your thought patterns and see which negative circumstances tend to trigger you the most.

Just notice how much better you feel when you are always thinking about the things you want versus the things you don't want. Which would you rather do?

References

1. Mind Power, John Kehoe