Positive Thinking: Ignore the Trolls if You Want Success
When I first announced to my friends and family that I was determined to become self-employed, living the writing life, I was approximately 13 years old.
I’ll never forget my father’s reaction to my dream of becoming a published novelist. A nuclear physicist with a PhD, my father has always based his decisions upon what he describes as “reality”—in other words, those things that are physically evident and therefore, can be safely cataloged as fact.
Positive thinking, in my father’s opinion, makes one “feel good,” but positive thinking has no quantifiable impact on accomplishment. My father, who was raised on the Puritan Work Ethic, insists that hard work and self-sacrifice are the keys to success, and that positive thought is merely imagination—the “mumbo jumbo” of the New Thought Movement.
About a week after I professed my ambition to become a published novelist, my ever-practical father returned home from work and handed me an IRS document. This document reported the average salaries of the most popular professions. At the top of the list were the highest paying jobs; at the bottom of the list were the lowest paying ones.
Without saying a word, my father pointed to the last entry in the report. “Writer” was listed as earning 7 cents per hour.
The year was roughly 1975.
May all your dreams come true:
even the ones the Trolls laughed at!
Since that time, I’ve met writers who are happy and successful. They’re focused on the New Thought Movement rather than the Puritan Work Ethic. With their encouragement, I began studying the Universal Law of Attraction and the power of positive thinking, reading such ground-breaking books as Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill; You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay; Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain, and You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought by Peter McWilliams. (See links, below)
As I educated myself in the New Thought Movement, I began to accept that the Puritan Work Ethic was not only making me miserable, it was limiting my ability to create the writing life that I’d always dreamed of. I came to believe that if hard work was the only criteria for accomplishing my writing goals, then I would have been a New York Times Bestseller by the age of 21.
Still, something was missing. My goals were slow in coming even through I was focusing my Imagaination, practicing creative visualization, and engaging in positive thinking.
Last year, I met a man—a healer—who has performed miracles in public venues. He teaches his students (from heads of state, to professional athletes, to Hollywood celebrities, to authors like me) to consciously and deliberately focus the power of Imagination upon what they want, as opposed to what they don’t want. Whether we choose to embrace the concept or not, he says, our minds are powerful magnets. What we focus upon is attracted into our lives.
He goes one step further, though. He has the courage to talk about the often unseen experience of “energy,” the subtle vibrations that exist in all animate and inanimate matter, even though many people aren’t sensitive enough, or aware enough, of such subtleties to recognize this energy in action.
As my healer friend and I were talking about the power of positive thinking and the Law of Attraction, he pointed out that if one always focuses upon what is physically evident (“the facts”), or if one accepts an existing circumstance as immutable (“reality”), then change cannot occur. Healing and prosperity cannot be achieved. Dreams cannot be made real.
“No one has more experience than a Writer at imagining a Reality into existence,” my friend encouraged me. “Believe what you want into form. Do it by taking action. Just one small step every day.”
My healer friend has shown me that my positive thinking does change my personal energy. That my positive thinking activates the Law of Attraction. That it brings me the opportunities that eluded me earlier in my writing life.
Now the rest is up to me. Do I choose to recognize the new opportunity, or do I choose to use my Imagination in a negative way, letting fear blind me? Do I take action, or do I revert to the limiting beliefs that did not serve me earlier in my writing life?
It’s never to late to live your dreams! Get inspired! Focus your mind on positive outcomes! Allow your positive thinking to activate the Law of Attraction in your life.
