There Are No Realists

A blog post went up Monday on one of my very favorite blogs. David from Raptitude.com wrote an article titled, “When Things go Terribly Right” that generated quite a bit of interest and commentary on his site. It’s a great article and one that I recommend looking over. To read it yourself click here.

In the article he talks about shifting his perception and reallocating investment of time and thought energy. Instead of thinking about why things might not work out, or how he could fail, or what might go wrong, he decided to spend time looking forward to positive outcomes instead. Without naming “The Secret” he waded into that oh so tricky and oversimplified, “law of attraction” idea that new agers have embraced completely to the point of obnoxiousness.

If I hear one more time about how picturing myself wealthy will make me wealthy or that success is as easy as pinning a picture of something onto my vision board, I might have to hit my head repeatedly against the closest wall.

It’s not that I totally disagree with the premise. I do think people tend to draw to themselves the things they focus their energy on. I think that what bothers me is that the emphasis for so many people touting the idea is on external rewards and systems. How can you get rich? How can you get famous? How can you find love? Just imagine hard enough and it will come.

Somehow it just feels wrong to me. The focus has turned outward instead of inwardRead more....