Chris Do asks, “Do you believe in manifesting?”
He expands, “About 10 years ago, I started telling people that I wanted to travel the world, and have other people pay for it. Now, I’m invited to speak (all over the world) and am paid for it.”
Chris shares a couple of additional examples, like daydreaming about living on the beach, dreaming of starting a successful business. He later shares a sequence for his approach to manifesting: “Visualize your goal → state your intentions → declare this publicly → align your supporters and resources → take massive action.”
Chris’s writing reminds me of Freyja’s, who writes about teenage dreams of being an adult artist who lived with her friends. She writes, “The description was about five or six handwritten pages long, and at the time, it was a manifestation of desperate longing to be somewhere other than where I was, someone who felt free and cared for. At the time I saw that description as basically an impossibility; my life could never be so amazing in reality.”
She rediscovered her notebooks several years later, and realized nearly all of the statements she’d dreamed up had become, effectively, true. She writes:
“What I realised was that while that vision had been compelling up until that point (24 or 25), in the literal sense of having compelled me forward through life, my fantasies had changed and expanded in the intervening time….”
“Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now). Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.”
Similarly, Pat Walls writes about how visualization—through Napoleon Hill’s 6-step framework—effectively changed his life. He was 26 years old, working 80 hours per week in a job he’d hated, and $65,000 in credit card debt. He decided to follow the 6 steps:
1. Exact amount: I wanted exactly $10,000 in cash, and no debt.
2. My sacrifice: Follow a serious budget and start a side project that makes money.
3. Achievement date: 15 months from now.
4. Definite plan: I made a spreadsheet and ran all the numbers. It was realistic.
5. I wrote this all down on a physical piece of paper (see image below).
6. I taped this piece of paper above my bed, and read it every morning & night.
The change was gradual:
I stopped going out and getting drunk every weekend. I stopped spending frivolously. And I started making money from my side project.
– 3 months in: I officially launched http://starterstory.com
– 6 months in: I paid off my first credit card
– 12 months in: Starter Story hit $1,000/month in revenue
– 13 months in: I paid off all $65K of my debt
– 14 months in: I quit my FT job to go all in on Starter Story
15 months in – I didn’t reach my goal 🙁
I only had $5,000 in my bank account… but I wasn’t sad.
I had paid off $65,000 worth of debt in 15 months! I was debt free AND I started my own business!
An important detail: Pat still keeps the paper in his wallet. (Pat’s handwriting drew to mind Bruce Lee’s penmanship, also applied to visualization and positive thinking.)
Based on these experiences, visualization works as a tool to create a new future—to rally your brain on it—and to keep it in mind. It works on the mind at both a subconscious level (as Freyja’s and Chris’s story describes) and a conscious one (as Pat’s story describes), rallying it to take action towards the goal of the visualization.
If you have something you want to do, write it down in as much detail as possible.
If you have no idea where to start, bias towards audacity. Ankesh Kothari writes, “Here is a trick to trick yourself into being bold. Think of your smartest colleague or competitor and think of a task for him: what’s the most daring thing he can do in your field?”
You can also substitute the smart colleague or competitor with a person you admire or appreciate (even if the admiration shows through an experience of envy).