[Note: Read Predicting the Future – Part 2 first]
I left off with… “What strikes me as especially interesting is that I had once before been involuntarily unemployed, with a distinctly different frame of mind, and it was that experience that ultimately led to writing the book.”
I’ll start this installment by saying The Physics of Success is not the story of how I saved myself by “doing something marvelous” that is described in the book. Actually what I did was stuff other people wrote about, and the physics in the book is stuff that other people figured out. I just put them together – the reason I wrote the book is covered in this entry.
Eight or nine years ago, I already knew about success principles (read about them here). I just hadn’t been using them. I was all wrapped up in the day-to-day business of life, job, kids, and lousy economy. Then, when it all caught up with me, my career, family life, finances, health and pretty much everything went down the crapper. Then (as noted in the recommendations in the book) I saw something that reminded me that I actually had control of my own life. The reason my life was out of control was that I gave up control, and let myself be controlled.
When I changed that attitude, my life got better. Not that everything got suddenly wonderful, but everything got better from one day to the next (and continues to do so).
What bugged me was why I got trapped in a negative cycle when for all intents and purposes I knew better! I had pretty much written this off, and just continued to pay attention to my life. Then, as described in the entry referenced above, when it dawned on me that the physics I knew actually explained why success principles work, I realized that it was the success princples that were the primary factor in determining the direction of my life, and that everything else was secondary to that.
In other words, to get to where you want to be from where you are, you may pass through uncharted territory. However, if you know you are on the road to where you want to go, passing through a bad part of town is not much of a concern. The only time being in a bad part of town is a cause for worry is if you are LOST in a bad part of town, and don’t know how to leave.
So, a few months ago the same thing happened to me that happened to me nine years ago. This time, it didn’t even faze me. I had a book to write, and I planned to complete that and go back to work. So, I completed the book and then went back to work, exactly as I had planned, even though the economy is worse, jobs are tighter, bills are higher, and so on.
[As a side note Andrea was a little bit stunned when things actually worked out exactly as planned. I had to ask her if she thought that I had spent half a year just writing down B.S. She answered that she believed me, but didn’t expect things to work out quite that exact!]
So, getting back to Ken; he was picturing himself in the place that I was nearly a decade ago – out of work without a lot of prospects. And my mindset back then was pretty unhappy. Thus, his surprise when I was not only not unhappy, but I appeared to be happier than most of the people who were still working.
Which brings us (finally) to the finale.
<-sorry, couldn’t resist->
Last October I wrote down what would happen. In November, December, January and February, many things happened, not all of which seemed connected to what I wrote down in October. By March 1, what I wrote down in October had happened, and all the seemingly unrelated events suddenly made sense.
In one sense, you might say I achieved my goal. In another, I had written down the future on that piece of paper. If that is the case, then I had, with surprising accuracy, actually predicted the future. That means that The Physics of Success describes how you can predict the future, at least for yourself.
Most important, I think, is the state of mind that I was able to maintain simply because I understood what was happening around me. That, more than anything, is worth the knowledge.
