I missed the Oprah show that discussed The Secret a few days ago, although I remember seeing a discussion about it on Larry King Live a few months ago. Basically, The Secret is a concept that says that you can get anything you want in your life, simply by thinking, feeling, and acting on it. In other words, it uses the law of attraction to explain this, as in we all project an energy field, a little like a magnetic field, and we attract what we think and feel. So if you’re always feeling down and awful about yourself, you are always going to attract these same type of feelings.
This theory makes sense. However, it can be explained in much simpler terms: Negative thinking = negative results, and positive thinking = positive results. So yes, thinking, feeling, and of course acting upon these positive thoughts no doubt increases your chances to succeed dramatically. Yes, its a good thing to do to look at the bright side of everything, but there is a piece that is missing. And it is something that I’ve pondered about for a while now.
Everyone knows that they have to think positive, and most people know what they have to do to turn their fortune around. We have access to more information now than ever in the history of mankind, and it is right at our fingertips. The question is, why aren’t people doing what they know they should do? Ah ha! That’s where there is a gap. And the answer lies in MOTIVATION. Without motivation, without a certain drive, any amount of knowledge becomes obsolete. People don’t do what they know they should do because they have no motivation (or not enough) to do so. Take a look at ANY success story. Drive and motivation is almost always the difference maker. It’s that “never quit” attitude that makes someone reach a higher level of success.
This is why I study motivation. Because I realized very early on that it was perhaps the single most important factor in determining someone’s success. So yes, The Secret provides an interesting point of view, and I agree with a lot of it. However, it is not the “end all, be all” that will resolve all the issues in your life. Look at it this way: you can have a treasure hidden. The Secret, and many other courses out there are the “maps” to the hidden treasure. It shows you the route to take to get to this treasure, and this route is quite hard, long, and painful at times. However, unless you have something inside of you that pushes you so hard that you absolutely feel like you would go through all these obstacles along the route to get to the treasure, then any knowledge of the route is pointless because you are not going to embark on this journey at all or enough to get you through it entirely. Makes sense doesn’t it? This is why I find motivation so fascinating 🙂
