We’ve all been hearing about The Secret for a while now…. Oprah’s talking about it, your community is talking about it. Perhaps you’ve read the book. Now it’s coming to your movie theater?
I can’t take it anymore. I’ve got students with lousy work ethics telling me they’re going to Brown because they’ve put it on a vision board and they’ve told the universe that’s what they’d most like to do. I suspect if I told my students how many of my other students have an identical vision, they’d flip; the admissions numbers and their thought lives aren’t in synch. Sorry to let the cat out of the bag.
It’s time we sort out the differences between wishful thinking (e.g. The Secret or Law of Attraction) and outstanding personal positioning and decision-making (what Rosalene Glickman aptly calls optimal thinking in her eponymous book).
I’m not going to lie: it seems like such a nice idea that if one wants something badly enough that “the universe” (whatever that is) will just line up with her and conspire to make it happen. However, I daresay Hitler really wanted to kill the Jews—and did a pretty effective job for a while there—and I’d hate to think that my universe got on board with his wholehearted, albeit despicable, desires. By the same token, people like Sean Combs, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack Obama aren’t sitting at home writing little journals about how much they want to be media moguls or The President; they’re working their butts off and making the most of every opportunity!
I’m going to challenge you in the midst of all this Secret stuff to buckle down and start thinking optimally. Optimal thinking calls us to decisively weigh out our options, assess the potential outcomes of our actions, calculate the risks involved, and then pointedly move in a direction towards our objectives. That means that if you want to get a high SAT score, you can’t use Professor Harold Hill’s Think System and hope to do well; you have to work at it!
It’s true, the implementation of optimal thinking feels quite a bit like implementing The Secret in that there’s a good deal of focus and meditation on goals. In fact, some of the things that The Secret suggests probably foster the same sorts of outcomes that optimal thinking would. For example, if I have a “vision board” in my locker with some pictures of Harvard and words like Achieve glued to it, I’m subconsciously encouraging myself to give my all at school and not to lose focus. My vision board may ostensibly lead me to get higher grades just because it’s a great reminder.
However, optimal thinking restores your personal agency (that’s your ability to act and make decisions for yourself, rather than being someone who passively reacts to the world). In other words, going to Harvard, achieving great grades, becoming Captain of the Track team are all great objectives, but you’re held accountable for designing and following up with a plan that maximizes the possibilities of those outcomes. Rather than “putting it out there” that you want to be on the debate team, you take every opportunity to assess each moment of your day and look for new ways to become a better arguer, to become more informed, and to improve your ability to see both sides of an issue.
Look, leaving your personal agency out of the equation can be tempting when your confidence is shot; in that case, if getting into Brown was merely a wish and it doesn’t come true, there’s no one to blame but Star Light Star Bright (certainly not yourself!). Ultimately though, I would wager that particularly when we’re working toward those goals that seem like they can’t be achieved without resorting to a flat out wish, we’ll fail without the pointed decision to optimize every situation.
It’s true: sometimes we just get lucky. Every now and then things seem to fall into place, but optimal thinking prepares us to respond to less-than-ideal situations and get as much out of them as we can. The Secret is safe; optimal thinking requires ownership. However, I’m willing to bet you’ll have so much more to own when you set your goals and are brave enough to optimize your life so that they’re more likely to be achieved.
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Lest I plagiarize myself, I’d like to say that this post is an adaptation of some material I wrote for adults… you should be able to find the parts of (if not the whole) original version at CreativelyThriving.com soon.
Thank you, I am so sick of hearing people, like the philosophy spouted out in the secret that their positive attitude will get them somewhere. It is a sliver of what it is needed, it is not about thinking positive, it is acting on those thoughts. The idea that the universe will supply what we want without our work in the process is insane. The universe or creator or whatever is so far beyond our capacity to understand that we cannot even begin to have that kind of inflated ego. The universe or fate or what have you, provides opportunities. You need to be ready to take those opportunities.
We can have an ultimate goal in mind, and that is good, it can be an amazingly difficult or astronomical goal (I personally think the more outrageous the better) but coupled with that goal, we must also have a plan of action to achieve that goal.
In this process we might have many steps and those can be very unclear, but you should have a ‘next action’. look at what you can do now to get you closer to that goal. Then do that, then figure out what after that you need to after that, and so on.
What I can’t stand about ‘the secret’ is that it seems to promote a lack of action. All of these great people in history, their secret wasn’t that they had positive attitudes and told the universe to give it to them, it was that they worked their tails off, getting ready for it to happen, to make it happen, and then all of the sudden they got lucky, right? no they spent their time preparing themselves to be lucky, but doing all the work that is required to get there.
I am glad someone said it
I have seen The Secret and my best translation for it, is what I always tell the teens that I coach-
Living YOUR DREAM is about moving in sync with your own reality.
So when you learn to accept and celebrate your reality (on both the light side AND the dark side), then you will essentially get whatever you ‘wish’ for. But for now, you can wish all your want for things and think positively about things but in the end you will only get those things if they are what you truly wanted…meaning (1) You are running to something, not from something and (2) It was something you wanted on your own resolve and nobody elses. Why do you want to go to a certain school? To impress someone? To get approval from a family member or friend? If those are the underlying reasons…your essay tells your story. It shows your insecurity and lack of substance even if you are a great writer and get professionally coached on how to do it.
So say you love a specific school and you obsessed over going there. Chances are you knew that long before you reached your last years of high school. You read or heard a story and you had some paradigm shift in your life. So you started studying- not to get into that school but you studied things about the people who got accepted into that school. You became a little bit obsessed in fact when its healthy we call that being passionate about something. If it is not healthy, you obviously have issues and should seek professional help
You would look for patterns about those people who got accepted; what their graduates were known for; what kinds of things they did (philanthropic, social, academic). And you would ask yourself- do I fit into that profile? If no, then you would be done and move on with it. If yes and truly yes, then you would start actively seeking out ‘creative’ and ‘non traditional’ ways to bring those experiences into your life and because you were actively doing things to make that happen and you truly loved it, then other things would begin to manifest and that is essentially “The Secret”. The more intensely focused on that moment or that thing, the more affirmations and ’signs’ you will begin to see around you (that were most likely already there) and the more willing people will be to help you. Everyone you meet will seem as if they have a story about someone they knew who went there or were somehow associated with that school. You will have all the AHA moments.
Ironically, many of those things and opportunities exist in your life now, it’s just that people often fail to embrace and nurture their reality and as you well know, folks simply don’t have follow through. And that’s why things seldom work out at the time you want them to….no matter how much you hope or think positively. In the end the universe will work out things, but not always at the time you hope or expect. Humble yourself…and learn to be grateful. In time everything you wish for and more will come and in abundance.
@teenbizcoach