Earl Nightingale became famous as a motivational speaker by promoting the maxim, “We become what we think about.” His premise was that our thoughts cause us to take certain actions that produce certain results.
Earl Nightingale is considered one of the leaders of the self-improvement and personal development field. He was a titan of the industry. All our current leaders in the field have based their work on him and others of his time.
He and his contemporaries advised people to write down their goals, consult with them often, and even to carry them around on a daily basis. He and others like him posited that our subconscious minds would begin to work on our goals and start finding ways to make them a reality.
His premise that we become what we think about is based on maxims and truisms that have been handed down for generations from every ideology, theology, and thinkers throughout time. We can find a version of, “As a man thinketh, so shall he be,” in all the great world religions and philosophies throughout time.
Far be it for me to say that they’re all wrong, but here goes just the same. They’re all wrong. We don’t become what we think about. Visualization, manifestation, and goal-casting don’t work. They don’t mean a thing. This is the greatest lie of the self-improvement and personal development industry.
We can think about something all day long. We can daydream and fantasize until we’re blue in the face. We can visualize, manifest, or whatever else you want to call it and imagine the life of success, happiness, and abundance we so crave.
Thinking about it won’t accomplish anything. Nothing happens until we act on it.
The results we seek—or don’t seek—are the consequences of our actions. Our thoughts don’t cause any consequences. We can feel as angry as we want about someone hurting or insulting us. We can even think murderous thoughts about them. Thinking or feeling something doesn’t hurt anyone nor is thinking a crime.
We only say it’s wrong when someone starts acting on those feelings.
Here’s the truth. Whatever action you take, for good or bad, you’re programming yourself for that particular action.
Everything you eat, every time you exercise, whatever routine you use when you get up in the morning or when you’re at work, what you do when you come home from work—every action you take programs you for more and more and more of that particular thing until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Do you want to make something a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do you want to make your big, beautiful goal essentially inevitable? The solution is very simple. Program yourself to do that action. Every time you do it programs you to keep doing it.
Of course nothing will change if you do the action once and go straight back to your lazy old ways. You have to take the first step. Then you have to take the second step. Then you have to take the third step.
The action becomes stronger each time you take a step. The results will be incremental at first until they compound with more and more successive action.
I find this concept incredibly liberating. We aren’t the victims of circumstance. It doesn’t matter if the goal seems insurmountable right now.
One action. It only takes one action to start programming yourself for success—or failure. Whatever action you take will compound, but it all starts with one action—the action you take right at this very moment.
We can deliberately, consciously, intentionally construct the lives we want. Our wildest dreams are within our grasp right at this moment. No one is stopping us. No one CAN stop us. We hold the ultimate control because we can program ourselves for anything.
Even our thought patterns are habits we can ingrain in our subconscious minds. This is in fact how we wound up with the thought patterns we currently have—by repeating them and programming ourselves to believe it.
It doesn’t matter if we think the process will work or if we think we can reach a certain goal. We can be plagued with doubt. We might not have a clue right now about how the goal will come about.
It will still happen as long as we keep doing the actions that program this success into our lives. Eventually, doing that action again and again and again will change our thought patterns to match what we’re doing. Our actions will become the circumstances that dictate our thoughts. We’ll see yourselves acting in a certain way and our beliefs, values, and identity will change to match what we see ourselves doing.
Say your goal is to quit smoking, but you don’t think you can. Say you’ve tried a hundred times and failed every time. None of that matters as long as you take the action to stop—or in this case you DON’T take the action of smoking.
Your success starts the very first time you refuse the very first cigarette. Then you refuse the second one. Then you get rid of your cigarettes altogether.
These actions will compound and become habitual. You’ll start to see yourself as a non-smoker who wouldn’t even think about touching a cigarette.
This is how the habit becomes effortless, thoughtless, and inevitable. Eventually, it becomes so ingrained that it would take another herculean, deliberate, intentional effort to break that habit and do something different.
This system works even if you don’t think about it at all. You could make the decision to go after a certain goal and then never think about it again. You could be thinking about anything and everything else.
You’ll still accomplish the goal as long as you take the actions.
You can apply this system to literally anything. We can program our every aspect of our lives to be whatever we want them to be. None of us is a victim of circumstance either external or internal.
It only takes one action. We’re choosing every minute of every day how to program ourselves. We do it every time we put something in our mouths. We do it every time we spend an hour or even five minutes doing anything. All of these things are within our control at any time.
We should all feel extremely relieved by this news. It means that everything that makes us unhappy is in our power to change. Every single facet of our lives is in our power to change. So what are you waiting for?
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.