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On my way to work, Ep 12 – Your beliefs have power

Posted on December 10, 2014

Summary:

  • This is almost a boring, clichéed, cheesy idea these days, that your beliefs have power. But it’s a powerful idea.
  • Obviously beliefs don’t drive everything. If you get hit by a bus or run over by a train, no matter how much you may believe in your eventual success, you’re probably not going to make it. Luck drives our lives as well.
  • But beliefs drive actions, not just the actions you take but also the options you see.
  • If you see everything as black, pointless, your actions will reflect that. You’re going to create a world around you that is pointless, has no substance to it, etc.
  • If you believe that people are worthwhile, generous, worth putting energy into, that’ll drive your actions too. The world, people around you, respond to that.
  • If you want to have the greatest impact on the culture of the company (no matter where you are in that company) the highest point of leverage where you can make changes is yourself.
  • Like all good ideas, this is nothing new.
  • The point of this is just to realise that, quite the opposite from feeling powerless about the world around you, you have enormous power to shape the world around you by the beliefs you apply to it.
  • Another converse of that thought is the idea that if you do see the world as drab and featureless and full of blame and things that are trying to hurt you, it’s all inside of you. Maybe the world has done something that you perceived as a trigger, that you thought justified you in feeling a certain way, but in the end the bit you can choose, you have power over, is your reaction. This is mentioned in Seven Habits, via a therapist called Victor Frankl, who survived the death camps and even in that environment, realised that although he could not control the environment, he could control how he reacted to the environment he was in.
  • That’s a very inspiring thought: if you’re feeling bad, you have the power to shape your perception of the world, and that perception then shapes how the world actually is. Your thoughts, which you have enormous control over, change everything. You have the power.
  • Whatever you think, you can make happen. Whatever you want, you can be.
  • I’d also like to take a minute to rant against people who take this “Law of Attraction” to the extreme. Being hit by a bus will seriously impact your ability to “achieve your dreams”.
  • You can’t change everything about the world. No matter how much you believe you’re going to grow back a limb that you’ve lost, it’s not going to grow back. People who discover this Law of Attraction (and unfortunately that includes many writers), like the author of the Secret, or Think and Grow Rich, that they present it as the one idea that solves everything, perhaps as a sales trick.
  • That’s a terribly insulting perspective to have to all the people who are in truly dire situations and do not have the opportunities we have around us. When you use this idea, remember that some people do not have all these opportunities available to them.
  • Another inspiring idea: the world we live in is so full of opportunities that the Law of Attraction largely does work for us most of the time. Spare a moment for those for whom it doesn’t.

Author: Founder Freedom. Founder of Investibles, GrantTree, Woobius and others. Speaker, writer, investor, DJ, painter, and mostly, happy entrepreneur.

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