Step 1 – Make Your Wish
Imagine you are out for a walk one evening and you stumble upon a brass lamp—the kind that a genie might be in. As you try to make out the inscription carved in its side, you take your shirt and start polishing off all of the centuries of dirt and neglect.
KA-BAM! All of a sudden, the lamp erupts into a cloud of smoke and flames. Falling backward, you drop the lamp and cover your eyes. When you open them again, standing before you, clear as day, is a genie.
He looks at you with a gleam in his eye. And with a strong, powerful voice, he says, “I am the Genie of the Lamp. What will you have, Master, what will you have?”
What would you ask the genie to do?
Believe it or not, you own just such a lamp. It is located behind your eyeballs and is right between your ears. It’s called the human brain—the most powerful computer on earth. In fact, it is so powerful that it has invented all the other computers on earth. It has invented everything from supercomputers to yogurt.
And you own such a brain, free and clear. Yours is the equal of any other brain on the planet. You are its sole proprietor, the only one who can summon forth its awesome power to make your wishes come true. You are essentially your own genie, brimming with the godlike power of creation.
But that still leaves you with the same problem, doesn’t it? What will you ask the genie to do?
Before you can make your wishes come true, you must decide what to wish for. When people don’t get what they want from life, usually it’s because they don’t know what they want. They grind through one work week after another, daydreaming about the good life, but they rarely muster a clear idea of what that “good life” should be. As competent and hardworking as they are, they lack purpose. They’ve been taught how to shoot, but they’ve never been taught how to aim.
Perhaps the most startling truth about human nature is that anyone can do something truly remarkable in life if he or she has something truly remarkable to do. Once you decide what you really want, the rest falls into place. You wake up each morning with a reason to get out of bed. Your days are filled with meaning because you fill them with meaningful work. You are able to take advantage of your talents, your time, and your opportunities because you have a purpose. Without this purpose the astonishing power you have to grant your own wishes sits idle, double-parked, the motor running with no one behind the wheel. But with this purpose, you shift smoothly through the gears, traveling at speeds far beyond your comprehension.
So go ahead, get into the driver’s seat. Figure out what you really want—not what you’re supposed to want, not what someone else wants for you, but what you in your heart of hears want for yourself.
Brainstorming
The easiest way to find out what you really want is to ask yourself. Specifically, ask your subconscious mind, the powerhouse of your intellect. This is where your deepest and best thinking is done.
To help you tap into the power of your subconscious mind, it is helpful to use a tool referred to as brainstorming. Follow these five steps:
1. Write the topic you want to brainstorm in the form of a question at the top of a clean sheet of paper.
The human mind is the most powerful computer on earth, but unlike computers, you don’t have to learn a programming language to make it work; all you need to do is ask it a question.
2. Write whatever pops into your head.
Ask yourself the questions you’ve written at the top of your page, then listen to all of your answers. Write every thought that floats into your mind when you ask your question no matter how silly or dumb it may sound.
3. Accept with gratitude whatever pops into your head.
No matter how silly your thoughts may seem, no matter how impossible, remind yourself how fortunate you are to have so many interesting ideas.
Think of each idea as a gift. We might not like every gift we receive, but we accept each one, we open each one, and we thank the giver. It’s the thought that counts. If you accept all your thoughts gratefully, your subconscious—like any other gift giver—will be that much more willing to keep them coming.
4. Keep your pen moving.
Tell yourself you’re going to write for a fixed amount of time—whether it be a minute, two minutes, or five—and then keep your pen moving until the time is up. Keep writing even if you have to write the same thing over and over again.
5. Save your criticism for later.
Write, don’t judge. You can judge later. Brainstorming is a tool to generate ideas, not to evaluate them.
Have you ever offered a suggestion in a meeting, only to have someone point out how stupid it was? After that, you probably decided to keep your thoughts to yourself.
Your subconscious mind is just as sensitive. If you reject its suggestions, it stops making them.
There is no time like the present to begin your first official brainstorming session. So take out a blank sheet of paper and write this question at the top:
What would I really want from life if I were absolutely, positively certain I would get it?
Now write your answers. Don’t worry about how you’re going to accomplish the things on your list; we’ll deal with that later. For now, just focus on what you want, not on how you’ll get it.
Write whatever pops into your mind. Keep your pen moving for at least two minutes. You might find it helpful to think about specific areas of your life. For example, what do you want from your work? From your home life? From your relationships? What kind of health do you want? What kind of physique? What do you want from your hobbies? From your community activities? From your love life? What kind of impact would you like to have on the world? How would you like to be remembered?
If you run out of steam, write the same answers over and over, each time with a slightly different twist. Change a word, change a color or a size, change an adjective. Whatever you do, keep writing for at least two minutes—longer if the ideas keep flowing. So go ahead, and write!
Prioritize
Congratulations! You have just created your first honest-to-goodness wish list. At this point in your wishing career, it’s a good idea to work on only one wish at a time, so you need to decide which item on your list you want to work on first. Here’s how to go about it.
The first thing you do is to number the items on your list. Then look at items 1 and 2. Which is more important to you? In your mind, label that item the Current Choice. Then move to the next item on your list—number 3—and compare it with your Current Choice. Which of them is more important to you? The one you prefer then becomes your Current Choice. Now move on to the next item on your list—number 4—and compare that with your Current Choice. The one you prefer becomes your Current Choice.
Repeat this process for each item on your list, comparing one with whatever your Current Choice happens to be at that moment. Continue until you’ve gone through your entire list.
When you come to the end of your list, the Current Choice that remains is the single most important item on your list. It has become your First Choice. You have compared it directly or indirectly with every other item and preferred it every time. Now write a big “#1” beside it. It’s the first wish you’re going to make come true, and the wish you’re going to work on for the rest of this book.
Purpose
The people who are most successful at making their wishes come true are the people who know who they are and what they want. They choose wishes that help them fulfill their purpose in life. To make the most of your astonishing power to make your wishes come true, the first thing you need to do is to choose a purpose, and then choose wishes that will help you fulfill that purpose.
Earl Nightingale, one of the great modern philosophers of human achievement, used to distinguish between river people and goal people. He said that river people are those lucky few who seem to be born for a particular purpose. From the time they are children they seem to know what they are meant to do with their lives. They find themselves in the middle of a great river of interest, and they flow with that river all the days of their lives.
Then there are the rest of us. We are the goal people or, the wish people. We aren’t born with an all-consuming interest. We aren’t born into our purpose in life. Instead, we have to define it.
For years, I wondered what I was supposed to do with my life. I envied people who knew what they were about, people who seemed to have been born with a sense of mission, people who were fortunate enough to pursue their river of interest. If only that could happen to me, I used to tell myself. And then one afternoon, it did.
I was walking down the street wondering what I was going to do with my life. Suddenly, I had the answer. As clearly as if it had been engraved on my forehead, I understood that my great purpose in life was to define my purpose. That was my mission. That was my river of interest. And it always had been. For years, I had been pursing the same mission—to define my purpose. But I had never realized it and had never accepted it as a valid purpose. Once I did, I understood with absolute certainty what it was that I was supposed to do with my life: I was put on earth to define my purpose.
For the first time in my life, I felt like a river person. I knew what my life was about. I had a reason to get out of bed in the morning. My days were filled with meaning because I had suddenly filled them with meaningful work. I had something vitally important to accomplish—a purpose—and I couldn’t wait to get started on it each day.
What I learned that day is that it doesn’t matter what purpose you have. It simply matters that you have one. And if you don’t have one, then your purpose is to define one. That becomes your river of interest.
Once you adopt this frame of mind, you will find that everything else falls into place. You will embark on a journey of self-discovery. You will open yourself to new thoughts, activities, and interests that you would never have considered before. Everything you do from that moment on will become part of your newly discovered purpose, your newly discovered mission in life: to define—to invent—yourself.
To find your purpose, start with what interests you. It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t have an interest in something. But there are many people who have never allowed themselves to acknowledge their interests. They feel that the things they like to do are unimportant in the great scheme of things, so they look elsewhere for meaning and purpose. Meanwhile, what they are looking for is right under their nose.
Finding your purpose in life doesn’t have to be some complicated quest. Instead of asking, “What do I want to do with my life?” why not make it easy on yourself? Instead, ask “What do I enjoy doing?” Then listen to all of your answers. Write them on paper. Write everything on paper—even the trivial or silly things. If what interests you doesn’t seem important enough to put on paper, that’s only because you’re trying to judge your interests instead of trying to live them. Try living the, instead, and you’ll take your first great step toward making your wishes come true.
If you enjoy doing something do it. Do you like to listen to music, go to the movies, read, watch TV, cook, fix cars, clean house, watch birds, teach, build furniture, surf the Net, or build sand castles? As long as your activity or hobby is not self-destructive (like substance abuse), hurtful to someone else, or damaging to the environment, why not allow yourself to enjoy it for all it’s worth?
If you enjoy something, pursue it. You don’t have to make it your official purpose in life—but what if you did? What if you decided to spend your life doing what you enjoy? That’s what river people do. Sometimes they’re called eccentric, or absentminded, or obsessive. Sometimes they’re called geniuses. But whatever they’re called, all they do is flow with their river of interest and allow themselves to enjoy the journey. They don’t care if what they’re doing is important to the rest of the world; they care if it’s important to them. They aren’t out to save mankind; they’re out to save themselves—from a life without joy or meaning.
If you want to maximize your contribution to society, you owe it to them, and to yourself, to follow your dreams, to follow your purpose, to follow your bliss.
Do what you think you’re meant to do, not what you think you’re supposed to do. If you’re worried that you’ll never amount to much unless your purpose is “worthy,” don’t waste your time. You already amount to something. Your achievements in life are not the source of your worth as a human being; they are the result of it. Self-worth comes before purpose, not the other way around. Once you accept your value as a person, once you accept that you already amount to something, then you free yourself to make the most of your life. You free yourself to define your purpose. And that’s where the fun begins.
Finding your purpose is a matter of asking yourself what you enjoy doing, and then doing it. That’s what river people do. They aren’t making a huge sacrifice to follow their dreams. They don’t have to practice iron-willed self-discipline to keep themselves on track. They simply do what they enjoy doing. That’s their payoff. That’s why they do it. Their achievements are simply a byproduct of that enjoyment.
Once you define a purpose—even if that purpose is simply to define a purpose—the rest will take care of itself. Your life will take on a focus and intensity of which you’ve never dreamed. One by one you will begin to make your wishes come true. Day by day you’ll find yourself growing, contributing more to those around you, and making the most of yourself as a human being. That is the noblest purpose of all.
Paying the Price
Every wish has its price. You can have anything you want if you are willing to pay that price. The price may be in dollars and cents. Or it may be in effort—the weeks or months or years it will take you to make your wish come true. Or the price may be in sacrifice; what you have to give up in order to get what you want. Whatever the price turns out to be, you have to pay full retail—you can’t bargain with fate.
Your willingness to pay the price is what gives you the power to cause your wish to come true. If you are 100 percent willing to pay the price, then you are 100 percent likely to succeed. If you are only 50 percent willing to pay the price, then you are 50 percent likely to succeed. It’s a simple matter of cause and effect. The price is the cause; the wish is the effect. Pay the price—set in motion the appropriate cause—and the wish will take care of itself.
Take a look at the First Choice from your wish list. How much will it cost you? How much will it cost in dollars and cents? How much will it cost in effort? How many months or weeks or years will you have to work on it? How much will it cost in sacrifice? Will it mean less time with your family, less time with your friends, less time watching TV, less time with your hobby, or playing golf, or puttering around the house? Once you have an idea of what that wish will cost, are you willing to pay the price?
Now here is an interesting question: Why are you willing to pay that price? What reasons do you have to make that wish come true?
The people who are most successful at making their wishes come true are the ones who have the most compelling reasons to do so. Instead of trying to psyche yourself into paying an exorbitant price for a wish, why not choose a wish that is worth the price in the first place? Choose a wish that compels you to make it come true.
If your First Choice doesn’t compel you, choose another wish. Go to your Second Choice or your Third Choice. Redo your wish list if you have to. Brainstorm new ideas and set new priorities until you choose a wish that compels you to pay the price, a wish that makes it more than worth your while to overcome every obstacle that will stand in your way. Choose a wish that is so compelling, you refuse to settle for less. You’re not going to get very far until you do.
While you are looking for a compelling wish, keep this in mind: Choose a wish for what it will make of you to achieve it. The greater the wish, the greater you have to become to make that wish come true. That’s the real payoff. That’s why human beings strive for more than what they have. It’s not what you achieve that brings you joy and fulfillment; it’s the person you must become in order to achieve it. You don’t get what you want from life; you get what you are.
That’s why it takes effort to make your goals succeed and your wishes come true. If all you had to do were to snap your fingers to get anything you want, you would never have to develop your potential. You would never have to become more than what you are. But by insisting that the only way to earn your wish is to become the kind of person for whom such a wish is possible, the universe gives you one of the greatest gifts of all: growth.
Along with this gift comes a warning: Beware of any wish that turns you into someone you don’t want to be. That price is too high. No wish is worth sacrificing your values, your character, or your integrity. No wish is worth losing the only things worth having. If a wish forces you to become less of a person that you want to be, it’s not worth the price.
Presenting Your Wish
Wishing is the most powerful force at our command. But most of us don’t know it exists; let alone how to command it.
The secret is this: Don’t just make a wish; make it presentable. The power of your wish comes from the way you present it to your conscious and subconscious. If you present it effectively, you will harness the genie-like power of your mind and cause your wish to come true. If you present it ineffectively, your mind will shrug it off as just another one of those good intentions, ill-timed and unachievable.
What follows are eleven steps that will help you make your wish (goal) so presentable that your mind will just naturally make it come true. As you learn about each step, apply it to the wish you have decided to work on first.
1. Write it.
If you think your wish is fixed so clearly in your mind that you don’t have to put it on paper, you are fooling yourself. Write it, or kiss it good-bye. When you write your wish, you give it the kind of clarity, focus, and urgency that you can’t give it any other way. You hang it out their in the world right in front of your eyes. You turn it into something real, something that stares back at you from the page and dares you to make it come true.
If you want your wish to come true or to succeed with your goal, whether long term or short term, write it down. If you don’t want to make it come true, then don’t write it down.
2. Be specific.
A presentable wish is specific down to the last detail. When you can picture precisely what you want—when you can feel it, hear it, touch it, smell it, and taste it—that’s specific.
The more specific you are, the better your chances for getting what you want. If you want money, how much money? By when? If you want a new house, what kind of house? Where? How many rooms? If you want a better job, in what field? At what pay? For what company? If you want a richer relationship, with whom? What will it feel like? Sound like? Look like?
When you make your wish specific, you give yourself a host of powerful advantages, such as:
- You can track your progress. If you don’t know what you want, how will you know when you get it?
- You avoid unintended results. Vague wishes can be dangerous because they can be granted in unintended ways. For example, if you wish for “more freedom at work,” you might find yourself fired. If you wish to “lose weight,” you might find yourself with a serious illness, one symptom of which is weight loss. If you wish for “lots of money,” you might find yourself the beneficiary of a large life-insurance policy, but the person you love the most had to die for you to collect it. Wish for exactly what you want, and you won’t find yourself with what you don’t want.
- You focus your brainpower. Have you ever noticed that you tend to pay attention to the things you’re interested in? You buy a new car, and you begin to notice how many other people are driving the same car. You read a book about nature, and you begin to notice the sunsets and the songbirds, though both have always been there.
When you’re specific about what you want, you alert your brain to notice all the people, information, and resources that can help cause your wish to come true. Everywhere you look, you discover helpful coincidences—what the rest of the world calls luck—but these coincidences you have made possible by being aware of exactly what you want. The more specific you are, the more luck you will create.
3. Set a deadline.
A wish or goal without a deadline is just an idle daydream, with no beginning and no end. A deadline imparts a sense of urgency, the way you feel when you’re about to leave town. But a deadline isn’t meant to make you panic, it’s meant to make you focus. Don’t wear it like a straitjacket. If you find you’re going to miss a deadline, go ahead and change it. Be comfortable with it. But keep your eye on it. If you want to make your wish come true, know exactly what you’re shooting for—and when.
4. Make it something you can measure.
You can be winning and think you’re losing because you aren’t keeping score. Measurement is your way of keeping score. Measurement lets you see how much progress you have already made and how far you have to go. If you can’t measure your wish, you won’t know when you’ve made it come true.
Some wishes or goals are easy to measure, such as making a certain amount of money or losing a certain amount of weight. But how do you wish for things that aren’t measurable, such as a better marriage, or a more satisfying job, or a sense of inner peace? It’s easy—just turn those wishes into something you can measure. Turn them into specific actions.
For example, suppose your goal or wish is to have a better marriage. To turn this unmeasurable wish into something you can measure, ask yourself these questions:
1. What specific changes can I make in the way I act toward my partner in order to improve our marriage?
2. Will I make these changes all at once or gradually?
3. By what date will I complete them?
Once you have identified specific measurable actions you can take to improve your marriage, you can phrase your wish in terms of these actions. For instance, instead of wishing for a better marriage, which you can’t measure, you might wish to rub your partner’s back a couple of nights a week. You might wish to cut the grass every other week instead of letting your partner always do all the yard work. You might wish to take the kids to soccer practice on Saturday mornings so your partner can sleep late. You might wish to take out the garbage, or wrap the Christmas presents, or clean up after dinner three nights a week—anything to lighten the load on your partner and sweeten the relationship.
The same approach applies to wishing for a state of mind, such as happiness, joy, or contentment. You can’t measure these things, so wish instead for the specific actions that will lead to the state of mind you want.
For example, if you wish to feel fulfilled, and you feel it most when you’re performing community service, wish to spend more time serving your community. If you wish to feel happy, and you feel it most when you’re with your family, wish to spend more time with your family.
Wish for something you can measure, and you will consistently measure success.
5. Wish only for what you can control.
A wish or goal is about what you do—not what anyone else does—because that’s the only thing you can control. There is no place in your wish for what you want someone else to think, or do, or feel, because you can’t make those things happen. Concentrate instead on the things you can make happen.
For instance, you can’t wish to be loved, because you can’t make that happen. But you can wish to be loving. You can’t wish for that heartthrob next door to go to dinner with you, because you can’t make that happen. But you can wish for the courage to ask that person to dinner. You can’t wish for someone else to make you happy, because you can’t make that happen. But you can wish to spend more of your time doing the things that make you happy.
If you wish only for what you can control, then success will always be in your hands. If you wish for something you can’t control, then success will always be in the hands of someone else.
6. Wish for what you want, not what you don’t want.
Your mind moves you toward whatever you think about. If you think about what you want, you’ll move toward it. If you think about what you don’t want, you’ll move toward that instead.
Rather than saying, “I wish I wasn’t broke,” tell yourself, “I choose to have $10,000 in the bank.”
Rather than saying, “I wish I wasn’t fat,” tell yourself, “I choose to lose thirty pounds.”
Rather than saying, “I wish I wasn’t stupid,” tell yourself, “I choose to educate myself.”
Rather than saying, “I wish I wasn’t so lonely,” tell yourself, “I choose to make some friends.”
Ask for what you want and you’ll get it. Ask for what you don’t want, and you’ll be stuck with that instead.
7. Begin your wish with “I choose.”
The real secret to success is not self-discipline; it’s choosing to succeed. The moment you make a choice, you eliminate all the doubt and hesitation that exist when you’re trying to make up your mind. Instead of worrying about what to do, you just do it. You throw a little switch in your brain that commands you to do whatever it takes to carry out your decision.
8. Make it emotional.
Your wish should include an emotional payoff so you can use the power of that emotion to help you cause your wish to come true. For instance, if your wish is to improve your marriage, you might say, “I choose to lovingly help my partner with the chores.” If you wish is to get up each morning at six, to give yourself some personal time before you go to work, you might say, “I choose to cheerfully rise each morning at six.” If your wish is to increase company revenues by 50 percent, you might say, “I choose to joyfully increase company revenues by 50 percent.”
When you build an emotional payoff into your wish, you tend to work harder at it because you enjoy it more. The harder you work, the more likely you are to make your wish come true. Before you know it, you’ll enjoy the work as much as you enjoy the results. From that point on, the results will take care of themselves.
9. Be brief.
Less is more. The shorter your wish, the greater the emotional impact. A single short sentence is perfect. To keep your wish brief, act as if each word costs you $10,000.
10. Believe in it.
Why would a gardener take the trouble to plant a seed, water it, fertilize it, and tend it—perhaps for weeks—before seeing any return at all on the effort? Because he believes the seed will grow into something worth the effort. Perhaps it will turn into a flower, or a fruit, or a useful vegetable. Whatever the expected result, the expectation must come before the result. The only gardens we bother to tend are the ones we believe will grow.
When you make a wish, you have to believe you will succeed, or else you won’t be willing to make the effort. With belief comes action. With action comes results. Without belief there is neither action nor results.
11. Take immediate action.
The final step in making your wish presentable is to send your brain the most powerful message of all: Act now. If you don’t, you’ll fall prey to the Law of Diminishing Intent: the more time that passes before you act, the less likely you will be to take action.
Before you get up from your chair, do something to put your wish into action. Make a phone call, create a plan, read a useful article in a newspaper or magazine, write a letter. Do something to get the ball rolling. Do anything. The important thing is to take some kind of action right now, before you lose the moment, and with it your chance to make your wish come true.
If you haven’t already been doing so as we’ve gone along, take the time now to go back and make your wish presentable. Take it through each of the eleven steps we’ve just discussed. Write it. Make it specific. Make it measurable. Make it all the things it needs to be in order for it to come true. Then take immediate action to start you on your way.
If you’ve come this far and still don’t know what to wish for, then make this your first wish: Wish to know what to wish for. Make it an official wish. Make it presentable. Take immediate action. DO this now, and you will be launched into a lifetime of making your wishes come true.
