Wealth from Thought
“Always imagine what you have to do as easy, and it will become so.” – Emile Coue.
Welcome back, my friend, and thanks very much for reading our newsletters each week.
Most people don’t think they have much of an imagination, which is a shame because your imagination really can be the key to your wealth, health, and happiness. So this week, I thought we could talk more about the incredibly powerful tool, that amazing gift that you already have, and costs nothing to own: your imagination.
There are 3 words you can literally live by: “Perception is Reality.” Perception is a core function of your imagination, i.e. what you perceive to be true is effectively what you imagined to be true… and because you imagine it to be so, it becomes your reality. Hence the expression: “The World is a Mirror”.
Clearly, if you see a person walking towards you now that is not perception, but rather reality- you didn’t imagine the event- it happened. But of course, life is full of far more complex situations, and that’s where our perception comes in. If that person walking towards you said something in a certain way, it’s about how you perceive, or imagine, their intentions, and you’ll act according to how you perceive the situation. And thus, whether we like it or not, we make important, often life-changing decisions based on our imagination.
Unfortunately, too many people see their imagination as something for children and completely uncontrollable where nothing could be further from the truth. I will prove to you that your imagination is a highly potent force, and more importantly, I’ll show you how to harness its power.
The first reaction I usually get from students at this point is “But I don’t have an imagination!” So don’t worry if this is how you feel at this point. But I put it to you that we were ALL born with an imagination. Remember those pictures you drew as a kid? What about those crazy worlds you made out of modeling clay?
It’s what ‘the system’ did to your imagination on the road to where you are now that’s the problem!
Think about it. Your writing materials in kindergarten were blank paper and a box of crayons with colors you never knew existed. By the time you graduated high school your writing materials consisted of a black ball point pen and ruled paper with margins. That’s indicative, don’t you think? But thankfully, the damage is reversible.
It’s been consistently scientifically proven that ALL children are far more creative than adults… and so we can learn a lot from kids. A child has an open-mind, the breeding ground for creative thought.
How open is your mind to new suggestions? Why do you think I constantly encourage foreign travel, and exploring outside your comfort zones?
There are essentially only 2 ways to legally create wealth (barring gambling which could be considered under number 2 anyway):
- Business (either owning one or working for one)
- Investment (property, shares, bonds, commodities etc.)
So let’s see how your imagination is the biggest key to both.
Business
Let’s focus on owning a business rather than working for one as that’s the path to true wealth. Name a success story, big or small, and you’ll see a person’s imagination behind it. The ability to think creatively and correctly perceive situations is the difference between wealth and poverty.
If a person perceives themselves as having a cap on their earning potential, or that they are and always will be poor, that PERCEPTION becomes reality. They will think and act like a poor person and hence watch opportunity after opportunity pass them by. Others will perceive them the same way and not invite them on potentially profitable ventures, and so the cycle continues.
A cycle YOU can break out of and control with your imagination.
Conversely, another person may well be poor in reality, but because they perceive the situation and themselves in a different way, an entirely different reality evolves. Think about all the wealthy people who became broke and then made it all again. Were they not poor at the low point and no different to the individual in our first example?
But it’s not just about how you perceive yourself and your situation, you can go one better and use your imagination as the most powerful wealth-creating weapon on the planet!
What’s the difference between Starbucks and the one-man-business on Main St. selling coffee from a truck? Who sells the most coffee and why?
The difference is one person sells coffee and another sells a CONCEPT. That concept being “You can have your coffee any way you like it in comfortable surroundings with friends and generally be a cool dude.” Starbucks, Google, Microsoft, the list is endless of how a concept created millions… and concepts are born of your imagination.
And consider this: Did Starbucks invent a cup of coffee? Did Google invent the search engine? Did Microsoft invent the computer?
No. What the people behind those corporations did was use their imagination to come up with a variation of something ALREADY successful. And YOU can make a fortune the very same way. Look around you and see examples everywhere of entrepreneurs, large and small, creating wealth by coming up with a variation on something already successful. Why waste time trying to make a market want something brand new?
I promise you, all your imagination needs is a specific task you give it and suddenly it goes to work all by itself.
To take an example you can immediately relate to, let’s say you’re suddenly in the market for a red Honda. That day, as you drive around you’ll notice red Hondas everywhere! Now, have the amount of red Hondas on the road dramatically increased overnight? Of course not, but because you had a specific task in mind (researching red Hondas), your awareness of them was dramatically increased. In other words, it was your perception that changed, not the reality.
The same is true for business opportunities.
In the words of Dr. Maxwell Maltz in his classic and esteemed research book, “Psycho-Cybernetics”:
“The creative mechanism within you is impersonal. It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending on the goals which you yourself set for it.”
Please re-read the above. It’s critical for your success.
In a San Francisco study, Dr. Harry Grayson and Dr. Leonard Olinger took 45 men hospitalized as neuropsychiatric. “The patients were first given the usual personality test. Then they were asked flatly to take the test a second time and answer the questions as they would if they were ‘a typical, well-adjusted person on the outside.’ 75% of them turned in improved test performances and some of the changes for the better were dramatic, the psychologists reported.”
Why? Because those people imagined themselves as sane…and so became as such.
Investment
Why do markets fall and rise? Why are there economic booms and slumps?
Quite simply, because of the human emotions of fear and greed. This much is a well-documented and acknowledged fact the world over. That is to say, market values are determined by how we PERCEIVE them to be.
If our valuations of markets were correct (and were therefore reality rather than perception), markets and economies would just rise steadily without booms and slumps. It’s the excess of both undervaluation and overvaluation (fear and greed) which causes that… the result of human imagination.
So the essential key in investment then is to be devoid of ANY emotion! This is about keeping your imagination locked up rather than embracing it and to rely firmly on facts and figures rather than a perception of how you might like things to be. In other words, DISCIPLINE is the key to investing.
Does this property yield positive cash flow on realistic numbers?
Is it time to cut your losses on that stock rather than pray for a ‘come-back’?
Between your ears is the most powerful computer in the world, but it’s a double-edged sword that humans have used to either build cathedrals or concentration camps, based on their PERCEPTIONS at the time.
You have that choice today. You have the control lever to this computer, and you can swing it towards a personal hell or personal heaven. You always have a choice.
Best wishes,
Mark Patricks