Go Thunk Yourself! Online Self Help Course - Introduction

Get your first installment of Go Thunk Yourself! Self Help Online Course here.


Just launched my new video, slidecast, and podcasts online for your use!

To begin with, I've set all the audio up on archive.org.

As I mentioned there:
"Soundtrack by chapter for the book, "Go Thunk Yourself!" self help techniques. Here I've utilized AT&T's Crystal voice to generate a Text-To-Speech version of the Introduction, each Day's lesson, and the Summary.

This is a way for you to have the audio version for your listening during commute, or as additional review to the book or online pdf."

And here's that streaming flashplayer for you:



Next was to get up the slideshare powerpoint on this:

| View | Upload your own

But I had trouble getting these two to link properly. Wasn't able to get a slidecast created.

And I wanted to put it all on a CD someday, so I went ahead and plopped it into Camtasia to create a video. Using the new TubeMogul facility, I've now got it on about four or five different video spots.

Here's the YouTube version:



And of course, you can read the entire book at my Go Thunk Yourself! blog, as well as getting the entire series at my Go Thunk Yourself! Self Help Library.

I hope to have more of these up, despite my heavy schedule with farming, marketing research, and my (ugh) day job. So stay tuned...

And so we begin to spread the news...

It's been awhile since I spoke to you all. Glad you're patient and didn't unplug your RSS feed.

The online course is about to be released. This is based on Go Thunk Yourself, Compleat! and so has everything of my four-book series and my own comments about how it all fits together.

I reviewed that last book recently and found that it actually flowed in a sequence and worked well, so I'm just going to drop these into course sections and put them all online. Plus, I'll package them up as MP3's and burn them to CD for any who want them as home study.

Today was posting the mere intro to the series.

Of course, we do this now with the Web 2.0 versions:

The audio, care of Archive.org -



And the slidecast using that audio soundtrack -

| View | Upload your own

Later today, I'll have the video up on YouTube, as well as Google and Propeller.

And bit by bit, I'll work up the entire course for you. It's going to be a very interesting ride, since there is so very much data to give out. As I can, I hope to link these to the Go Thunk Yourself Website - but more than likely, I'll be working up this whole thing as a CD with a working menu and so on. But somehow, I intend to get the bulk of this up on the web so people can follow it.

Got my work cut out for me.

You'll be interested to know that I'm probably going to do a bit of a reverse order, since my later stuff on this is far more interesting in its conclusions and advice than my early pieces - which is why I've dusted off this blog to host all these.

Here's some more data, the Press Release:

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Farmer-Doctor Unveils Single System He Says Runs This Universe

Mexico, Mo. Mar 28, 2008 - Dr. Robert C. Worstell today released the introduction to his theory that the entire universe operates on a single system, that anyone can learn and apply to improve their world around them. He states that there are no limits to a person's ability - and that the world around you depends on what you think it to be. Author of the successful "Go Thunk Yourself!" book series, Dr. Worstell has only released the introduction to his online self help course in Web 2.0 formats.

His approach seems at odds with the traditional publishing model. His books are published through the Print-On-Demand publisher Lulu.com and he has no agent or major publishing house carrying or promoting his work. The promotion he does is through Social Networks, such as Facebook, Digg, Propeller, and Stumbleupon. And his books have been converted to podcast-friendly MP3's.

"You have to go to where the people are, " said Dr. Worstell. "When you have some exciting breakthroughs to tell about, you have to go where people are going to find out about them. Regular bookstores are fine places (and usually have great coffee), but more and more people are going online for their information. Online sales continue to increase, while brick-and-mortar stores are finding their in-house traffic is lower every year. So I produced this introduction so it would play well with online social media - so people could find and use it."

Dr. Worstell is no stranger to online publishing. He maintains over a dozen blogs and has converted three of his "Go Thunk Yourself!" book series into blog format, one chapter per post. A prolific author and editor, his other blogs cover a variety of subjects, including more than just self help advice, also covering online marketing, politics, and even agriculture.

He claims his rural background was the inspiration for his breakthroughs in discovering the underlying system this universe runs on.

"When I was growing up, it was always a marvel to me how Nature worked, "related Worstell. " Anywhere you go, you could plant a seed and it would grow - provided it had water, nutrients, the proper temperature, and enough days of sunlight. So when I was going through school, it didn't make sense to me how all these different governments and religions were always at each others throats and telling the other they were wrong. Of course, I then had to figure out why they didn't make sense and how they could. That was the exciting part."

And that "exciting part" took Dr. Worstell a couple of decades to work out. While he admits his first unanswered questions were left over from grade school, he hit the road days after graduating high school, working in another state and traveling, ultimately winding up back on the family farm after having working in several widely different jobs across the US.

Self-trained on graphic arts and then learning Internet web design in the 1990's, he saw where publishing was headed. Returning to his family farm, he set out to get missing college degrees and meanwhile started his research - studying study itself in those college classes. Ultimately, this lead to the clues which unraveled what he calls the "universal solvent" of this physical universe.

"The old story of the universal solvent is that it can't be held by anything else because it dissolves everything it touches," explains Dr. Worstell. "Any pot or pitcher or beaker would simply be dissolved, as it's a 'universal' solvent. However, the trick was finding that the solvent didn't need to be contained - it was actually the core material for everything else. Practically, when you find out that there are only a handful of rules which govern all life and manifestation on this planet - and in this universe - then everything suddenly falls into place. There's explanations everywhere you look."

Dr. Worstell also claims that this system will explain everything and give you a way to improve anything you put your attention on. But he refuses to take credit for discovering these secrets, as they've been published for centuries. In his introduction, he mentions that this Internet Age gave us the means to cross-compare all these various texts and so find the common thread that runs through all of them.

The remaining chapters to his online course have no set publishing schedule. The introduction has been posted to Slideshare.net and a video based on that presentation has been posted on various video sites, including YouTube. The soundtrack is available through Internet Archives (archive.org). Dr. Worstell said only that he would work to get his course published as fast as he could get to it, but his works could be found by searching for "Go Thunk Yourself" on any search engine or social media site.

Contact:
Dr. Robert C. Worstell
15559 Audrain Road 821
Mexico, Mo. 65265
(573) 581-3003
robertworstell[remove this]@robertworstell.com

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/worstellr
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/joethunkyourself
Blogs:
http://gothunkyourselfsmore.blogspot.com
http://onlinemillionaireplan.blogspot.com
http://worstellr.blogspot.com
Websites:
http://gothunkyourself.com
http://onlinemillionaireplan.com
http://robertworstell.com

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When Compleat is complete

Just a short note:

I decided to leave Go Thunk Yourself, Compleat! alone and consider it final.

There is a ton of stuff I've gone over since, and in reviewing my original prose (which is due out on Amazon shortly), I figured that I have improved in my writing style - but don't want to re-write those early books to update them.

So I'll be writing a fifth GTY book, which will be Go Thunk Yourself, Revisited. There I'll correct my prose sins of the first four books and update with the latest research - plus go into techniques on acquiring/improving/extending personal abilities.

While there is a ton of stuff to cover, hopefully it won't ramble.

Forget your problems - create a new world instead!

You want to go from problem-solver to world-builder. That's the big change to make. You can solve yours and others'problems forever. The universe - as it's been created - creates endless problems to solve. And you can be very satisfied and happy with your solutions - and these can better peoples' lives.

However, your own world can be far better than this. It can be whatever you want it to be. You see, when you solve problems, you are operating at the effect of the problem-creator. Someone or something created those problems. You solve them, great - you're a hero. The problem-creator then serves up their next one and the game begins again.

Now, when you create your own world, you can have one where the problems stay solved and you don't have any new ones coming up. You move over into constantly creating improved versions of things around you. You start living the world of your dreams. What you've always wanted to happen, to achieve, to acquire - all these things start appearing around you.

And how you move from one to the other is all on that DVD, "The Secret". It's all in Nightingales classic recording "The Strangest Secret". It's all in "Think and Grow Rich", "The Science of Getting Rich", "Master Key System" - and a few other books.

But in order to know what you are all about, in order to create the world of your dreams - you have to get the concept and do the actions which are laid out in these references TOWARD THAT GOAL. You don't stop at just getting rich, having that nice car, living a life of ease. You have to continue on down that line until your whole world is just the way you want it to be.

That means the people around you have to change - but you can only change people through education, example, your gifts. You could possibly get enough fish through your own efforts to feed yourself and a few others. But it you taught everyone around you how to fish - everyone could eat well and you would live a life of comparative ease as a teacher of fishermen, if that's what you wanted.

So it takes some figuring out. How to get from here to there. But the answers will come to you as you trust your intuition to provide them. You will gradually move over from problem-solver to world-creator as you do.

And that is why I wrote this. To bring you along on the journey. It's a much brighter path than the ones we've been travelling so long.

Hate and Love are four letter words, one leads to self-damnation, the other to bliss

I had a girl say to me once, "Outrage is not a bad emotion." She and her colleagues believed that a person was allowed to demonstrate their anger at will - in other words to rant and rave and bully in order to get their way, to solve things by exhibiting bad temper.

A recent episode on a cable "news" show showed two normally congenial people - and friends - really going at each other in order to "defend" their views. This was considered "good television", as much as over-dramatic acting is known as "good theatre".

Let's get something straight here. Hate is learned. Hate is a bad habit. Using argument and temper to try to overwhelm your opposition is playing into their hands. No one wins in that scenario.

One philosopher said that you do not shovel out the darkness, you simply turn on a light - meaning that hate only exists in the absence of love, of appreciation.

The argument then goes, that if the sun burnt out, then darkness would indeed cover all. However, my friend, why is it easier to make a child laugh than to make it cry? Why do we all rush to find what's wrong when that baby does start crying?

Why do we remember - and seek to retell - a truly funny story?

You have to learn hate in order to maintain it in your life. You have to practice it. It is too easy to fall into a bad temper because someone set this as an example to you. It is too easy to simply cry and carry on because you learned this got attention when you wet yourself as a baby.

We are not babies. We are responsible for the effects we create around us. There is no mother-figure which goes through our lives cleaning up our messes, wiping our nose (or butt) and generally fixing things for us.

We have to lie in the bed we made, strange politicians and all.

Our life, and the society around us, is of our choosing and our habitual wont.

If you don't like being told bad news, quit hanging around those people. Or turn off the "news". And probably keep the TV off entirely, unless you are watching comedic DVD's.

You can choose to have good in your life, you can choose to live with love.

On the farm, in Nature, one is taught this constantly. If you "train" a dog with beatings, they become very wary of you - something that isn't easily overcome. Dogs, as pets, instinctively seek your love. They want food, but this is an extension of the love you show for them. Many dogs will die of hunger rather than leave your side.

I've proved this to myself in raising all sorts of domesticated and wild animals. While the instincts may be savage, they constantly exhibit their preference for love over viciousness.

All negative thought is conquered through applying love - and its variant, understanding.

Those who seek a world where there is definable black and white, evil and good - they live in a constant world of struggle. Evil only exists in the absence of Good. You have to work at casting good out in order for evil to continue.

Most people abide by the laws. Laws are actually created in order to keep criminal behaviour in check. They are not created to "idiot-proof" society, to make it safe for the stupidest of us. Given a model world, people would live together peaceably and by common sense would co-exist happily. The first law had to be written down when some individual wouldn't obey common sense - or thought they could "get away" by violating that custom (which was built on common sense). And so penalties had to be created to out-weigh "breaking" that custom.

Practically, you don't ever "break" a custom. What you say or do to another comes back to you, sooner or later. (The Golden Rule cuts both ways.) It is arguable that locking up a person is humane. I've heard the Quakers were the first to put a person into solitary confinement, his only companion a Bible. The Quakers themselves would relent after awhile, since so many went insane from too long of this.

If the natural law says that you will get as you give, then all a prison does is to deny fate it's chance to rectify things. Or does it? Why do prisoners seldom improve - why are there such stories of violence in prison?

Where people are improving in prisons is through education. Give them books which enable them to improve their lives, to correct their poor decisions in the past, to straighten out their logic errors which then became habit.

One basic therapy of the ancient Polynesian belief-system Huna was to first forgive yourself. The rationale is that the only reason you continued to "feel bad" about something you did is that you hadn't let go of that action - that your subconscious kept bringing this up to you as there was some lesson you hadn't learned yet. And so you were "haunted" by something you considered a mis-deed in your past.

And that is the crux behind Easter, and the whole Christian religion - that you can forgive yourself, that you don't have to live with your sins for the rest of your life.

The bottom line is that by practicing feeling good, behaving responsibly, you can change your life and develop the good habits which will bring all manner of success, wealth, good health, and happiness toward you for the rest of your life.

Anger, temper, cursing - all these are habits which can be changed. The difference between a sunny and surly disposition is a continual choice. Optimists are that way by choice - they've observed that looking for the bright side is an easier route, as well as being more profitable.

All you have to do is start today. Start smiling. Soon you'll find a reason to smile, even to laugh at the world around you. Clean up your room, your cubicle, your world - put order into things. People will want to be with you as you are putting light into their lives.

Norman Vincent Peale, William James, Dale Carnegie - all these and more philosophers said that your attitudes, your emotions are completely under your own control. You only have to act happy to become happy, act courageous and become courageous.

"As the twig is bent, so grows the tree." Our past thoughts have determined our present habitual state of mind. And the twig can be straightened and grow up tall and straight, with hardly a trace of the bend you earlier put into it.

You have a choice in life to constantly forward the hate around you - or let it go and seek the light.

My advice: turn off the TV, smile - and really enjoy the basic goodness you are.

Genius: How to become one and stay that way

Wouldn't you like to have a way to release the latent genius within you? How would it feel to be free of all restraints in your life and able to simple create the way you've always wanted?

The road to doing this is much simpler than we suspected.

Some theory first:

Pareto principle is a tool to use in this. Briefly, from Wikipedia,

"The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule-of-thumb in business; e.g., '80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.'"

If you follow the link to Juran above, you will get his full essay on how he found and named this principle.

For our use, it is a form of shorthand. The caveat is to ensure you also use Juran's phrase, "the vital few and the useful many" to not overlook resources or be too harsh in your estimations.

Consider the forward push of a civilization - it is literally won on the backs of a very few, singular people. Einstein, Madam Curie, Edison, Eleanor Roosevelt - just study these people back and you will find them immensely capable, far beyond what is common.

The rough math shows that you have 20 percent, and then 4 percent and then under one percent (20% of 20% of 20%...) and so find just a small handful of people doing incredible work. Juran was the first to point out that these numbers don't always hold true. While he held to Lorentz curves (which I have been unable to nail down for this post), I have found that the Long Tail exponential curve, as well as the Bell Curve both apply to this area.

That last is perhaps the most graphic. It sweeps down from the bulk of the group (population, in our case) to a small proportion on each side. If you widened this out into a 3D view, it would be a hill standing out in a field.

The Long Tail is what is fascinating along this line. There is as much money being made, cumulative, in niche sales as there is by the few market leaders.

Ability might have this take. The bulk of humankind is surviving and doing quite well. However, a small handful are doing intensely, extremely well.

Our educational system, as well as our marketing and government - through no fault of theirs - is built on protecting the bulk rights and status quo of this largest amount. That is where the common concerns and voters lie. (Both left and right have to court the center to get elected.)

Now, let's concentrate on the extremes for awhile. One extreme is criminal and the other genius. The reason for laws is to hold the criminal in check. However, this is only moderately successful - more effective in the America's than some other areas of the world - which has to do more with the philosophy of our Founding Fathers that enable anyone to succeed if they want to. (This idea is fascinating in and of itself - read Thomas Paine and Adam Smith in our modern light ... but this is not on our current path.)

Geniuses are a rarefied few.

How is this so? We only observe that this is the way it is. You might have concentrations of a group here and there, which throws off the above generalized math, but statistically that's the way it is.

These few find out early on that they simply need to devote themselves to full-time creative works. If they are really smart about this, they will get some one or several around them to be their support group and work on doing their marketing and cover their economic butt, as it were, to keep food on the table and the lights on. Artists Benton and Russell met and married their marketers - which is why we know about them today.

As any genius, you should get a body of people around you which simply work to support you and get your work out to humanity. Or, you can work a bit of your time on the more mundane aspects of marketing your own work and then setting this up to run on a semi-automatic basis through Internet autoresponders and similar tools. Ultimately, as Corey Rudl found, you will have to hire some people full time to take care of your millions in income.

I've looked up one corporation I had been intimately involved in earlier, and found that after the founder died, it ceased to expand shortly thereafter. They haven't replaced their core genius. However, that person left the seeds of destruction behind him, as he said he was the only one who could do what he did - closing the door on succession. No matter how expert or genius the manager that follows, that place is doomed to extinction.

However, the door is wide open for others to succeed. I did a study years ago of self-help classics which are continuing to be successful and expanding after their founder's end. And at the bottom of this are apparent universal principles which anyone can apply to improve their lives. (These are linked in the title.)

So anyone can literally make themselves a genius.

How to recognize and strengthen your own genius traits:

Part of this is to apply and use the Pareto Principle in your own life. Where are you wasting time - where is the 80% of your life which does nothing but take time you could be using for other things?

Perhaps you should concentrate on what is really working for you in your life. Those things you like to do - those things which bring you peace and satisfaction - what about these?

If you chase these down, you'll stumble over your basic purpose for your life. What you are here for can only be defined by you. The clues you get are in what consistently makes you happy, makes you feel good, enables the cares of the world to slip off your burdened shoulders.

Follow your bliss, follow your intuition - these roads lead to your understanding exactly what you want for yourself. And the legacy you wish to leave.

Success, as Earl Nightingale defined it in his gold record "The Strangest Secret", is "the progressive realization of a worthy goal." What goal is personal to you. Some want to become millionaires, some famous actors/actresses, some just want a happy family, or to teach children to become successful themselves. Your goal is what ever you choose it to be.

Look around and search in your life for where you've been leading yourself. You've been pushing for something - what is it? What gives you the clues you are on the right track? It is those simple indicators which you need to follow to determine where your best efficiency lies.

A note is that the bulk of humanity - 99 44/100th's - have no clue about you or your purpose or goals. It's going to be a solo attempt. Likewise, the only thing humanity has evolved is "conventional thought" and "common knowlege" - aka rumormill, scuttlebutt, trashtalk.

The main offspring of modern Western world has been

1. TV (especially afternoon soapoperas and talkshows, evening "news", pornography, and 500-channel cable filled with 2/3rd's content and 1/3 advertisements);
   
2. Movies (the bulk of which don't pay their investors back, as they are that unpopular or ill-concieved, poorly executed);
   
3. Modern "Art" (which the "artist" has to write a paper on what he was trying to say with his art - otherwise, it doesn't make any sense to anyone)
4. The "Beltway" where we send soon-corrupted politicians to spend our money for us - and where we elect a President on a regular basis that we can get tired of and blame for everything that is wrong in our personal lives.

You can safely throw overboard everything you've learned in school and in our modern culture - unless it would get you or someone else physically hurt or killed (like how to cross a busy street safely).

A mob never solved anything or advanced sciences, philosophy, or common sense. Only individuals ever did anything. So get over having to be approved by our modern culture.

Figure that you are really only going to get agreement from individuals like you. You live in a niche somewhere on the Long Tail. There are only a few of you on this planet, no matter how many people wind up living here at any one instant.

To not waste that talent, they have to recognise their rare gift and work on their real talent, which is constant creation. They must "take care of business" either by allocating a small amount of time daily to housekeeping (the original definition of economics) or get some people they can trust with their lives to do that for them.

Surround yourself with people in your 20 percent who have the genius of organization and running large, prosperous corporations. Then you will simply be able to create the way you want to in the remaining time you have on this blue mudball out in space.

You want to live a very full life, doing exactly and always what you should be doing. You'll be constantly cheerful, routinely healthy, and money will be no problem. This is because you'll be providing a very valuable service to all around you. People will want to give back to you just as openly as you have helped others.

You want to encourage others to find their own genius and apply their talents - whatever they are. The world needs all the talents it can use. The world does not need more people making terrorists out of poor souls who have no clue they could be the next Einstein, Curie, Walton, Gates, Sister Theresa...

And where those people in turn recognize their own genius and apply the Pareto principle to utilize those around them, they will build a true juggernaut and expand on the core genius they support.

Society will only improve as the result. And the dream of world peace could become reality.

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P.S. About the "criminal geniuses" - they have the inherent seed of being destructive to all around them, including themselves. Commonly, they live very short lives and cannot trust any around them. Organized law is more effective than organized crime. Your key emphasis should be on creating solutions which far outstrip the ways they can be misused.

Crazy dictocrats in this world ruin their own society for a short time. When true freedom is supported, true economic and quality-of-life choices are possible for everyone - then you have real progress and a society where both the rich and less-rich get richer, where more people live better lives and help each other improve conditions.

Those people who take choice and freedoms away from people are the ones to put in your prayers and meditations. Praying Peace is proved effective. Praying Justice is as well.

Here's some podcasts for your use...

Podcasters delight! - Go Thunk Yourself - the blog - Lulu.com: "Through my other blogs, I found that I had been using some MP3's in my own life which I hadn't made public for others to use. These are simple summaries of Wattle's Science of Getting Rich, and Haanel's Master Key System, plus an updated edit of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.

To make these, I was able to get a good voice from AT&T named Crystal, plugged this into one of my Windows XP machines in order to translate texts into voice, saving these as MP3's.

Now these are available as free downloads for your use. I've also included them into the Go Thunk Yourself Companion CD, so that you can read as well as listen to key excerpts of these books - all from your computer and even your iPod.

I've got some other MP3's from such as Haanel and Troward, but these are only under consideration at this time..."

Practice makes perfect

If you are going to be rich, part of getting in the feeling of your new world is to get used to handling money - lots of it. Some ideas:

a. Work your life backwards from this new income. Part of your planning has to be what you are going to now enjoy with that new income. Jack Canfield has some great ideas on "The Secret" DVD with what he's done in his life.

b. Remember your charities. A great place to get some tax breaks on this new income is to give it away to charity. Get the picture and feelings of being able to write out a huge check to some organization or individual that you think really needs it.

c. Practice writing budgets. How much will you be putting in savings, how much will be operating expenses, how much to investments. Even if you just scratch out some simple ball park figures, these will help. If you are going to start a business, or take one to new levels, figure how much you are going to be paying your new staff and what is going to benefits, your buildings, your fleet of vehicles, how much you are spending on catering. Get the great feeling of having an accountant come in and tell you that you need to find some more places to invest your money. Get the feeling of hiring an investment counselor and some CPA's to take care of all your accounts and keep them balanced.

d. Make a vision board for you new business. Start working it all out - start with a great office suite for yourself (if that is part of your vision) and all the phones and well-groomed, efficient assistants who are helping you manage your empire. Go through some catalogs and magazines and cut out pictures of the executive life you want to lead. Put these on your board, then sit for some time each day and visualize that new, big business you have. If you later revise your dream upwards, you can replace these pictures with new ones you find. But get something up right now, even if the first one is taped on some posterboard.

e. Write or draw everything out. Hill states this from the beginning of his Think and Grow Rich. Other authors also have found the power of getting something written or sketched in the physical universe. You don't have to show this to anyone, what you are interested in here is getting the details worked out of your vision, your new life to lead. I recently found out the truck I drive is exactly like the one I drew years ago, before finding out about the Law of Attraction.

The thing is to do something today, right now, to get yourself in the feeling of your new, rich lifestyle. Get the vision, get the feeling, watch it happen around you.

More self-re-programming progress

Found myself cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Following my muse is interesting - sometimes I wake from dreams with a complete script going. I write this down, but then have no "time" to do the artwork I should really be doing.

But what I "should really be doing" is actually wrapping up and finishing off the old lives I've led to this point. I'm still one foot stuck in marketing my books, which will continue as I go through the rest of this life.

But on "The Secret" DVD is a Feng Shui teacher, who says the physical environment can hold one back. So I cleaned out my shelves and only kept the stuff I thought would be interesting for later study - that I could still get something out of. I wound up with boxes of books to donate to the library (right now they are weight in the back of my truck for the rest of winter). I also have around a 5 foot stack (literally) of paper left over from college, which is trash or will wind up as tinder for starting the stove in the barn this winter.

On this DVD is also Jack Canfield, who says that all the past up to now is "So What?" and the real what is what are you going to do with the rest of it. Since what you thought before this point is what you are experiencing now, then only changing your current thoughts will change that now into something you would prefer.

The trick, as Joseph Campbell stated, is to "follow your bliss". This is hand-in-glove with your intuition and those feelings which bring you peace. If something is irritating you, take action and solve it.

One intuitive point I constantly get is, "Clean Your Room." So, I do. The only great point about this is that it is bringing my far more peace than I thought it would. There is something to be said for an orderly environment.

Little by little, I am being lead (or leading myself) to a more productive space. I'm getting rid of stuff which is destractive and what I don't throw out, I'm reorganizing so that I can either access it readily, or at least make it look nice until I can get to it.

What I want as an end result is an environment which either simply are tools to create my art or are inspiration or exploration leading to inspiration. Farming, for instance, is not readily available on the web. Those sites I've already found useful have been mirrored to my hard-drives so that they can be searched. Otherwise, I am left with researching through some old and very old/reprinted books which tell me data of an earlier, simpler time where organic was the norm, not the exception. But that is only one of my part-time jobs. Left for the remainder of the day is my art and my writing/marketing.

With this room cleaned up, I am able to just have an organized room which is set for servicing the muse when she appears. That is another story and another post.

For right now, I use these last few days before Christmas to enjoy the company of my relatives and to polish my cleanup.

But that's the world I'm living in, as I continue to reprogram my life.

Guess what? Now you're the President!

You are the President. You are also your best friend and worst enemy. You are your spouse and every relative - all at the same time.

How is that so? The way you treat people is how you train them to treat you (Law of Attraction). What you think is what you attract and also how you communicate (or fail to do so) creates your friends, enemies and government representatives.

Have you written the President or e-mailed him about what you think on so-and-so policy he just put out? Then don't complain if he does something you don't like. Same for your senators and representatives, and the clerk as well as senior executives at Wal-Mart. If you communicate, even if they don't respond, at least you've sent something which tells people how you want to be treated.

Now that brings up a very interesting caveat. If you chew them out, or call them bad names, you are essentially wanting them to treat you in this fashion. If you are positive in your comments, you get what you ask for. Now that person might be doing something really stupid - but if you say "hey, you idiot, wise up!", just imagine how you feel when someone says that to you. If you say, "Bud, there's a better way to do that..." you'll get a better response.

You may have seen that anytime you push a negative, you get the opposite response ("The Secret" DVD had extensive data on this subject). So when you tell someone NOT to do something, they'll do it. This was known to NLP practitioners for years. The mind only recognizes a statement when you put it in the positive. Of course, it's common knowledge that only constructive criticism gets results - "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" is the common sense adage.

And so "The Secret" lays out extensively that when you worry about debt, you'll get more debt. If you constantly anguish over how someone is misbehaving in your life, then that person will continue to misbehave. If you "Prayerize, Visualize, and Actualize" per Norman Vincent Peale, then you will create the way you want them to act. If, when you talk to them, you are constantly positive and constructive instead of being critical, this will further the effect. You may note that one of the first actions you are doing is confronting and then taking responsibility for what you see, beginning with your own actions with the people in your environment. Added to this is that you have to be willing and able to understand what is going on and see what life-purposes are in action around you. This is known as the Ablity formula.

Confront your world and those around you, seek to understand where they are coming from, take responsibility for your own and others' actions, find what purpose you and they are striving to achieve. Note that these four points act together inter-relatedly. When you concentrate on one point, you will bring up the other three. While you could conversely work to be irresponsible and avoid confrontation, you will blunt your own purpose and understand less of what is going on around you, but for most people this is harder than simply working to improve life around one. That is because outside of a criminal few, most of us are working to evolve and achieve growth through our daily actions.

Another point on how to talk to people and get your point across, start the conversation with how you appreciate something they are doing - like keeping the floors clean and the shelves stocked. Then ask them if they could improve on something that you've had your attention on. Or could they see if they could stock a certain item for you. Maybe they can't, or won't - but if you stay positive, they might consider it in the future. (Especially if your friends also want this item and use the same approach - what if 20 people came up and complemented you on what you were doing and then all asked you to change one little thing... of course you'd be persuaded to do that.) This is how grassroot response occurs, this is exactly how Wal-Mart and any retailer stocks their shelves - they look at what has been selling and what prices people are willing to pay for a given item. People vote with their pocket book.

The only problems politicians have is that they are elected for years at a time. Often they don't hear from some constituents except at these polls. (And since most of the time, not even 50 percent of the public actually do vote, they never hear from that person at all.)

Here's your assignment: If you disagree with what the President is doing with the economy or the current war - sent him an e-mail. Be positive in your suggestions. Do the same for your other elected officials. Contact your local store through their corporate office and send them some suggestions on how they could improve their service. You can also buttonhole the local manager and tell him how great a job he is doing. And don't forget to complement your significant other on several things that person is doing that you appreciate.

If you do that once a week, adding your representatives' e-mails to your address book, you'll be able to establish a positive flow in your environment. Government might actually be doing what you want them to do for once. I imagine that if a person sent them e-mails 50 times a year/once a week, then they would be inclined to respond. If all these e-mails were positive, then that person would be positively inclined toward that constituent. If not, at least you've put out a positive flow which will attract some positive return to your life.

Changing the theme in your life

Change out your own theme

Your personal theme can be changed, just like you change the theme of your browser or your computer. (On some programs, this is called a "skin" - which is an appropriate metaphor...)

Your theme is built from partly what you have experienced in your life, partly what you have been taught, and partly from you genetics. These are the recurrent attitudes you approach life with. That's your theme.

If you are worried constantly, easy to anger, take life with a "grain of salt", are always optimistic about what is going to turn up - these are all life themes.

You change them, like any habit, through substituting another habit for them. Yes, attitudes are habits. They are adopted by repetition.

You can control any of your attitudes, and should. Just as you stand out if you are laughing at the wrong point in a theatre or crying when everyone is jubilant around you at a football game, you attitudes should be appropriate for what is going on around you. This doesn't mean you agree with everyone's reactions - but you can decide whether you want to call attention to yourself.

I covered this point of controlling your attitudes in Go Thunk Yourself(TM)! Re-programming your habits was covered in Go Thunk Yourself, S'more!

Why I am writing about this is my own efforts in continuing to eat my own dog food. The re-programming I've been doing in my own life has some interesting results so far. The program, as you may recall, is to play "The Secret" DVD several times each day. I often listen to it as background while I am doing other work.

What I've found is that my basic core attitudes have been changing. The text of the DVD has been becoming almost subliminal - listening to something like this makes it become nearly learned by rote, you often know the upcoming part and what is going to be said next. This is the exact point. If you can find a single recording which has a complete system on it, playing it over and over enables you to learn this and reprogram your life with it. There aren't a lot of these recordings, but you will find that many authors such as Wayne Dyer and Earl Nightingale said to contantly play other self-help tapes in your life, to surround you with these articles, books and so on. You are going to reprogram yourslf in this fashion.

Oddly, you can do this by turning off your radio, TV and reading less newspapers during your day. It's interesting to see how quiet things are and what thoughts now come into your mind. If you do this, you can see what you are constantly thinking about during the day - what your "theme" is in life. You will see what your attitudes are and how you deal with things around you. Because you aren't constantly being inundated with stories of the dead, dying, or threatenting - you now have time to track your own thoughts. And then you can decide whether you want to change them or not.

My own experience with this

I'm your basic creative person. A problem solver, an artist. While long ago, I found I was too busy counseling others to have time for my own interests. When I worked out my own purpose, then I found that I really wanted to do more with my art. To do this, I quit my job, moved back nearer my family, went to college to get some degrees, and meanwhile started sorting out how I got into that scene. The result has been these books - and these blogs. So you are seeing in my writings my own evolution. When you read "Go Thunk Yourself, Compleat!", you'll see the changes that happened to me through this route.

But I'm not here today to just talk about me, I'm writing here to tell you how this reprogramming works. My own them was a convoluted one - many, many inputs over many years had left their marks. My mind at times felts like some old washer filled with whites and coloreds and everything else, just spinning around like crazy, sometimes adding water and sometimes draining it off. Only problem is that the washer never stopped washing so you could take the clothes out. So at slow times, I started taking certain items out and putting new ones in (even though my hands got wet in the process... ;) ).

When I learned about from turning off the TV and in doing my farm work (which has a lot of solitude in it with all my chores and field work) was that I could control the speed of that washer - it didn't need to spin all the time at a mad rate. So I kept it going slower so I could see what I was washing.

Reprogramming is like gradually replacing all the colored clothes with whites or vice-versa. You mostly only can pull out a single item at a time and sometimes you pull out the wrong thing - but it's ok to drop something back in. Sometimes you don't have a choice, since a white long-sleeved shirt might be entangled with a pair of jeans. But you simply take out the pair, untangle them, and then put back in the one you want.

How you do this is by doing your four steps, the key one being your own daily review. As you play an MP3 or DVD daily, you start to give yourself a recurrent line of thought to compare your other thoughts with. What I've found is that this method will show up a regular and definate chronic line of thought in your life. With "The Secret" DVD, I'm starting to change any old patterns of self-doubt, anxiety, temper with the positive emotions I really always have cherished. Only now, I can simply keep these positive emotions in my life as a constant theme.

By encouraging those around me to keep to the positive, it helps them and helps me. Dyer once said, "if you can't change the people you are with, then change the people you are with." He also mentioned that your actions to others tell others how to treat you. So as you learn these datums, as you re-program yourself, let others know through your actions. If you truly treat others the way you would like to be treated - through the Golden Rule and the Law of Attraction, this is exactly what will appear in your life.

So in your efforts to change your own theme, you are simply changing the world around you. That's just the way it is. The only way this could fail would be in your keeping all this great stuff to yourself. But then, you'd be surrounded by people with secrets, wouldn't you? And you would have mysteries constantly appearing in your life, wouldn't you?

Write your own theme song

Your world and what you think is entirely up to you. What you experience around you is up to you. If you don't like the stress in your life, if you don't like the arguing, if you feel like you don't control where your life is heading - change it.

I've laid out in this post and its links how you can do it. You can change your life to whatever you want it to be. You can travel, become a millionaire, live a rock star's life - anything you want. For me, I like living on a farm and having the time to do my artwork and write. You might like more action in your life - I cherish solitude. What you want in your life, what your theme is - all of this is up to you to change and sort out for yourself.

Whatever your life's theme song is - it's up to you. And only up to you. No one can change your life for you. Get one of the classics, or one of my books, or several - or listen to Dyer's tapes, or Nightingale's. Or pick up anyone else's and play them constantly for yourself, for your own personal good.

And you'll find your theme changing - so let us find you constantly humming your own theme song.

The Triumvirate of American Self-Help

Wallace Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich;

Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich;

Charles F. Haanel, The Master Key System.

Why are these three authors lauded beyond measure when you mention self-help? How is is that one or more of these books is known by virtually every successful entrepreneur in America today?

Each of these authors laid out a complete system which can be simply applied by anyone to change their lives. Essentially, they gave us a set of new software we could download and install – which would overwrite that system we had been writing for ourselves since birth.

And that is the point of self-help and self-improvement, after all – to enable us to reprogram our own life and to start creating our own world. In a word, Growth. The action is to evolve.

As you study all three of these, you become aware that they repeat each other. They each bring up points covered by the other. While Hill, the most modern of the three, brings up specific points which are more relevant to the modern day and age, his basic principles are still based on the same system which each of these have found.

The method of studying these three is usually in order of simplicity, not according to the date order in which they were written. Haanel wrote his Master Key System as a course in 1909, then published it as a book in 1912. Wattles wrote The Science of Getting Rich in 1910. Hill wrote his Think and Grow Rich in 1937. The simplest of the three is Wattles, followed by Hill and then Haanel. How someone is introduced to any of these three depends on the issues one is facing and whether one is ready to learn (as many texts say, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”).

Comparing the three lives of these authors comes up with numerous parallels and relations. What is interesting is their interconnections. Wattles is the most mysterious of all three, in that little is known about Wattles' life. He was born in the USA shortly before the civil war, and experienced much failure in his earlier years. After he discovered the truth of New Thought principles and put them into practice in his own life, he began to write books as he practiced the techniques from these principles. He then became wealthy and successful.

More is know about the other two. Hill is the more extensively known of the three. While Hill came from humble backgrounds and went on to write his 30-million-copy bestseller, the bulk of his work came after accepting Carnegie's commission to research 500 millionaires to find a success formula that could be used by the common person. After 20 years (1928), he released his 16-volume work, The Law of Success. In 1937, Hill condensed it to a single volume to shake people out of their financial fears from the Depression.

What is interesting is the connection between Hill and Haanel. In a letter written in 1919, Hill thanked Haanel for his book and wrote, “my present success and the success which has followed my work as President of the Napoleon Hill Institute is due largely to the principles laid down in The Master-Key System.”

Charles F. Haanel found his fame in St. Louis and was known as a brilliant entrepreneur, who was responsible for many successful businesses during his life. Haanel's sources are similar to those of Wattles. What you find in comparing Haanel's writings with the Wattles' sources above is their New Thought roots.

The central study, then, is New Thought and its myriad authors. The success of New Thought is due to its inclusive attitude towards authors. Anything which forwards the effectiveness of the subject has been included, no dogma or fixed idea has been held as more important than the truth.

The core to my own studies has been backwards from the bestsellers these authors have created. Each wrote texts that continue as bestselling (and best downloaded) nearly a century after they were written. While I initially limited my studies to eleven authors which met this criterion, my subsequent studies have narrowed to these three authors. The reason for this is found in a key sentence above:

Each of these authors laid out a complete system
which can be simply applied by anyone to change their lives.

When you read these different authors with their similar works, the similarities nearly leap out at you. They each talk about a complete system of thought, cause and effect. They all tell about re-working your own attitudes and thereby re-creating your world around you.

When you go to the web sites which sponsor forums for these authors, you will find seemingly endless volumes of personal success stories from reading just one of these authors.

And that is the amazing recurring point which prompted this volume. These three authors are singing the same tune and very successfully, even while they've been gone from the scene for many, many years. What this means is that if you learn the tune and learn the score, you can have any sort of success in your life that you want. It's just that simple.

The truly killer point of this is

People find that this stuff works, over and over, person after person.

Nowhere in your public schooling has any of this surfaced. They have taught you about the mechanics of how to manage the physical characteristics of your life. These schools, teachers, books – they tell you nothing about how to really pull it all off. They don't teach you how to become an indomitable success in your own life. They can't tell you how or why some people became rich from the same neighborhoods as others who became poor, even after inheriting wealth.

But these three authors do.

So I tell people to read all three of them. And reread them. And start all over again. Figure out how to instill these principles into your own life. Set yourself on the inevitable path to all the wealth, fame, and happiness you've ever wanted. Keep reviewing these references until the solution to any problem immediately leaps into mind from these authors or their influence. That's your key to a completely new world.

But as they say, over and over, you can't get out what you don't put in. So start today; let this day be the first day of a very bright new world for you.

- - - -

I've edited and re-published the classics by these three authors for your use. Each of these key works (except only Hill's Law of Success) I've also published as blogs: Wattle's Science of Getting Rich, Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and Haanel's Master Key System. In this fashion, you and I can refer people to exact chapters of the text, or link a specific paragraph directly in any paper or blog.

These books are all in the public domain. Others have published them quite before me - and some with better bindings, prices, and so on. The reason for my bookstore is so that you don't have to look all over to find a copy - so that any of my research can be duplicated by anyone, to enable complete transparency.

I give you online versions for your use, and published versions for your offline reference. Any books you buy or donations simply support my continued research.

The above article will appear in the final version of Go Thunk Yourself, Compleat!. This last book will contain the latest research notes - in fact, I've just updated it last week. It runs some 400 pages right now, so it's a real paperweight against those stiff winds running through your office.

All of these books can be previewed online, and many of them can be bought as downloads.

Good Hunting!

Now there is another option for your use.

Got a Squidoo page for this book. And there's videos linked in from YouTube, plus books from Amazon.

I've got Squidoo pages for the other two books as well. Fun, and letting people know what they can get.

Have to get back to my artwork, afterall...

The Secret to the World

Chapter 8 of "The Secret" DVD gives many answers to what is going on around us in this world and how things have gotten this bad - as well as how they are improving. This version includes Hicks-Abraham, which isn't the version commonly available now. But the great part is that this whole DVD is available on Google Video - so watch away. But get the DVD for yourself for the extra features and better quality.

Summary of "The Secret" by Bob Proctor

Here is a small intro to the DVD. Get it, watch it over and over and over. Change your life. Make your dreams become reality.

Joe Vitale on Larry King Live! (promo clip from CNN)

Joe Vitale on the Larry King Live cable TV show. Full show aired November 16, 2006 - and is available on Google Video, and the transcript is also available. Thought you'd be interested in why and how you can focus on positive thoughts to get more of these in your life.

Throw out your past, Streamline your present, Let your future be Now.

Simple operating words, and simple theory behind them.

Your past isn't worth worrying over or trying to re-create – it's over. Your present is the result of past thought and action. The future never shows up – so you have to create the Now.

The Law of Attraction says what you think about will happen to you and around you. These three steps enable your power to change your world.

Throw out your past:

Essentially, what happened is, “so what?” Your past and present were created by thoughts you had in the past. What you did or didn't do back then, resulting in what you have, do, and be right now – these are gone and done with. Regretting your yesterday's or constantly comparing yourself to old accomplishments doesn't get you anywhere today (only continually shrinking residual/royalty checks, if you were smart enough to be a successful actor or got a book published). If you are constantly referring to your own actions, your own reputation or legacy – you only live in the past, which means you aren't living today, right now.

Go through your room and your house and look over what you have decorating it. Do these represent your past glories or your current visions and expectations for future accomplishments? If your rooms and home have become a museum, it may be time for a change. Those things we keep around us motivate us and support our current actions. Or they hold us, stuck in the past.

What you surround yourself with reinforces what you are achieving or acquiring right now. When you keep old college notes, old books you will never read, old collections of past glories – these leave you stuck in your college days, in potential knowledge or experiences never grasped, in your past accomplishments. What you think about NOW is what you will become, manifest, accomplish – NOW. If you surround yourself with old glories, you will be reinforcing those things you did once – not things you are want to do now. This is what makes “old age” really old – people with that condition only constantly think about what they have already done, not what they can still get done.

So go through everything around you and see what you are surrounding yourself with. If it doesn't support what you are trying to accomplish, then chuck it out. Donate the books to Charity – don't keep it around so you can “sell it on eBay”. If you want to make some money off the valuable stuff – get it over to someone else to sell on eBay – then give 10% or more of those proceeds over to charity and invest the rest toward your vision. Don't just buy more stuff, unless this is going to forward your vision.

Streamline your present:

You have to sort out what your are doing according to what vision you are holding for the rest of your life. What are you constantly working at accomplishing? Your internal vision is what is going to happen to you. If you are constantly having attention on negative items, such as global war, poverty, bills, ill health – that is what you are going to surround yourself with.

You have your purpose, but you have to let it find you. It will find you in those things you really like to do, those things which bring you personal peace of mind, those things which thrill and inspire you to do better things with your life – you are a creative being, it comes with the territory of being human. What you create is in your mind first. Until you get the idea first, you won't get the product. Nothing springs eternal without someone at least having the idea first.

So you have to take the ideas which you can really get behind and then really get behind them. To do this, start cutting out of your life those things which don't make you more peaceful, more serene, more happy, more content. If you get mad at what you see on the news, why are you watching – do you have to watch all the news in order to accomplish what makes you happy? Maybe you only really need the financial news, or the sports news actually thrills you. But do you have to have the commentary and slant? Will what you read and what you watch add to your ability to create that vision you have for your life? If not, get these out of your life. If they do, reinforce these so you get only what you really need out of these.

Streamlining can be simple. For instance, while you like to find out what the sports scores are, if you look them up on the Internet as a summary, you will save some time and be able to quickly find out the specific teams you are interested in. Another example: if you have to keep track of business news, there are sites which enable specific news to be searched for and filtered out (both Google and Yahoo have this, as well as others.) There are add-on's to some browsers which even filter out the ads, like the ones which filter out the spam and viruses from your e-mail.

Streamlining will give you more time and more energy. Saving 3-5 hours of TV watching a day will give you more time to fill your mind with pleasant thoughts and inspirations. If you constantly have pleasant thoughts, you will get pleasant things happening in your life. If you have a mix of noise and pleasant stuff in your head, figure that this is why you have a chaotic environment around you. That's the way the Law of Attraction works within you and around you. Use all that extra time around you to increase the amount of great-feeling stuff in your thoughts and in your life.

Let your future be Now:

If you are always thinking about how “someday I'm gonna,” “if I only had,” “when I win the lottery” - all these things will never occur because you have them all out there in the future. What you think is what happens to you and around you. If you put the tense of what you want into the future – that is when it will occur. If you never put a date on it, then it won't show up. It will always be out there as a “someday, I'll...” And that is exact.

Thoughts are finite things. So in order to create something around you, these thoughts have to be created as having happened. Your present was created from past thoughts. So think as things have already happened and get the feeling of these being there just like that – they have to be completed actions in order to manifest around you as fact. Wishful thinking, daydreams – all these things never happen because you don't really get behind them and start to make them happen.

In order to get your thoughts to happen around you, you have to look behind them and do the actions which will make them happen. Most of the times, especially with big items, you may not have a clue how you are going to make your first million dollars. But as you continue to feel that you already have that first million dollars, ideas will come to you that you can apply to achieve it. Work at implementing these ideas, while continuing to hold that positive ideal as already completed – and more ideas will come to you; your luck will change and everything will go your way.

Sure, this takes practice. I've heard of studies and examples where people took as much as thirty days to start making things happen around them. But if you look around you, you'll find some of those things happening to you – look at some little things, first – and you can chase it back to where you had that thought, or told someone a thought like that. If you are having a hard time finding something, perhaps it is because you put it down somewhere that “you won't lose it”. (The human mind doesn't recognize no, nothing, or zero – it only sees the sentence as “ you will lose it”.) If you want to find things easily, always hold or change the thought to “I'll put it down where I find it easily.” And then you will probably have an inspired idea of where to put it – like on a hook above where children or pets can reach. But keep examining your thoughts and practice daily on creating your vision, full of feeling, out in front of you – and you will start having these things occur in your universe.

There is only really the Now. The past is a record of what happened, the present is full of things you thought of earlier, the future never really comes. So what you think and act and feel in the Now is how you can and will influence and change your life.

So:

Throw out your past, Streamline your present, Let your future be Now.

- - - -

Links: The Secret DVD, Haanel's Master Key System, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Wattle's Science of Getting Rich, Allen's As a Man Thinketh.

Dr. Robert C. Worstell has researched and studied in the field of counseling and personal improvement for over 35 years. He is the author of the successful “Go Thunk Yourself^TM” series, along with editing numerous collections of self-help classics, and maintaining numerous blogs in this area.

Re-programming progress

I started just over a week ago conscientiously to re-program myself. Essentially, this is taking the 30-day datum which traces back to “The Secret” DVD. One step of this is visualizing, much as Hill laid out, all the things I want in life. Another is listening to part or all the that DVD daily – regardless of what else is going on.

What has started happening is that I'm finding various things I want showing up for sale or in my environment. Land, farm equipment, even an old truck with 4WD – just the color I plan to have. These bring up the interesting point that I consider myself unable to purchase these – which is itself a negative attraction. But I've found out that started finding myself saying, “That's my truck!” So I've started to effectively change over my thoughts into new habits and patterns.

As well, I've been noticing how I have actually been manifesting both in the long term and immediately at work and home. Things show up for me. Two dogs which are mixed breeds, but of the kind I want around. Both loving and faithful, intelligent and able to learn quickly.

I've also found that as I see how I train others to put up with my temper outbursts (which are becoming more infrequent), I am also training myself to demonstrate forbearance, patience, and so have “pulled in” my family and others being patient with me. At work, I strive to do more than asked for (as Hill and Nightingale and Wattles all advise) and so I now effortlessly achieve production quotas – with less work and anxiety on my part. I simply had to disbelieve those who said that it was impossible to meet those quotas.

Despite how others around me treat me, I give them hopeful ideas and supportive comments. As a result, these people are now starting to give me examples of how they are being supportive and hopeful, helpful in their own lives.

Today, after a bizarre snowfall which dumped over 12 inches over night, I made sure the roads in front of my own house – for about a half-mile total – were cleared enough to drive on. Then I helped my brother-in-law get home as he was stuck on roads which hadn't been opened. This was done without complaint and through using vision and acting on the inspiration to hand. Sure, I thought I could be more at peace about it and more cheerful, but nonetheless, I didn't lose my temper and simply worked with the tools to hand to get him home. Later that day, I accidentally went off a steep shoulder into drifted snow. The person I was getting over for stopped and tried to get me out, unsuccessfully and breaking a chain. However, he went ahead and took me home, completely out of his way. Calling tow trucks got me nowhere, since none of the local trucks were able to deal with the snow. I did keep holding onto the idea that the truck was out of the ditch, leaving it over to Higher Intelligence. One detail in this was that I had taken one of the dogs with me and so needed to get it home again. I asked the neighbor for a ride, finding that he had a 4WD truck. He immediately latched onto the idea of seeing if we could pull me out. The long and short of it is that we got two other trucks to stop and help out, even though we didn't even know them. And the truck was pulled out, despite breaking a chain and two tow straps.

An interesting point is that my neighbor and I discussed how it was always good to help others out without ever expecting a return, since good things always came from this. While he told me an example of someone who had mistreated him recently, I simply returned to the point which we both did agree on is that the Golden Rule always worked, what goes around comes around. And so we had all the help we could use. Others even stopped to give advice and moral support.

The phrase, “what goes around comes around” also accurately describes the Law of Attraction. Being able to keep somewhat at peace also influenced my day. I got cheerful and helpful people who actually asked to get involved in my predicament.

So I really see that I have to be grateful for all that comes into me. Everything. One has to take responsibility for everything one attracts and be grateful for having that happening. John Assaraf, bestselling author and millionaire entrepreneur, says that one of the laws of this universe is that there are plus and minus to everything. That “every dark cloud has a silver lining” is one such example. Others, such as Wayne Dyer, agree with Assaraf that every bad thing that happens to one has a lesson behind them. Once one learns and appreciates that lesson, one can change the operating basis one has and so keep that situation from recurring – or handle the nightmares which are recurring about that scenario.

The trick is to do it without fear, but with gratitude – which is a form of love. Fear brings more toward you, Love turns all negative situations to your advantage.

I've taken certain ideas from “The Secret” into my own life as part of this. As an artist, I am creative, imaginative – all talents which are very valuable in creating things into my life. So I made pictures of the 7 major items I wish to happen in my life, posting these on a board which is in the middle of my room – so I pass these images several times each day. Now I just take a moment each time I pass this, in order to get the feeling of these images in my own mind as having occurred. Then I release these to the Universe to manifest.

I'm still in the process of cleaning up this room which is chock-full of STUFF from several years of working to get college degrees. I see that I have wanted for a long time a room which was filled with books – and this is what I achieved, putting shelves on all four walls, then filling them with references. So when I finally saw that, I said to myself, “OK, great. But I don't want that anymore. I don't need that manifestation around me. I want to get a lot more art into my life. So the new manifestation is to clear off these shelves and fill those spaces with images which represent my new ideas. There is tons to do. Almost all of these books will go over to library donations – a few rare books will be put up for sale, only because they are specialist items, not because I expect to get much from them. Donating some very valuable books to the library where they can be either used or sold – this gives me a tithing scene where I can give without expecting return, doing something good for the community. Just streamlining my life and getting it closer to an ideal, by changing my own immediate environment.

In chasing down these 7 or 8 key ideals, I have run into some intuitive suggestions. Some seem blind right now, but I simply use visioning to get these done as well. I get the vision of that particular product happening and then turn it over to the Universe, with faith that it has occurred – the Universe always provides. But I still have to act.

Another point borrowed from “The Secret” is that the part-time job I am holding has now become my debt-repayment program. I work to pay off the bills I've created, just two days a week. In this fashion, I quit worrying about the bills, since I make more than enough to pay for them. One interesting point is that this job I got had just increased its base pay by $2/hr just days before I applied (as I found out after I had filled out the application). By figuring what immediate reserve I had to have, and then targeting all the rest of the monies to go back against the debt, I'll pay these off more quickly. But the main point is that I've moved away from consciously having negative attention on debts. So I have more free time to now concentrate on optimistic goals.

The rest of the week, I am working at reprogramming myself and manifesting my dreams. This is moving along, never as fast as I wish – but I have to simply keep my faith at it, keep my own optimism high. I keep getting ideas all the time about books to publish and artwork to create. Where I can, I work these up and get them done. Some segue into others. I see the points of these which are working, the serendipitous chance happenings which you can't do other than simply have gratitude for.

One interesting situation occurred recently when I was cleaning up one of those bookshelves and found several copies of a picture book I would publish currently – while I thought all copies of that book had been lost. I also found another script and a short story which could be made simply into published works. In doing this cleaning, I also found myself filled with new ideas for future works. So I still have teachers in my life.

The scene in re-programming, or in doing any action, is to look for things going right. The more things which happen that show up just the way you wanted – these show that you are right on track and doing the right things in your life. With the Law of Attraction, all of the points talked about in “The Secret” can be worked out logically backwards to that Law. They give some underpinings, such as the world consisting of massively interconnected energy fields. Most of it is tied up in how you apply this and create the world around you. As you fill yourself with positive thoughts, more and more positive things happen in your life.

I started years ago to determine if there were a single personal improvement system. This road has lead me to write, edit, and publish well over a dozen books, more than a half-dozen blogs, and embrace a completely new world view. As Bob Proctor says, “What a wonderful trip it is!'

I only have one wish for you: join us on this journey, from wherever you are right now to wherever you want to wind up.

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Links: The Secret DVD, Haanel's Master Key System, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Wattle's Science of Getting Rich, Allen's As a Man Thinketh.

Dr. Robert C. Worstell has researched and studied in the field of counseling and personal improvement for over 35 years. He is the author of the successful “Go Thunk Yourself^TM” series, along with editing numerous collections of self-help classics, and maintaining numerous blogs in this area.

How Magic Works in Your Life

The Secret DVD is a real classic. In this movie, you are told all about the Secret to life. Part of this is the magic which envelopes you on a daily basis – if only you can tap into its power.

What is the Secret?

The Secret is the Law of Attraction. In simple terms, Like attracts Like. According the ancient philosophy of Huna, their first principle is: The world is what you think it is.

That means everything you wish for – and wish fervently for – comes true. While I and others have covered this in great detail (get that DVD above for the real master course in this subject), here are some notes taken from a single chapter out of that movie.

Having magic occur routinely in your life is no different than crossing the street safely. If you know the rules and apply them, you can do it safely every time. You can put walking and street crossing on automatic, not even thinking about how to get from here to there in a city. You can then spend your time walking in great conversation, solving a problem at work, or appreciating the world around you. Attracting the things you really want in life is just that simple, just as easily put on automatic. Once you've established this pattern in your own life, you are on the way to creating bigger and better creations. There is no limit to what you can potentially manifest in your life.

There is a very simple creative process outlined there.

The Creative Process:

1. Ask,

2. Believe,

3. Receive.

Really, this is just using the Universe as a catalog, as Joe Vitale explains it. You just place your order for what you want. You can have anything that you want, really. If you really have faith in how your thoughts create your world, it will show up. If you want more cash, a better job, a certain type of person in your life – simply ask for that specific amount of money, that particular job, that certain person. Believe you have it, and then get into the feeling that you already have it.

This works just as well for little things as it does for great things. A cup of coffee manifests as simply as a new building. If you look around your life, you can probably find things which occur around you because you've thought about having it earlier that day or that week. Part of looking and finding these things is the practice of developing your faith.

A Feeling Universe

This is a universe of feeling. You have to believe with your whole heart and have faith in yourself and your creations. The important part is to be grateful, to feel yourself as you do when you receive that gift – every day is your best Christmas.

Faith is essentially built by feeling good about it. Napoleon Hill had this built up with auto-suggestion, which is essentially making and memorizing your goal, then repeating it over and over to yourself. This is a useful truth. Others in this DVD tell you to keep your vision in front of you constantly. Every day look over that vision of what you want to accomplish and get into the feeling of having it. Eventually, this becomes nearly automatic.

And your feeling good, having that great feeling of having things needs to become automatic. This is that when you feel good, good things happen to you. If you allow yourself to feel bad, then negative things happen around and to you. Get on the positive side of life – not just thinking positive, but feeling positive.

Fill your life with action

The trick is to fill your world with action. When you get some hint, some intuitive nudge – act on it. Nothing happens, nothing is given without giving. Work this whole scene over in your mind and act from the impulses you receive there. When you start looking for things to happen, you will find odd coincidences happening around you. Keep note of these coincidences and validate them, be grateful for them. They will then start appearing in greater frequency. That is what you are looking for.

You may do the simple thing of giving away things in your life which you no longer have any use for. Go through your books and donate those ones you basically have no further use for. Give them to charity, to the local library. Stream line your world around you. Particularly get rid of stuff that makes you feel sad or upset. Surround yourself with stuff that makes you feel inspired, which makes you feel good, which makes you feel inspired.

Start living from your purpose – which is finding those things in your life which make you feel good. If you like to play sports, then do this. If you like to draw, regardless of whether anyone says what you draw is good or whatever – if you like to do it, if it brings you peace: do it. Your purpose in life is whatever you say it is. It is what brings you peace, what makes you feel good – all the time.

Then the magic starts happening in your life. Work only from what makes you feel good, the visions you hold as important to your life. Act on the inspirations you receive as you go. As you act with integrity, your life will continue to feel better and better – and you will surround yourself with more and more things which support that basic purpose you have for your life.

The way to get magic into your life, surrounding you:

• Decide what you want,

• Believe you already have it with all your heart,

• Feel in yourself that feeling of having received it.

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Links: The Secret DVD, Haanel's Master Key System, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Wattle's Science of Getting Rich, Allen's As a Man Thinketh.

Dr. Robert C. Worstell has researched and studied in the field of counseling and personal improvement for over 35 years. He is the author of the successful “Go Thunk Yourself^TM” series, along with editing numerous collections of self-help classics, and maintaining numerous blogs in this area.

Bliss

“Follow your bliss,” goes the quote.

Why is this key, what are the downfalls to doing so? Theoretically, none – but if you don't know the theory, you can get into some pretty wild scenarios which aren't under your control.

Most people, however they try to remain in control are very much on automatic. The control they have in their lives is mostly through subscribing to other's opinions and concepts. Our habits are those we've chosen partially due to heredity, but a lot are due to our own learning. And the learning we've done is from those people we have experienced in our lives. Books, schools, colleges – these teach only the mundane, regular theories which have served us for centuries. The wildest concept to break through since Christ has been that of the free market and related concepts such as a written constitution, which guarantees free speech and all the peripherals needed to having an open market.

However, most of the lies are still out there. Economics is based on a huge one, which is usually explained in the first few paragraphs of any basic text – that there is not enough to go around. Unfortunately, this was disproved many, many years ago. Buckminster Fuller pointed out in the 60's and 70's how mankind had been able to feed the entire world since WWII. Our only problem has been in distribution. (And more recently, Wal-Mart has seemed to have solved that...)

Practically, natural laws described by nearly all religions and known by successful people throughout history have long held that there is enough of everything to go around, not just food. This is due to the simple concept and Law of Attraction – which is based on the simple datum that “thought becomes things.” Whatever you think is what occurs in the world around you. If you are happy, you attract happy circumstances. Get critical and you will find yourself being criticized. This is, of course, the Golden Rule. But not because someone has told you to treat others like you would like to be treated, but more that however you treat people around you is exactly how you are going to be treated – whether you know of that rule or not.

Before you treat others around you any differently, you should know one thing: you have to treat yourself like you would like to be treated. This is prior to even treating anyone else in any fashion at all. If you are constantly critical of yourself, you will get critical manifestations in the world around you. If you are loving and cheerful, even supportive of your own efforts, you will then get happy things happening around you. William James, Norman Vincent Peale, Plato, Aristotle – all these knew that a person could change their attitudes at will. You can think of cheerful things, or just start laughing, and you will soon cheer up. By changing your own attitude, you can then attract whatever you want.

You then get closer to following your bliss. Bliss is very close, almost synonymous with your own personal purpose in life. Wayne Dyer very simply states that you find your purpose by letting it find you. Look around and find what makes you feel good. What do you like to do and what activities bring you real satisfaction? Start keeping track of these and doing more of these. Eventually, you will see a pattern to what is making you happy and constantly feeling good. This is what you should be doing. You might be able to put a name on it and describe it – maybe not.

What you are finding is your bliss. You are finding what is sublime in your life, what brings you peace, what makes your serene.

If all your thoughts were serene, were happy, were confident – then you would attract things in your life which bring you serenity, happiness, confidence and security. Fear will drop away and courage will build, as you build your faith in yourself and what you can and do create by changing what you are being.

Bliss, follow your bliss.

Try it for yourself – make yourself cheerful, as Earl Nightingale long ago prescribed, for 30 days and go about doing things for people far beyond what you are expected to do. Do things which you expect no returns for. Simply do good deeds every chance you get – for family, friends, total strangers. Be unreasonably cheerful in everything you do and hold this as a constant way of life. What will happen after 30 days is that you have now just developed a new pattern, a new chronic habit for yourself. You can support this by picking up self-help tapes and books which talk about this subject. Earl Nightingale's “The Strangest Secret” is one, while the DVD “The Secret” is another. Wallace Wattle's Science of Getting Rich, or Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich both have intense methodologies for changing your world around. Read them during this 30-day period, and/or listen to such tapes or DVD's daily, over and over. You will reinforce your bliss and refine it. And you will have a very different take on life.

You can have an incredible world around you, full of magic, miracles, and habitual success in all you attempt.

But you have to follow your bliss. You will then find the world around you assisting you in following that bliss. The more blissful you make yourself, the more the universe backs you up.

And tell others why you are “so damned happy all the time” when they ask. Encourage others to find and follow their own bliss.

Eventually, you will make islands of sanity and calm around you. Those islands can become the sea, and eventually take over the whole she-bang.

But it starts with you and your bliss.

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Links: The Secret DVD, Haanel's Master Key System, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Wattle's Science of Getting Rich, Allen's As a Man Thinketh.

Dr. Robert C. Worstell has researched and studied in the field of counseling and personal improvement for over 35 years. He is the author of the successful “Go Thunk Yourself^TM” series, along with editing numerous collections of self-help classics, and maintaining numerous blogs in this area.