Steer Your Thoughts: Drive Your Life

A couple of years ago, as I marked 10th anniversary of graduating from the American University in Bulgaria, I came to realize that there are 2 important activities that you have an opportunity to engage in a lot when you are a student and have considerably less after you graduate, and these are Reading Books and Having Sex. Just imagine: unless you are working in the library or the adult industry, it is hard for you to be surrounded by everyday possibilities so abundant in one of these two fields, and almost never in both, unless you are a RedTube star who is also a part-time librarian. rnAs opposed to these undertakings, there is something you can do right here right now and can continue doing as much as you want throughout your whole life: The ability to control your thoughts. This is the only thing over which you have full and unquestionable control. The major step to designing your life exactly the way you want it to be lies in realization and full acceptance of this fact. You can steer your thoughts to any end you wish and thus effectively drive your life to any destination. You are the creator of your thoughts, and as the creator you can decide how they will look like. When you are drawing a picture, you don’t let it become whatever it happens to become, right? You consciously direct your artistic talents—if you have developed such—in making the picture look exactly like you imagine it to be. The same relates to your thoughts. Letting any random thoughts dominate your mind and hope to have something good come out, is like drawing with no effort or direction and hoping to get good-looking painting at the end. That is possible, and you may even be recognized as a genius, but the chances are quite low. Napoleon Hill wrote in his Law of Success “Thought is the most highly organized form of energy… The fact that thought is the only thing over which you have absolute control is, within itself, of most profound significance, as it strongly suggests that thought is your nearest approach to Divinity, on this earthly plane.” Like attracts like. We attract events and people into our lives that are consistent with our prevailing thoughts. It is a fact that our fundamental thoughts determine our actions, reactions, and choices we make that invariably lead us in the direction they represent. It is the Law of Attraction in action. Brian Tracy said, “You are a living magnet. What you attract into your life is in harmony with your dominant thoughts.” And in the words of Buddha, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” We cannot see this attraction physically, but the same goes for electricity. The fact that we don’t see it doesn’t prevent us from enjoying its constructive benefits or fearing its deadly force. The same goes for the Law of Attraction. It works whether we see it or not and whether we understand it or not. As positive thoughts lead to positive events, so do negative thoughts lead to negative events. We have to be extremely careful in selecting our thinking patterns. The Law of Attraction is the universal law that is treating everybody and everything equally. Your thoughts are the seeds from which the plants of your reality grow. James Allen said at the turn of the last century in his book As a Man Thinketh, “A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If not useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.” “We become what we think about,” as was exactly noted by Earl Nightingale. If you remember just this and nothing else from this humble piece, you’ll be ready to start making radical and lasting positive changes in your life. The life that is the way you think it should be. But will only good thinking about pleasant things in life help you achieve something worthy? If you think about tiramisu all the time, it may happen so that someone will ask you to go for a coffee and will treat you with this very dessert, but this might hardly move you closer to where you want to be in life. So, the single most important factor for becoming the driver of your life is in knowing what you want. It is about having an exact idea of where you want to go. I want to make it clear: it’s not about knowing all the details of how you’ll get there, but rather knowing what is your final destination. A definiteness of purpose is something that separates successful people from failures. Clarity of vision is the number 1 prerequisite for those aspiring to become outstanding in life. All great success in life starts with a Definite Aim, a Major Goal, an Overriding Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it. The written history doesn’t have any records where any significant accomplishment has been attained without first being born clearly in someone’s imagination as a concrete goal. 19 out 20 people that you meet in the street, wouldn’t know what is that they want to achieve in life. Most of the people live the lives of “quiet desperation,” as Brian Tracy says, because they don’t have definiteness of purpose. Or, as Napoleon Hill put it, “fully 95% of people drift aimlessly throughout life without having a slightest idea what they really want or at what they are the best at.” I hope you don’t want to be among those who just float on the skies of life, being totally at the whim of the winds for their direction. It’s hard if not impossible to know if you got somewhere you wanted, if you didn’t know where you were going in the first place. “You can’t hit a target if you don’t know what it is,” is well-said by Anthony Robbins. If you want to attain successful in life, however you define success for yourself, you have to know what you want from it. As Stephen Covey puts it in his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, in the beginning have the end in mind. That is a very powerful method for both weekly tasks and life objectives. It lets you see the things from the absolute perspective. So control your thoughts. Steer them in the direction of your Dominant Ambition, feed your mind with images of your success, and you will drive your life to wherever you want it to go. I would like to finish with quoting the famous poem, Thinking, by not so famous poet, Walter D. Wintle, that was originally printed in 1905. “If you think you are beaten, you are;rnIf you think you dare not, you don't;rnIf you like to win, but you think you can't,rnIt is almost certain you won't.rnIf you think you'll lose you've lost,rnFor out of the world we findrnSuccess begins with a fellow's will –rnIt's all in the state of mind.rnIf you think you are outclassed, you are -rnYou've got to think high to rise.rnYou've got to be sure of yourself beforernYou can ever win a prize.rnLife's battles don't always gornTo the stronger or faster man; rnBut soon or late the man who winsrnIs the man who thinks he can.”