Is It Really Possible To Attract Wealth?

The world is not short of websites, books and motivational speakers who teach that money may be acquired (or manifested, to use the jargon) purely through the power of the mind. That focusing intently upon, being open to receiving and acting as if you already enjoy great wealth will in, and of itself, cause you to become wealthy.

Is there any truth to this? Well some, but to be honest, not much. In many, if not most, human endeavors, certain conditions are what is known as necessary but not sufficient. In other words, you need to develop some particular trait or skill to make success even a possibility, but that ability is not usually enough by itself.

For example, to stand a hope of pursuing a successful career as a golf professional you have to master all the various shots (driving, short game, putting, etc) otherwise, frankly you're just a dreamer. But paradoxically, being technically superb is not enough either - you do need to develop elements of the dreamer in order to nourish and sustain your drive and ambition.

Like the song says, if you don't have a dream then how are you going to have a dream come true? Ask any golf pro or other person who has been successful pursuing their goal and not one of them will tell you they drifted into it by accident. It starts with a dream, with burning desire; but it gets accomplished though action.

Action, execution, delivery, just doing stuff. Whatever terminology you prefer, it all boils down to the same thing - turning the dream into reality. And that's the problem with what is touted as the Universal Law of Attraction. At best it can lay only a limited claim to represent one half of the equation. And in the absence of anything vaguely useful to say about the other, lazily presumes that to be quite sufficient.

We're back to visualizing yourself sinking that winning birdie on the 18th at Augusta. Ask Tiger, Jack, Arnold, anyone whoever won the Masters and sure, they all had that dream and saw themselves there years before it happened. But do you honestly believe that any of them set about acquiring the trophy by "attracting" it? If you do then I have disappointing news for you - it is not possible to "manifest" a three hundred yard tee shot. All the positive energy in the world is no match for hours, weeks, years of hard, dull practice and getting it wrong more often than right (at least to begin with).

Anyway, back to what where we were taking about - making money. What will happen if you totally focus your mind on creating wealth? The answer is that it depends on what you actually do to deliver on those thoughts. There is no question that fierce concentration on a particular subject is helpful. Like our golfers, most rich people wanted to be rich and so devoted a lot of their time to thinking about their goal and how to achieve it. But they all, without exception, backed this up by doing stuff - with a ratio probably close to 99:1 doing:thinking.

In order to make money it is undoubtedly necessary for "making money" to be the center of your attention. If you are always thinking "how can I make money" then you will spot opportunities everywhere you look. Your colleagues may regard a shambolic and unreliable local pizza delivery service as an annoyance; you however will see it as a business opportunity because you have dialed your mind to that setting. But you still won't generate any wealth unless you act quickly to setup and run a better service. Being alert to opportunities is certainly necessary, but it's not sufficient.

Knowing what needs to be done and how to do it is not, never has been, and never will be any substitute for actually doing it. And that's the central problem with all this talk of attraction. It's the wrong damned word. Attraction describes a process whereby things are drawn to you; that all the action is on their part and you are a passive recipient of this largesse.

That's the complete opposite of how it really works. People who are successful and attain wealth (fame or whatever it was they wanted) pursue it, hunt it down, chase it. Attract it? It's never happened yet and all recorded human history acts as overwhelming evidence that this is so.

So next time you come across a pitch promising to show how you too can manifest wealth beyond reason through the lore of attraction then keep a firm grip on what "beyond reason" actually implies. You know, like when we refer to a lunatic as "having lost all reason".