Don’t Call It the Law of Attraction

Note From Rand

Ken Blanchard, “The One Minute Manager” guy and one of my co-authors for last year’s Blueprint for Success, recently celebrated his 70^th birthday. His family had a party for him in southern California that he billed not as his “retirement celebration,” but his “re-fire-ment celebration.” I’m convinced that Ken will live to be 150 and will work right up to the end. He brings lofty vision, incredible energy and a genuine love of people to everything he does. He is totally engaged in living his life.

Age is only a number. If you truly own your life … if you are totally engaged in living your life … if you believe that your own growth and vitality are among your super-ordinate priorities, you must define and achieve greatness along dimensions that you determine are important. Why settle for less?!

Are we connected on Facebook? If we are, go to my “info” page and check out “my beliefs” under my personal information. I frequently ask my clients to detail their beliefs and then regularly assess how they’re doing versus what they espouse. Try it in your own life and be ready for its transformative power.

Lastly, my friend Dr. Denis Waitley, a legend in the personal development field (his audio-program, “The Psychology of Winning,” is still the all-time bestseller), former Navy pilot and Naval Academy grad, shared the statement below on Memorial Day. It’s never too late to remember.

“My name is unimportant; it isn’t even known. My face is unfamiliar; it is never shown. I live only in the hearts of family and my fellow men. Remembered mostly once each year, then forgotten once again. But I feel no sorrow or loss of faith, and my values endure and sustain. For I am the Unknown Soldier, whose life was not in vain.”

My first article this month concerns the Law of Attraction. Here’s the short version: It may be true, but it’s not a law. The second article cites the late basketball coach, Chuck Daly, as an example of effective leadership. He once made the comment, “You want to create an environment where they’ll let you coach them.” That sounds obvious; its implications, however, are profound.

See you in July. Until then, get real, get tough and get going.

Rand Golletz’s Profile | Create Your Badge

Attraction: Call it a Principle; it’s not a Law

A few hundred people crowded into the hotel ballroom. Smoke billowed from the dry ice planted behind the stage, creating a mystical impression. The evening’s speaker, a renowned “authority” on the “Oprah circuit,” emerged from behind the curtain to wild applause from the crowd who believed he would impart clues to their fulfilling their dreams.

He launched into a superbly crafted, hugely entertaining but scientifically flawed presentation. The subject: The Law of Attraction. In case you’ve been asleep for the last couple of years, the law of attraction says that all your thoughts, all images in your mind and all the feelings connected to your thoughts will later manifest as your reality. In other words, everything you have in your life now
has been attracted to you through your mind. I buy it — partially.

A bit of history:

In the early 1900s, Napolean Hill was engaged by Andrew Carnegie to conduct a study of the most successful people in the world. That decades-long study was published in 1937 as Think and Grow Rich. Make no mistake about it, this was and is a great book — maybe the best book ever written about success. I’ve read it and re-read it and encourage you to do the same (Click here to purchase). What I do not encourage you to do is to take it literally and absolutely. Think and Grow Rich introduced the masses to the concept of the law of attraction. It stated unequivocally that success begins with a clear image and definition, as well as with certitude and conviction.

Fast forward to the 1970s: Jim Rohn, Denis Waitley, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy and others each began teaching their personalized versions of the laws of success to the masses. They supplemented the message of “if you can conceive it, you can achieve it,” with a good bit of “and oh, by the way, you also have to plan, focus your energy, discipline your actions and work your a– off.”

In the 1990s, the concepts of spiritual enlightenment and material prosperity converged and, at some point, many people who were spiritually inclined but who were not previously disposed to strive for financial success collapsed the two. (I have neither the time or inclination to get into that any deeper here.)

So far, the 2000s have spawned a large number of “gurus” who have pitched the idea that if a person:

• knows precisely what he wants,

• asks the universe for it,

• feels, behaves and knows as if the thing he desires is on its way and

• is open to receiving it all while letting go of the outcome, then

the object of his desire will manifest itself in his life.

I’m OK with all of this, but I would put these assertions in the category of “necessary, but insufficient.”

From my perspective, here’s the rub: Calling attraction a law rather than a principle creates the impression that it survived an unassailable, scientific triage process. Here’s the real deal:

In our world, we use the “scientific method” to test hypotheses before we call them laws. In really oversimplified terms, the scientific method is a process of:

• stating a problem,

• creating a hypothesis,

• collecting and analyzing data and

• drawing conclusions.

Hypotheses must pass through the scientific method before becoming theories, the next formal stage in the journey from hypothesis to law. A theory is a more detailed and substantial explanation of phenomena. It has some predictive value. Ultimately, if a theory is validated over time; if it is shown to be true; it is designated as a law.

Gravity is a law; attraction is not!

The implications (and here’s where my cynical side emerges): I believe that many of the purveyors of the “attraction is a law” school of thought know better. In an effort to sell product to the “I want prosperity, but I don’t want to dirty my hands with the seamier side of capitalism” crowd, they intentionally omit one requirement: hard work.

I’ve been with and worked with enough successful people to know that attraction works magic in their lives. Their belief in their vision, their faith in an outcome and their conviction of their own ability ignite their fire. Their discipline and hard work, however, are the fuel without which their aspirations would be hallucinations.

They Have to Allow You to Coach Them

Chuck Daly died a few weeks ago of pancreatic cancer. In the 1980s and 90s, he was the head coach of NBA’s Detroit Pistons. That team was referred to as the “nasty boys,” an obvious nickname. (Google it for the reasons!) They won back-to-back NBA titles and beat the Bird-led Celtics, the Johnson-led Lakers, and the Jordan-led Bulls in doing so. Earlier, Daly had also coached the University of Pennsylvania. Go Quakers!

A Hall of Fame coach, Daly also led the 1992 Olympic basketball team, known as the “dream team” (Jordan, Bird, Johnson, Thomas, etc.) to a Gold Medal.

Daly’s forté was taking groups of big egos and free spirits and transforming them into teams. What struck me at the time of his death was this comment attributed to him about his coaching style: “You want to create an environment where they’ll let you coach them.”

How obvious; how elegant; how simple; how elusive!

Notice, he didn’t say, “You want to create an environment where they know who’s in charge.” He didn’t say, “You want to create an environment where they fear that if they don’t contribute, they’re outta here!” He didn’t say, “You want to create an environment where they know that their first job is to obey my rules.”

Charles Barkley, no shrinking violet and a member of the 1992 Olympic team, didn’t know Daly well prior to that experience and developed such an affection for him during that time that in the weeks immediately preceeding Daly’s death Barkley called him almost every day. He said that Daly had an endearing way of engendering loyalty: “In Monaco, it would be me, Michael Jordan, David Robinson and Chuck Daly. … We’re all carrying our (golf) clubs and walking and saying to each other, ‘This guy is the coach of the Olympic team and he’s out here carrying his own clubs!’” Great leaders are humble and they’re not afraid of doing the “heavy lifting.”

Daly recognized that today’s athletes are spoiled, self-indulgent and highly compensated, but that’s not the point. The REAL point, the ONLY point is this: How can the coach get the most out of the talent that he has, both individually and as a team? How can he configure and exploit strengths?  How is that measured? Simple — the final score.

I know a lot of executives — “C” level people — who dwell on things that do not, and will not, translate into competitive victory. Those things have a lot to do with executive rights, privileges and prerogatives; they have little to do with winning. These same guys understand Covey’s concept of “starting with the end in mind” when it comes to “chunking down” long-term financial objectives into short-term action steps and working backwards, if you will. When it comes to understanding the implications of Covey’s exhortation on human motivation and behavior, however, those same guys are
frequently clueless.

Don’t be one of them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 5:27 pm and is filed under The Real Deal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.