In the world of your personal and professional development, this is the master law you really have to abide by if you desire a higher level of success than you want to experience or have ever experienced. This law is very basic but powerful:
Everything happens for a reason, for every effect there is a specific cause.
From this law, Albert Einstein observed that doing the same things again and again but expecting a different result is insanity. Why? Because for every effect there is a specific cause. When you do a specific set of activities, you create certain results and those results will not change until you change your inputs or as the law says, your causes. If you can be clear about the effect or result you want, you can probably achieve it. You can study others who have achieved the same or a similar goal, and by doing what they did, you can have the same or similar results.
It really bothers me when people believe successful people are just lucky. Success has a timing aspect to it, there’s no doubt about that. There are certain things which come with a window of opportunity which are only available while the window is open and savvy people recognize that and take advantage of it. Others spend too much time analyzing the opportunity and the window closes. Even with this timing aspect, success is not a matter of luck. Sir Isaac Newton observed this and said, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” So, it’s not luck, but allow me to suggest something else to you.
Everything happens for a reason, for every effect there is a specific cause.
Consider this principle to go alongside this law. Your thoughts are the primary creative forces in your life. You create your entire future world by the way you think. Everything in your life (People, Places & Things) have only the meaning you give them by the way you think about them. So, when you change your thinking, you change your entire life. As I have written previously in The Big Idea: 52 Ways to Be A Better Leader Now, you are becoming what you think about most of the time! Whatever you see of experience is the expression of the thinking of the people behind it.
Therefore, it is not the world outside you that dictates your circumstances or conditions. It is the world inside you that creates the conditions of your life. Hopefully, no one is forcing you to think, feel or behave the way you do. You choose your thinking and that informs both your feelings and behaviors. The good news is that you learn to do this by what you have experienced so far in your life. You are trying to repeat the good and avoid the bad. Not all of this is totally accurate though, some of these are deceiving you from experiencing future things that could possibly be good for you, even though in the past, they may have not worked out.
Your way of explaining things to yourself is under your control. You can interpret your experiences in such a way that you feel happy and optimistic rather than angry or frustrated. You can make the decision to respond in a way that are constructive and effective. You are always free to choose the causes you want to put in place to create the effects you desire!
Things you can do:
Observe the cause-effect relationships between what you think, say, feel and do with the results you are getting in each area of your life. Most importantly, be very honest with yourself!
Analyze how you really think about yourself in relationship to the kind of life you are living. How are your thoughts in each area causing, creating and maintaining the situations you are now experiencing? What changes could you make?
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