Earlier this year I listened to Napoleon Hill’s 1954 Live Lectures from Chicago. I found my way to these audio recordings because I got interested in acting professionally again late last year after a 20+ year absence. In the intervening years I’d become a psychotherapist but something didn’t feel finished for me about acting.
I felt an energy that wanted to move forward dramatically in my life and I remembered Hill’s book Think & Grow Rich, which I’d started some time earlier but had never finished. So I listened to the audio version of the book and then found my way to the Chicago recordings from 1954. Along the way, I also discovered the work of Earl Nightingale, Bob Proctor, Frances Scoville Shin, and Sadhguru, all well-known figures within the realm of “law of attraction” and “manifesting your life.”
I wanted to see if there’s anything behind this business of “manifesting” and I wanted to find a system or technology that could help me “manifest” a life of success in professional acting. I decided to try an experiment suggested by Earl Nightingale based on Hill’s “philosophy of success.” Following Nightingale’s instructions, I decided on a “definite purpose” (to book one acting job paying at least $2000 by March 1st) and wrote it on the front of an index card. On the back, I wrote: “Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to those who knock, the door will be opened.”
Now, if you know me, you know I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home, church, school, and college before finding my way out of that cult-like environment. I’m not a big fan of using verses from the Bible to run my life. However, these verses spoke to me about possibility. What if I asked? What if I knocked? Would the door be opened? I wanted to find out.
As soon as I finished the card I began to doubt whether I’d done it correctly. Within a few days I changed my intention to, “To book one — or more — acting — or modeling — jobs, etc.” I felt like I’d f*cked it up. I was supposed to have a clear intention; now it’s muddied. This is why that manifestation stuff never works for me, I thought. I’m mixed up in my intention so I attract mixed results. Well, maybe so. Oh, and I changed the date when the manifestation was supposed to happen by, since it was one week into the 30-day plan already.
(By the way, I have so many qualms with this law of attraction stuff: It’s such a convenient explanation for why someone does well — or poorly! In this way of thinking, one’s failure has nothing to do with personal circumstances or societal oppression or political disenfranchisement. It’s all about one’s individual ability/inability to “tap into the cosmic law of attraction” and “manifest abundance.” So if you do well, [partly because you’re a privileged or driven or opportunistic or charming, let’s say, entrepreneur maybe], those advantages [in a money-based, capitalistic society] get overlooked in this philosophy and your success is attributed to personal initiative and support from cosmic intelligences and “tapping into” divine guidance — whose desire for you is to live a life of abundance — so if you don’t do that, you’ve missed out on your birthright. Another instance of victim-blaming.)
Still, I kept the card near my computer where I worked. I looked at it often. I knew from listening to Hill’s lectures that I couldn't just set an intention, write it down, and expect it to come my way. There had to be action.
(I actually like this aspect of his philosophy. The idea of personal responsibility for one’s life resonates with me, connected perhaps to my affinity for existentialism’s insistence that one’s life is no one’s if not one’s own. I do have some agency, each of us does, and it is up to each of us to use it as well as we can. No?)
So I reached out to an old friend from my past. I’d just had new headshots taken and I contacted a director I’d done a film with 25-ish years ago. He responded back that he was directing a series for a streaming service and that he might have a part for me. I was pretty floored that a door had opened, seemingly so effortlessly.
Did I make the amount of money by the date on the card? No. But I made some money and the timing wasn’t far off. After having listened to Hill’s lectures and the audio book of Think & Grow Rich, I think there’s something to his “philosophy of success.” It kinda makes sense: if you have a firm intention, believe you can achieve something, won’t take no for an answer, recruit others to assist you, and put in the time and effort required, how can you not achieve something amounting to success, whether or not it’s the original thing you had in mind?
Another problem, of course, is believing you can do it. It’s having faith — or better yet — trust — in yourself, to learn to rely on your ability to show up for yourself rather than default to excuses, fatigue, etc. To learn to take care of yourself so that fatigue can’t become an excuse. To follow Hill’s teaching appears to me to be a path of discovery of one’s potential, if not for finding out that there’s a corresponding effort from “divine intelligence” on one’s behalf.
(Btw, I started this post as the first entry of a writing challenge from my coach. She suggested writing 15 minutes a day for 30 days and publishing each day to Medium. I told her that scared me and negotiated 14 days, when I meet with her next. I may add more to this post as I did today or write about something entirely different. We’ll see how it goes. Anyone else trying to find their way as a writer? How’s it going with you?)
