Create Your Reality

I don’t remem­ber where I heard or read this idea, but the con­cept is straight for­ward. If you want a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion to exist, you deter­mine what the results would be if the sit­u­a­tion did exist, then you take steps to bring those results about inde­pen­dent­ly and this will help to bring the desired sit­u­a­tion into being.

This method has its lim­i­ta­tions. If one wish­es to be a mil­lion­aire, buy­ing a Porsche 911 might not be the prop­er way to go about it (though there might be cases.…)

Many years ago my broth­er urged me to answer the ques­tion of “How are you?” with “Ter­rif­ic!” regard­less of how I actu­al­ly felt. I tried it. And I was sur­prised to learn that answer­ing “Ter­rif­ic!” (excla­ma­tion point clear in my tone) actu­al­ly made me feel bet­ter and often seemed to bright­en the mood of the questioner.

Now Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can finds that my expe­ri­ence is not unique (and here I thought I was one of a kind…). Smil­ing makes a per­son hap­pi­er, at least in the short term. The linked arti­cle men­tions evi­dence that smil­ing in the face of rea­son to frown con­sti­tutes repres­sion of feel­ings that then man­i­fest them­selves in oth­er ways. So don’t get car­ried away with it.

Hat tip: 3quarksdaily