Secrets by Rhonda Byrne

Secrets by Rhonda Byrne

[Secret sauce of secrets]

The secret revealed

• The Great Secret of Life is the law of attraction.
•  The law of attraction says like attracts like, so when you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you.
• Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think thoughts, they are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Everything sent out returns to the source—you.
• You are like a human transmission tower, transmitting a frequency with your thoughts. If you want to change anything in your life, change the frequency by changing your thoughts.
• Your current thoughts are creating your future life. What you think about the most or focus on the most will appear as your life.
• Your thoughts become things.

The secret made simple

• The law of attraction is a law of nature. It is as impartial as the law of gravity.
• Nothing can come into your experience unless you summon it through persistent thoughts.
•  To know what you're thinking, ask yourself how you are feeling.
• Emotions are valuable tools that instantly tell us what we are thinking.
• It is impossible to feel bad and at the same time have good thoughts.
•  Your thoughts determine your frequency, and your feelings tell you immediately what frequency you are on. When you feel bad, you are on the frequency of drawing more bad things. When you feel good, you are powerfully attracting more good things to you.
•  Secret Shifters, such as pleasant memories, nature, or your favorite music, can change your feelings and shift your frequency in an instant.
• The feeling of love is the highest frequency you can emit. The greater The love you feel and emit, the greater the power you are harnessing

How to use the secret

• Like Aladdin's Genie, the law of attraction grants our every command.
• The Creative Process helps you create what you want in three simple steps: ask, believe, and receive.
•  Asking the Universe for what you want is your opportunity to get clear about what you want. As you get clear in your mind, you have asked.
• Believing involves acting, speaking, and thinking as though you have already received what you've asked for. When you emit the frequency of having received it, the law of attraction moves people, events, and circumstances for you to receive.
•  Receiving involves feeling the way you will feel once your desire has manifested. Feeling good now puts you on the frequency of what you want.
• To lose weight, don't focus on "losing weight." Instead, focus on your perfect weight. Feel the feelings of your perfect weight, and you will summon it to you.
• It takes no time for the Universe to manifest what you want. It is as
• Starting with something small, like a cup of coffee or parking spaces, is an easy way to experience the law of attraction in action.
• Powerfully intend to attract something small As you experience the power you have to attract, you will move on to creating much bigger things.
• Create your day in advance by thinking the way you want it to go, and you will create your life intentionally.

Powerful processes

• Expectation is a powerful attractive force. Expect the things you want, and don't expect the things you don't want.
• Gratitude is a powerful process for shifting your energy and bringing more of what you want into your life. Be grateful for what you already have, and you will attract more good things.
• Giving thanks for what you want in advance turbo-charges your desires and sends a more powerful signal out into the Universe.
• Visualization is the process of creating pictures in your mind of yourself enjoying what you want. When you visualize, you generate powerful thoughts and feelings of having it now. The law of attraction then returns that reality to you, just as you saw it in your mind.
• To use the law of attraction to your advantage, make it a habitual way of being, not just a one-time event.
• At the end of every day, before you go to sleep, go back through the events of the day. Any events or moments that were not what you wanted, replay them in your mind the way you wanted them to go.

The secret to money

• To attract money, focus on wealth. It is impossible to bring more money into your life when you focus on the lack of it.
•  It is helpful to use your imagination and make-believe you already have the money you want. Play games of having wealth and you will feel better about money; as you feel better about it, more will flow into your life.
• Feeling happy now is the fastest way to bring money into your life.
•  Make it your intention to look at everything you like and say to yourself, "I can afford that. I can buy that." You will shift your thinking and begin to feel better about money.
• Give money in order to bring more of it into your life. When you are generous with money and feel good about sharing it, you are saying, "I have plenty."
• Visualize checks in the mail.
• Tip the balance of your thoughts to wealth. Think wealth.

Secret to relationships

•  When you want to attract a relationship, make sure your thoughts, words, actions, and surroundings don't contradict your desires.
• Your job is you. Unless you fill yourself up first, you have nothing to give anybody.
• Treat yourself with love and respect, and you will attract people who show you love and respect.
•  When you feel bad about yourself, you block the love and instead you attract more people and situations that will continue to make you feel bad about you.
• Focus on the qualities you love about yourself and the law of attraction will show you more great things about you.
• To make a relationship work, focus on what you appreciate about the other person, and not your complaints. When you focus on the strengths, you will get more of them.

Secret to health

• The placebo effect is an example of the law of attraction in action.
• When a patient truly believes the tablet is a cure, he receives what he believes and is cured.
• "Focusing on perfect health " is something we can all do within ourselves, despite what may be happening on the outside.
• Laughter attracts joy, releases negativity, and leads to miraculous cures.
• Disease is held in the body by thought, by observation of the illness, and by the attention given to the illness.
• If you are feeling a little unwell, don't talk about it —unless you want more of it. If you listen to people talk about their illness, you add energy to their illness.
• Instead, change the conversation to good things, and give powerful thoughts to seeing those people in health.
• Beliefs about aging are all in our minds, so release those thoughts from your consciousness. Focus on health and eternal youth.
• Do not listen to society's messages about diseases and aging.
• Negative messages do not serve you.

Secret to the world

•   What you resist, you attract, because you are powerfully focused on it with emotion. To change anything, go within and emit a new signal with your thoughts and feelings.
• You cannot help the world by focusing on the negative things.
• As you focus on the world's negative events, you not only add to them, but you also bring more negative things into your own life.
• Instead of focusing on the world's problems, give your attention and energy to trust, love, abundance, education, and peace.
• We will never run out of good things because there's more than enough to go around for everyone. Life is meant to be abundant.
• You have the ability to tap into the unlimited supply through your thoughts and feelings and bring it into your experience.
• Praise and bless everything in the world, and you will dissolve negativity and discord and align yourself with the highest frequency love.

Secret to you

• Everything is energy. You are an energy magnet, so you electrically energize everything to you and electrically energize yourself to everything you want.
• You are a spiritual being. You are energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed—it just changes form. Therefore, the pure essence of you has always been and always will be.
• The Universe emerges from thought. We are the creators not only of our own destiny but also of the Universe.
• An unlimited supply of ideas is available to you. All knowledge, discoveries, and inventions are in the Universal Mind as possibilities, waiting for the human mind to draw them forth. You hold everything in your consciousness.
• We are all connected, and toe are all One.
• Let go of difficulties from your past, cultural codes, and social beliefs.
• You are the only one who can create the life you deserve.
• A shortcut to manifesting your desires is to see what you want as absolute fact. Your power is in your thoughts, so stay aware. In other words, "Remember to remember." 

Secret to life

•   You get to fill the blackboard of your life with whatever you want.
•   The only thing you need to do is feel good now.
• The more you use the power within you, the more power you will draw through you.
•  The time to embrace your magnificence is now.
•  We are in the midst of a glorious era. As we let go of limiting thoughts, we will experience humanity's true magnificence, in every area of creation.
• Do what you love. If you don't know what brings you joy, ask, "What is my joy?" As you commit to your joy, you will attract an avalanche of joyful things because you are radiating joy.
• Now that you have learned the knowledge of The Secret, what you do with it is up to you. Whatever you choose is right. The power is all yours.

There is a big difference between giving and sacrificing. Giving from a heart that is overflowing feels so good. Sacrificing does not feel good. One emits a signal of lack and the other emits a signal of more than enough. Giving from a full heart is one of the most joyous things you can do

Books Referred:

The science of getting rich by Wallace Wattles

The master key system Charles Haanel

Zero to one by Peter Thiel

Zero to one by Peter Thiel

Notes on startups, or how to build the future.

(Book version of Theil’s famous CS183 course at Stanford. He is one of the co-founders of PayPal. He implies the importance of building a monopoly business)

Every moment in business happens only once. The art of creating a singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means during new things - going from o to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.

Nietzsche wrote, “Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule. ‘Traitorous eight’ in business, small group of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The ‘PayPal Mafia’ created unicorn business of their own, other than PayPal as a group itself (YouTube, Spacex, for example). \\

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today.

1, Make incremental advances - grand vision inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Small incremental steps are the only safe path forward

2. Stay lean and flexible - You should try things out, ‘iterate’ and treats entrepreneurship as an agnostic experimentation.

3. Improve on the competition - The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.

4. Focus on the product, not sales - technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.

Opposite four principles are probably more correct:

1. It is better to risk boldness than a triviality
2. A bad plan is better than no plan
3. Competitive markets destroy profits
4. Sales matters just as much as the product.

‘Perfect competition’ is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. However, under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an indifferent commodity business.

During dot.com crash, both paypal and x.com(Elon’s similar venture) made an mutual agreement to merge rather than compete head-on and thus successfully survived the dot.com crash. Sometimes you do have to fight and sometimes, you need to make mutual understanding to avoid losing on both side. When there is to fight, you should fight and win.

This advice can be heard to follow because pride and honor can get in the way. Hence Hamlet:

“Exposing what is mortal and unsure

To all that fortune, death and danger dare,

Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great

is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honor’s at the stake.”

Characteristics of monopoly:

Proprietary technology:

Proprietary technology is the most substantive advantage a company can have because it makes your product difficult or impossible to replicate. (Google’s search, facebook’s social network for example). As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. The easiest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new.

Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you are 10x better, you escape competition.

Network effects

Network effects make a product more useful as more people use it. Initially when fax machine started to appear in the market, more people has fax machine, the exponential was the network effect than only two people having it. Paradoxically, then, network effects business must start with esp. small markets. This is why successful network business rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.

Economies of scale

A monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger: the fixed costs of creating a product can be spread out over ever greater quantities of sales.

Branding

A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition., so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. In practice a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it is hard to ever reach that 1%.

If anything, too many people are starting their own companies today. People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it is growing fast. Even if you are extraordinarily talented, you should not necessarily start your own company.

Four social trends have conspired to root our )PayPal) belief in secrets.

1.  Incrementalism - start small was one of the success factors of PayPal.

2.  Risk aversion- People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret has not been vetted by the mainstream.

3.  Complacency - social elites have the most freedom and the ability to explore new thinking, but they seem to be believe in secrets the least.

4.  Flatness - people perceive the world is homogeneous - world is flat.

How must you see the world if you don’t believe in secrets? If today’s conventions are correct, we can afford to be smug and complacent: “God's in his heaven — All's right with the world’ (In other words, God is in heaven, separated from humanity, man is free to do as he pleases...All is right with the world).

If you find a secret, you face a choice: do you tell anyone? or do you keep it to yourself?

As Faust tells Wagner:

The few who knew what might be learned,

Foolish enough to put their whole heart on the show,

And reveal their feelings to the crowd below,

Mankind has always crucified and burned.

I beg you, friend, it’s now the dead of night,

We must break up this conversation.

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs it is rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

As Tolkien wrote in ‘The Land of the Rings:

‘The road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began”

Life is a long journey; the road marked out by the steps of previous travelers has no end in sight. But later on in the tale, another verse appears:

Still round the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate

And though I oft have passed them by

A day will come at last when I

Shall take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”

The road does not have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden path.

Every company culture can be plotted on a linear spectrum: Consultants at the extreme left and cult at the extreme right.

The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

Sales

All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity. That is why the word ‘salesman’. can be slur. Like acting, sales works best when when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution  has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called, account executives’. People who sell customers work in ‘business development’. People who sell companies are ‘investment bankers’. And people who sell themselves are called, ‘politician’. There is a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we are being sold.

The most fundamental reason that even business people underestimate the importance of sales the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world of secretly driven by it.

http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

The well-tuned brain by Peter C Whybrow

The well-tuned brain by Peter C Whybrow

Neurosciences and the life well connected

The modern world owes much to capital markets and to the spirit of the European Enlightenment, of which America has become the Grand Experiment. The material affluence we now enjoy validates the Enlightenment principle of individual freedom and the conviction that scientific and technical advance is best achieved by harnessing human reason within a competitive marketplace.

Two simple neurobehavioural questions arise from this puzzling behavior. First, why is it that human beings tend to consume excessively when living in a resource-rich environment, and second, why despite our growing conscious awareness of the challenges we face do we find it so difficult to change our ways.  Succinctly, the human brain is not well-tuned to modern day circumstance.

First our instinctual strivings: the propensity for over-consumption is the relic of a time when individual survival depended upon fierce compensation for scarce resources. Second, that we are creatures of habit confounds our instinctual striving. Everyday life would be impossible without habits. Habits are the brain's way of handling the events of a familiar world with speed and efficiency, essentially a personal autopilot.Third, is the cultural change. Habits of intuitive thought are profoundly shaped and given meaning, by the culture into which we are born.

Today, in the western world, the master cultural narrative is written in the language if the market. ‘Happiness’ wrote Adam Smith in 17659, consists in tranquillity and enjoyment and in America it is happiness that has been the pursuit. Self-interest is the engine of the consumer society, but it is habit and our fascination with novelty that sustains it. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, a time of the insatiable curiosity that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and provided the philosophical foundation for Western society today.

Searching for truth about one’s self is a perennial human quest. The Greeks found it compelling about challenging. Similarly, Benjamin Franklin, considered three things extremely hard,”steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self’.

The capacity for self-restraint is further eroded by a market culture that not only reinforces such acquisitive behaviors, but also has become economically dependent upon them. Rich world economies are focused by necessity upon inducing and encouraging additional behaviors - in the US, consumer spending accounts for some 70% of economic activities. The amount we consume has become a measure of a nation’s vitality. In today’s society the twin drivers of commercial growth are the merchant’s discovery that when faced with material abundance the human brain does not effectively self-regulate desire and the classical economist’s delusional insistence that it does. As portrayed in the media, this is the American dream - a world of choice, material abundance, excitement, energy and self-actualization.

Obesity is now America’s number one problem in public health. Human beings are designed for survival during times of scarcity rather than times of plenty. In America, an abundance of cheap & tasty food and the calories available from the food we consume becomes greater than those required to meet metabolic need.

The fundamental biology of the stress response - the coordinated brain-body reaction to uncertainty and threat - is a vital mechanism of adaptation we share with our evolutionary. A subjective sense of control is of primary importance to the human mind. Thus highly competitive work environments - where pressure is pervasive and repeated confrontation are the norm - are commonly experienced as profoundly stressful.  Most affected by chronic work stress in America are the skilled and semiskilled members of the middle class, both men and women, who toil long hours with marginal financial security, often to the neglect of their families and their own health. Social inequality is also growing in America. Thus, for many middle-class citizens workplace competition increased while job security decreased, engendering a rising level of metabolic stress is frequently expressed as anxiety and weight gain.

First, changing established eating behavior is not easy because we are creatures of habit: foods, healthy or otherwise that we enjoyed as children are those that we continue to prefer later in life. This has long been known to the food industry,. That’s what McDonald’s Happy Meals are all about: giving young children exactly the tasty treats they want and exactly the high-calorie diet that they don’t need.

Powerful cultural forces shape each of us. Dynamic social norms - accepted conventions, about how to live based on attachment, learning, common experience, and shared intention - continuously shape brain development in infancy and continue throughout life to mold character. The preconscious network of reflexive self-knowledge is commonly known as intuition. The industrial society of the 19th century valued discipline, thrift, organization and faith as the path to human betterment, devaluing in the process human emotion and instinct, which the Victorians saw as ‘base’ and immoral’.

Fundamentally the brain chooses in one of two ways: The first is through acquired habit. This method of decision making is quick, reflexive and stimulus drive with the brain architecture involved being principally that of the basal ganglia. The second method the brain has for performing decision making, is fundamentally through a process of internal competition, where the relationship between an action taken -actual or imagined - and its consequence is analyzed and the information retained and coded for future reference. This process of goal-directed action and decision making is primarily conscious and reflective and depends upon the integrity of the orbital-frontal cortex.

In the brain, making choices is not a sporadic activity, but a process designed to produce continuous, adaptive improvement with the pleasurable experience as the goal.

From the perspective of the behavioral neuroscientist, four simple words describe the ecology of educational development: attachment, meaning, habit and trust. These words form a progressive sequence.