The quickest way I know to manifest money and abundance is to think like other people who are on the front lines doing it every day: entrepreneurs and people creating and providing value.

I’m always getting asked questions like, which masterclasses, strategies, or products will work for me and make me successful? That’s kind of like a loaded question.

You’re only going to be as successful as you allow yourself to be. It doesn’t matter what you’re promoting, selling, or building: if your head isn’t in the right place, you’re not going very far.

I’ve long understood the power of positivity and cultivating personal energy, even before I jumped into online marketing and business.

I can directly correlate the lows and highs of my life to the periods of time when I allowed my mental states and moods to be dictated by others and my surroundings rather than myself.

Success is bred in the mind. If you think you’re going to become the next Instagram star, elite marketer, or even the next best car salesman, yet you’re always putting yourself down, clinging to negativity, and expressing doubt, you’re in for a rude awakening.

There are many layers to this. Understanding the relationship between our mental states and our actions is the first of these layers. 

You Reflect What is on Your Mind

This is pure unconscious psychology: unless you meditate regularly and have already engaged in concentrated mental control exercises, there is a good chance the majority of your behavior is controlled by your thoughts. People call it your “inner monologue.”

It’s the story you tell yourself every day about your own life. Are you happy? Wealthy? Satisfied? Tired? Unfulfilled? Lost? Is the world against you or are you at peace? Are there opportunities awaiting around every corner, or are you deprived and oppressed? 

The story you tell yourself will largely play out in your everyday life. We’re not yet talking about manifestation or anything like that. This is just basic logic. Due to the subjective nature of circumstance, you are much more likely to see the good in a situation if you are prepared for it and expect it. If you don’t expect good things to happen to you, and aren’t on the lookout for them, you have a much slimmer chance of encountering them.

Our reality is very blinder-dependent.

By that I mean, each of us experience life through our own set of blinders and self-imposed limitations.

Opportunities and experiences are out there for the taking, but our blinders often limit how many of these we see at a given time.

The belief that good things only happen to other people, or that life is working against you, will severely impair your ability to see and capitalize on opportunities. The difference between a successful person and someone who seems marred by bad luck, is all in the perception.

These two people could be in the same room together, presented with the same set of circumstances, but more often than not, it’s the person without self-defeating behavior that will capitalize and come out on top.

I see this all the time. It’s amazing how the exact same set of circumstances can present themselves entirely different depending on who is interpreting them.

I’ve seen more than a few people talk themselves out of great partnerships and even their own happiness because of negative thinking. That is why mastering your own thoughts isn’t simply a smart business tactic, it’s the key to a fulfilled life.

Our society doesn’t place a lot of emphasis on learning about our minds and how they work.

Most people typically divide their mind from the rest of the world and falsely believe that they can cultivate some kind of fantasy realm inside their head where they live as king and perpetuate a kind of “me against the world” story that acts as a linchpin to the rest of their thinking process. This “wrong thought” behavior enables people to go through life believing that they can essentially “think whatever they want” without consequence, never realizing that every thought you have impacts your reality in a multitude of ways.

Just because your mind is hyper-personal, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have the go-ahead to think whatever you want. This is where problems arise. Self-defeating behavior is usually a common result of improper thinking, but it can go deeper, to misinterpreting reality and then all-out delusion, which is a rampant problem in our society as well.

It is important to guard against thinking errant thoughts that don’t benefit you, because what you think will determine the blinders you subconsciously place on yourself, and this will ultimately dictate how you see the world around you.

Judging other people, the “poor me” complex, gossiping to yourself about others, mentally attacking others, falsely believing others “don’t deserve” what they have, and similar thinking patterns, will destroy your life faster than any real person ever could. If you ever wonder why you are miserable or why opportunity never seems to knock, look first at your own thoughts. There will most likely be the answer.

Successful People Generate Opportunity

“Luck” is basically the art of opportunity awareness.

Don’t expect great circumstances and life fulfillment to drop out of the sky and into your lap. Yes, this can occur, but more often than not, waiting around and just “hoping” for better days isn’t going to make things happen or move you in the right direction.

Often it is the opposite, as such behavior tends to lead to other self-defeating habits, such as laziness, entitlement, and relying on faith rather than knowledge.

Instead of waiting around for things to go your way, the key to success is putting yourself in situations where the outcome benefits you. This mindset also requires that you hone your spatial awareness, always keeping an eye out for the little synchronicities that life throws at you for you to capitalize on.

The number of and quality of beneficial events that happen to you is directly proportionate to your awareness, and your awareness is driven by your mindset / thought patterns.

Blinders (self-defeating, limiting thoughts) will block certain roads for you.

It’s not that the opportunities aren’t there, it’s that you don’t know how to capitalize on them, or worse yet, you can’t see them at all.

The truly “blind” could be in a room full of millionaires, and they won’t see opportunity, they’ll just wallow in self-pity, curse their luck, and may even have jealous fits inside their own heads: “What is she wearing? If I had money I wouldn’t be caught dead in that!” Never knowing that opportunity is literally smacking them across the face, they rather pat their own egos and continue to live through the parameters of the story they’ve written for themselves based on limitation and scarcity.

The surest mark of a weak-minded individual is that they will let their own thoughts pull them into a sour mood.

They’ll be going about their day and see something that damages their ego, so in retaliation, their inner-monologue will go on the passive-aggressive offensive.

Instead of ignoring the situation or making use of it, life itself becomes a weapon turned inward. These kinds of people almost universally find success hard to come by, simply because they live in a world where success isn’t a state of being, it’s a survival-of-the-fittest end-goal that they they feel they’ve been cheated out of.

Successful people don’t think in these terms. If you want to start living the life you’ve always dreamed of, drop the blinders. It should be noted that this holds true even if your idea of success has nothing to do with money.

You will take yourself out of the game before you’re even able to play, if you allow blinders to rob your awareness. Being successful in life begins and ends in the mind. Don’t expect change to come if you don’t first address this fundamental issue.

As you develop the proper awareness, you unconsciously situate yourself around opportunities as well.

Seeing the reality of what’s around you is only half the game. Once you begin placing yourself in progressively better situations, taking advantage of what comes your way, further opportunities will present themselves, ones that would have previously been inaccessible altogether.

Generating opportunity is often like a snowball effect. Once you shift your mindset, your knowledge of how things are connected, your new relationships, the situations you put yourself in, and the skills you subsequently acquire, open more and more doors the further you go.

Most Successful People Started Broke

For the sake of perspective, it’s important to remember that most of today’s great entrepreneurs, motivational speakers, work-from-home gurus, YouTube personalities, and new digital business owners, all pretty much started without much money.

Many, in fact, start with nothing. And drop the mentality that somehow all these people are just more talented than you, and that’s why they’re so big. Sure, talent carries a lot of people really far, but in this field, you’re just as likely to meet former retail cashiers as you are savants.

There’s nothing special, talent-wise, about most people who are killing it as entrepreneurs. Some of the most influential people I know in the industry are simply former 9-to-5 workers without any specific talents at all, who simply got sick of the rat race and started shifting their perspectives, learning new skills, and networking.

Why is it important to know this? Because it serves as a means of removing mental blockages.

There is no “I’m not talented enough” or “there’s nothing I can bring to the table.” It’s not about that.

You have to shift your mindset from one of limitation to one of prosperity, and that begins by letting go of misconceptions that hinder many people from realizing their dreams and goals. The false belief that successful people somehow have magical talents that the rest of us possess is just not true.

We make ourselves believe false things and these limitations actually hold us back in everyday life.

The mere idea that you can only get ahead and make money by possessing some rare talent creates mental blocks that hinder your decisions and reduce your awareness. It’s self-defeating behavior.

Successful people don’t sit around thinking other people “have it better” or have special talents they can’t possess. They certainly don’t stew in their juices, pout, and proclaim that just because one person has a certain ability, that it somehow denies them the ability to succeed.

It’s the competition versus cooperation mentality.

The nonsensical view that every day life is some kind of “survival of the fittest” battle royale is a mentality purely borne of limited thinking and scarcity belief systems.

Entrepreneurs and people who are realizing their goals work from a place of cooperation, they seek to make connections and learn from others whenever possible. They reach out and grow by establishing a network, because they understand that no one lives on an island and that success is almost always a product of multiple people and forces working toward a common goal, not some magical force that happens upon people who are lucky or talented.

Your mind is your greatest asset for overcoming limitation and using it properly is the only “talent” you ever really need.

Right-thinking and spatial awareness are infinitely more valuable than knowing how to, say, play an instrument, speak five languages, or paint like Picasso. With the right mindset you can move mountains, but the key to cultivating the right mindset about the world around you is to do away with limiting belief structures.

Keep everything in the proper perspective at all times.

If you find yourself drifting, meaning that you’re thoughts are coming from a state of weakness, ground yourself and return to a collected, balanced state. A state of mental weakness is any mood or mental state where you are not the arbiter of your own happiness, well-being, peace, and destiny.

This includes blaming others for your lot in life or current situation, getting frustrated with events going on around you, deciding you can’t do something simply because others are already doing it, guilt-tripping yourself, wallowing in self-pity, using any kind of “poor me,” arguments, or otherwise putting yourself in a state of intentional powerlessness. 

This is the next point that I will touch on, and it’s something successful people avoid like the plague: never give away your personal power.

Intentional Powerlessness: Being Your Own Worst Enemy

It might seem counter-intuitive, or even absurd, but the truth is, many people put themselves in powerless situations because of their self-defeating attitudes and self-destructive and self-sabotaging behavior.

There are many reasons for this: they don’t want to take responsibility for their actions, they want to take the path of least resistance in life, fear holds them back from making the right decisions, doubts tell them that they don’t deserve to be powerful.

While the reasons are many, the result is the same: the intentional relinquishing of personal power so as to avoid responsibility or difficulty.

When you place the direction or flow of your life in the hands of another, things are bound to go awry, and this is exactly what happens when you give away your personal power. The biggest stumbling block to realizing your dreams and getting out of life what you want will be you.

Breaking the habit of self-defeating behavior is half the battle when it comes to gaining perspective and having the right attitude about life. If you inwardly believe that you “can’t” do certain things, or that you are limited in any way, you manifest and live by that reality.

This includes identifying with your problems and vices. Man is this the killer of dreams.

Classic self-sabotage is the personal identification with that which limits you. For example, a person who is feeling depressed will consider themselves a “depressed person,” or someone “suffering from depression.”

You are not your illness, you are not your malady, you are not your limitations. These are only transient states.

These labels that we use to define ourselves have been given far too much power, to the point where people wear their ailments, diseases, hangups, and vices like badges of honor.

We’ve gotten to the point where mental illness, obesity, diseases, and character flaws are treated like character traits rather than life experiences or problems to be solved. Some will even get offended if you suggest that you can cure depression or obesity, and claim you are being prejudice toward them for wanting them to be healthy.

This is intentional powerlessness: the conscious decision to let changeable forces and circumstances dominate you.

You strip yourself of power and therefore choice by unconsciously “believing” that a certain problem or issue is “just the way it is.”

Nothing is “just the way it is,” especially not life circumstances.

J.K. Rowling, the acclaimed author of the Harry Potter franchise, lives in a legitimate castle right now. She first began writing the Harry Potter story on a napkin in a tiny cafe as a struggling single mom. There are self-made millionaires out there that started their path to greatness with just an idea and some moxie.

And there are countless people who once told themselves that they had some kind of incurable affliction that they eventually learned how to either cope with, cure, or consciously eliminate.

You are not your illness. You are not your vice. You are not your limitations. These unconscious barriers are constructed by you.

Yes, life is a wild card and deals different hands to everyone.

Does someone living in the middle of a 3rd World desert have less opportunity than someone born in NYC? Sure, circumstantially speaking.

But there are plenty of absolutely miserable people with dead-end jobs in New York, who wake up every day directionless and lost, who have weak wills and no goals, and who think the “man” is keeping them down, who will continue to live out every day bored, apathetic, disgruntled, and angry.

Conversely, there are, even now, ingenious, spirited people rising out of the depths of poverty all over the 3rd world, inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, who are using whatever tools they have at their disposal to get noticed, make money, and change their circumstances.

Listen, if you believe, at all, that circumstances dictate your life choices and not the other way around, you’ve already taken yourself out of the game.

That’s intentional powerlessness.

It’s like saying you want to win the game of Monopoly but you think it’s rigged so you wont play.

Well you have zero chance of winning if you don’t play.

You have control over your circumstances, unless your circumstances happen to be extremely dire, in which case the same applies.

No matter how dire your predicament, you are more likely to see an answer to your problems if you are engaging in positive, right-thinking. If you are not opportunistic, if you wallow in depression and spend your time blaming others rather than building yourself, the chances of you finding an answer to your situation are slim.

Self-sabotage takes so many people out of the game before they even roll the dice. Stop tearing yourself down. Stop blaming others for problems and situations which are entirely under your control! Stop getting angry, disgruntled, or upset over trivial happenstance. Build yourself, grow your awareness, connect with people, and thrive.

A Word on the Law of Attraction

You may have heard of the Law of Attraction before and written it off as some kind of New Age hokum or quasi-spiritual delusion, but the truth is that it is a big part of the entrepreneur mindset. Everyone from major athletes, to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to millionaire entrepreneurs utilize the ideas behind the Law of Attraction to manifest what they want for themselves.

One of the biggest “secrets” in the biz is that successful people use this technique because quite simply, they know it works and they get results with it time and time again.

So just what is the Law of Attraction then? I think many people assume it’s some kind of magical or wishful thinking: just believe in something hard enough or repeat a mantra to yourself enough times and your wishes or goals will come to pass. That’s not quite how it works.

Without a little background it’s rather difficult to explain despite the innate simplicity its basic premise: that on some base level, like attracts like. So here’s a quick science lesson, take from it what you will. Entrepreneurs the world over certainly do.

At its core, the Law of Attraction is a catchphrase for the nature of quantum mechanics as it pertains to our influence on physical reality via our minds. To break down a few certain principles: 

• Subatomic particles are actually just energy, or vibration. Everything you see, including your body, can be expressed as a wavelength of energy. Nothing in reality is solid. Quantum physics has proven these points conclusively.
• Unlike the atomic realm, where opposites attract and similar polarities repel, the subatomic plane operates on a “like attracts like” basis. Like energy attracts like energy. This basically means that energy of a certain vibration, wavelength, charge, or nature will naturally seek out, combine with, and bring unto it, similar energy.
• The observer and the observed cannot be separated. What we observe is a part of us, and our observations on objects influence them – this is because, sub-atomically speaking, everything is made up of one energy. The wavelengths of our mind and the wavelengths of subatomic particles are extremely close, so much so that one could say there is little difference. We are connected, mentally, to everything that is going on around us. The act of deciphering (“observing”) what is around us essentially “collapses the wave function” of an energy state, making it real.
• Your thoughts are vibrations and are real, independent forces, not just invisible musings going on inside your head. Each has a charge of energy that can attract similar charges of energy to it (and in turn, you), as well as second-by-second unconsciously “collapsing the wave functions” of everything around you, locking in your reality as you go about your day.

The implications of all of this are of course staggering. It would surprise many to know that quantum physicists have all but proven mind-over-matter in the lab, and have already made great strides in recording how we mentally influence our surroundings with our own thoughts and observations.

The very act of cognitive awareness “chooses” certain subatomic states to manifest, thereby making us all co-creators of everything that happens around us. It’s heady stuff.

So that’s where the Law of Attraction comes in. In essence, it states that by going off of the premise that like attracts like on the subatomic plane, we can subconsciously attract certain events. This is achieved in any number of ways, but most notably by combinations of positive affirmation, meditation, mood boards, right-thinking (keeping positive), and spatial awareness.

Because the Law of Attraction works via our subconscious rather than our conscious minds, it is not an instantaneous or straightforward task, however. The subconscious needs to be led, with a firm hand, toward manifesting a repeated series of positive events. Because the subconscious is fickle in that it is impressionable and subject to manipulation, fear, etc. meditation is often practiced as a way of gaining better control over oneself.

This is also why many entrepreneurs, sports figures, movie stars, and other go-getters, are adopting meditation into their daily routines all of a sudden. They know it is one of the best ways of mind mastery and “hijacking” the Law of Attraction.

This is all important to internalize, because whether you subscribe to it or not, the Law of Attraction is one of the most widely used “underground” entrepreneur tactics, and has been for a long time. Case in point, just about every person I know who is killing it right now in online marketing and digital agencies takes advantage of the Law of Attraction at least to some degree.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. Even if for whatever reason you don’t necessarily “believe” in it, regardless of the evidence, here’s why you really should just go all in and start using the Law of Attraction techniques anyway: it’s subconscious affirmation and a relinquishment of mental blocks and limitations.

Just as we can create barriers to our own success and engage in self-sabotage, so too can we do the opposite: create mental shortcuts and tricks that help us overcome our fears, doubts, and limitations.

To put it another way, if you start to subconsciously believe that the Law of Attraction is working for you, you’re more likely to see and take advantage of opportunities. It’s simply how our minds are geared to work.

If you are open to new possibilities, you’re going to see them. Point blank.

It’s simply the name of the game.

So many people claim they never get any breaks and constantly grumble to themselves “when is it going to be my turn, why can’t I get the breaks?? Where’s my good luck?” Well there it is. You’re making an active mental decision to “block” yourself from seeing opportunity when you tell yourself there aren’t any opportunities.

This is Subconscious Logic 101. The deeper parts of our minds are extremely fickle. If you really start living your life like opportunity never knocks, it could slap you in the face and you’d be grumbling over the sting of the slap and not overjoyed that you just got slapped with a million dollar chance. That’s the weak mindset in a nutshell and I see it all the time. Where they see limitation and scarcity I see opportunity and chance.

The Law of Attraction is one of the best ways to combat limited patterns of thinking, by progressively teaching the mind that things are going its way and that it is in control.

Remember, opportunity doesn’t fall into your lap, even if you are a Law of Attraction guru. It’s your cultivated awareness that puts you in the position to take advantage of opportunity when it arises. Yes, the Law of Attraction can and does lead to incredible happenstance, but more often than not, and especially in the beginning, you’re still going to have to keep your eyes peeled and your mind open. That’s how entrepreneurs function.

Bottom line: ditch your limited thinking patterns, stop using your weaknesses as a crutch or identity, and begin to tell yourself you have what it takes to live the life you want. Opportunity will come knocking when your awareness is high enough to see it.