How to achieve your goals and satisfy your desires
The same advice from two very different books: "Think and Grow Rich" and "Ask and It Is Given"
I first read Think and Grow Rich when I was lying on the floor of an overnight bus to New Orleans with 50 other high school students for a mission trip (this was a few years after Hurricane Katrina).
Now, more than a decade later, I still have the same copy, which I recently started reading again.
This quote stuck out to me:
“Riches begin with a state of mind, with definiteness of purpose, with little or no hard work.”
This concept of being able to achieve success with “little or no hard work” has been recurring in my experience lately.
Outsourcing is one practical example from my recent life of how I’ve been able to achieve more while working less.
The part about “definiteness” also resonated with me.
In this post, I will compare Think and Grow Rich to Ask and It Is Given (a spiritual book about manifestation).
Despite these two books being very different, they somehow arrive at almost the exact same conclusion in terms of how to achieve your goals and satisfy your desires.
At the end, I will interject my own opinion, which is a middle-ground between the two books.
How to achieve your desires, according to Think and Grow Rich
The second chapter of Think and Grow Rich is titled “Desire.”
In this chapter, Hill outlines “Six Ways to Turn Desires into Gold” …
“FIRST: fix in your mind the exact amount of money you desire. It is not sufficient merely to say “I want plenty of money.” Be definite as to the amount.
SECOND: determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire.
THIRD: establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire.
FOURTH: create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action.
FIFTH: write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire, name the time limit for its acquisition, state where you attend to give in return for the money, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it.
SIXTH: read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night, and once after arising in the morning. As you read—see and feel and believe yourself already in possession of the money.”
“It is especially important that you observe, and follow the instructions in the sixth paragraph. You may complain that it is impossible for you to ‘see yourself in possession of money’ before you actually have it. Here is where a burning desire will come to your aid. If you truly desire money so keenly that your desire is an obsession, you will have no difficulty in convincing yourself that you will acquire it. The object is to want money, and to become so determined to have it that you convince yourself you will have it.”
How to achieve your desires, according to Ask and It Is Given
When I read the above excerpts from Think and Grow Rich, I was immediately reminded of something I had read in Ask and It Is Given:
"The key to bringing something into your experience that you desire is to achieve vibrational harmony with what you desire. And the easiest way for you to achieve vibrational harmony with it is to imagine having it, pretend that it is already in your experience, flow your thoughts toward the enjoyment of the experience.”
A comparative analysis: Think and Grow Rich and Ask and It Is Given
What’s especially interesting is that Think and Grow Rich and Ask and It Is Given are two very different books written by very different authors.
Think and Grow Rich was published in 1937 and written by Napoleon Hill.
The book was written based on “research, which [Hill] had undertaken at Mr. Carnegie’s request, [Hill] analyzed hundreds of well-known men, many of whom admitted that they had accumulated their vast fortunes through the aid of the Carnegie secret.”
There’s a long list of names in the book. Here’s a short list of the most notable ones:
Henry Ford
William Wrigley Jr.
Charles M. Schwab
Wilbur Wright
John D. Rockefeller
Woodrow Wilson
William Howard Taft
Ask and It Is Given was published in 2004 and written by Esther and Jerry Hicks.
In the Preface of the book, Jerry explains that his “wife, Esther, is one of those rare persons who can, at will, relax her conscious mind enough to allow the reception of Non-Physical answers to whatever is asked.”
The book is written based on “blocks of thought” that Esther received from a Non-Physical Intelligence called Abraham.
So, Think and Grow Rich was written based on observations of American industrialists, businessmen, and politicians (most, if not all, of whom were men) in the late 1800s and early 1900s. While Ask and It Is Given was written in the early 2000s based on the intelligence received by a woman from a Non-Physical entity.
It’s hard to imagine any two ways in which a book could be written that are more different than that. And yet, they arrive at nearly the exact same conclusion.
Still, it gets even more uncanny. According to Wikipedia, “Rosa Lee Beeland contributed substantially to the authoring and editing of Think and Grow Rich.”
Beeland was Hill’s wife at the time. Two data points are not enough to make a convincing argument for this, but I have a hypothesis that there is a certain intuitive intelligence possessed by women. This is a tangent for another time.
My main gripe with Ask and It Is Given
When I was reading Ask and It Is Given for the first time, I thought the book was ambiguous about how to actually take action to get what you desire.
It said a lot about how to think of, imagine, and get into vibrational harmony with your desire, but I wanted more practical steps.
Here’s what I wrote at the time:
“I'm curious about what this book can teach me because I've always been taught that hard work is the way to get things. If you want something that you don't have, you make a plan and then work hard to execute the plan until you get what you want.
But this book is saying that you can get what you want just by imagining that you have it and pretending that it's already in your experience.
It feels like there's a middle piece that's missing. I’m imagining the middle piece would be some kind of action.
You desire something, you think up a plan to get it, and then you take action in accordance with the plan.
But the Law of Attraction seems to suggest that there's no action necessary. You just imagine or pretend and then whatever you desire comes to you somehow.”
My main gripe with Think and Grow Rich
With Think and Grow Rich, on the other hand, I think Hill’s “Six Ways to Turn Desires into Gold” are too planned out and action-oriented.
Mainly because our desires change.
We have new experiences, which cause our desires to change over time.
If you follow Hill’s “Six Ways,” you “create a definite plan for carrying out your desire.”
But then your desire changes, and so the plan would need to change too.
But what I often see happen (especially for myself) is that, at some point, you forgot about your desire and you just stick to the plan, which is insane because the whole point of the plan in the first place was to satisfy your desire.
Finding a middle-ground between Think and Grow Rich and Ask and It Is Given
My main gripe with Ask and It Is Given is the lack of guidance on planning and action.
My main gripe with Think and Grow Rich is the over-emphasis on long-term planning (and also too much focus on money as the desire when there are lots of desires other than money).
What the books agree on is that it’s important to get clear on your desires.
The question that remains is what to do after you’re clear on your desire. How much should be intuitively letting the universe guide you and how much should be cerebral future-based planning?
For the rest of this post, I’ll give my own answer to this question.
How to stay in touch with your desires
You have to continually meditate on what you want.
It’s really not that complicated.
The hard part is carving out the space and time in your hectic schedule to just sit down in silence and ask yourself, “What do I want?”
And it takes time. You probably need to sit there for at least a half-hour before you start to really get to the root of your desires.
And you have to do this regularly because your desires are constantly changing. Doing this daily might be too much. But doing it about once a month seems about right.
And the reason it’s so important is this: why do anything if not to satisfy your desires?
It’s crazy how easily we end up exerting so much of our energy on things that don’t make bring us joy.
And oftentimes it’s because we don’t even know what our desires are.
Or it’s because you had a desire at some point in the past and then came up with a 5-year plan and you were so focused on executing every step of the plan that you didn’t realize your desire completely changed.
How to satisfy your desires without a plan of action
Stick with me on this one because it’s gonna get a bit spiritual.
As human beings, it’s natural for us to satisfy our desires.
I’d even go as far as to say that the entire universe is moved by desire and satisfaction. All creatures and even physical forces are animated by the energy that drives them to satisfy their desires.
Animals hunt to satisfy their hunger. Plants face the sun. Volcanoes erupt. Tectonic plates shift.
But let’s just stick to human beings for now.
When you have a desire, there is an intuitive sense of how to satisfy it.
You get restless when you sit in a chair for too long and you intuitively understand that you need to stand up.
You get tired after a long day and you intuitively understand that you need to lie down.
Your throat is parched and you intuitively understand that you need a drink of water.
When your desires get more complicated
But some desires are more complicated.
You want to buy a house.
You want to make enough money that you never have to work a 9-to-5 again.
Your intuition might tell you to just walk up to a house, open the door, and move in. But there are probably already people living there.
Your intuition might tell you to just stop working your 9-to-5 and start doing what you’re passionate about. But then you have to pay your bills and you don’t have any money in your account.
And this is the part I haven’t completely worked out yet.
For these more complicated desires, what is the balance between just naturally following your present intuition versus thinking of a future-based plan of action?
I feel like you can still follow your intuition and just take it one step at a time, executing each step in the present moment. But I’ve never really operated this way. I’ve been taught to make plans.
I guess the ideal I’m imagining is one where I wake up and intuitively go about satisfying the first desire that comes to me.
But now I’m imagining another counter-argument: some desires aren’t good for you in the long run. For example, what if your first desire when you wake up is to eat cookies? A plan for your long-term health would be useful in this case to dissuade you from eating cookies first thing in the morning.
Anyway, my desire right now is to stop writing this, so I’m going to honor that. ✌️
For me, "Think and Grow Rich" had some very good elements and "best practices" for reaching financial independence (for reference, I may have read or listened to about 100 other books on personal finance and investing, so this comment is not out of the blue), but the spiritualist aspect of it was a really big turn off. Woo? No thanks, don't need it. Reminded me of Alcoholics Anonymous.
That aside, the idea of the power of a positive mental aspect should not be dismissed nor underestimated. It is real, and this book does tap into it.