Dr. Robert Anthony says, in the How to Be Rich series says 17 seconds of focused, non-contradicting thought is equivalent to 10 hours of physical work. So if keeping a positive thought in your head about what you want to attain, is about the amount of work as a work day, then 7 times that would be like a week of work with no break, or about 2 minutes of thought (119 seconds).
And four times that would be like a month of work (476 seconds) which works out to a bit less than 8 minutes. There are 12 calendar months in a year, but let’s go by 365 divided by 28 and see how much thought could equal a year of work.
13 months times 8 minutes.
104 minutes, or an hour and 44 minutes. If I could spend an hour and 44 continuous minutes doing focused, non-contradictive thought, it would be a year’s worth of work?
Seems hard to believe, and I don’t know if that is accurate, or where he came up with the proof. What I do know is that
1- People constantly ask me how I can be so productive, especially when it seems like I spend all my time helping them.
2- In the same way very wise people think carefully before they speak, I strive to think carefully before I act. Meaning I try to work out as much in my head before my pen ever hits paper.
That goes for writing poetry, writing a sales page, creating a traffic plan for a site, putting together a blog post. When I do that, I make fewer mistakes during the process, and since it already exists in my head, I get work done faster. I wait as long as I possibly can to bring something from my mind into reality. Of course, some things can only be worked out once they are in physical form, and I allow for that too.
But of all my best-selling products, ALL of them were 80% written in my head before I typed, spoke, or videoed a single word.
How is that helpful? It’s helpful with not wasting time un-creating.
Think about it. If you try to go somewhere you have just a “general” idea of without directions, you’ll probably get a little lost at some point.
“Oh, no, wait, this is the 1100 block. I wanted 903 West Haven Avenue.”
And that’s fun, to get a bit lost when trying to find a place you haven’t been to before. As a bonus you can learn your way around an area better.
It’s not so much fun in life.
It took me a year of wrong turns to figure out how to rank well in Google, and another six months to figure out how to show people to DO what I was, instead of doing it for them. I have never promoted this page, except for pinging and a few blog comments, and in Yahoo it’s number one for Tinu, out of 1.7 million pages.
Not a competitive listing but it’s crazy that I know how to do this so well that I literally rank by accident.
To get really personal with it, how long has it taken most of us to find the right person in our lives. Most of us just happen to fall in love, we don’t actually plan to find someone we feel is compatible, and make a conscious choice that the person we want must have these specific qualities we want. Nor do we make the changes we need to make to be suitable for that person.
No, we kinda meet at work, and they do this thing that gets on my nerves, but I’ll live with it because I love them. And later that thing they’re living with leads to a divorce.
Would half of marriages end that way if we really picked correctly to start with? How many times have I subconsciously selected unavailable men?
And yet, even 17 seconds of focused, non-contradicting thought is so hard to accomplish. It sounds easy, but let me tell you what “focused, non-contradicting” means.
We’ll talk about that in the next post.