Natural Laws

“There are many who are liv­ing far below their pos­si­bil­i­ties because they are con­tin­u­ally hand­ing over their indi­vid­u­al­i­ties to oth­ers. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be your­self. Be true to the high­est within your soul and allow your­self to be gov­erned by no cus­toms or con­ven­tion­al­i­ties or arbi­trary man-​​made rules that are not founded on prin­ci­ple.“
– Ralph Waldo Trine

“Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.“
– Miguel de Cervantes

In every­thing you do or want to do in life, you are always gov­erned by law and not by chance. Nat­ural laws are prin­ci­ples or expla­na­tions of why things are the way they are. Prin­ci­ples defined by Web­ster are “fun­da­men­tal laws or facts of nature.” Out of the many you have read or will read about in this book, there is one, how­ever, that is the foun­da­tional prin­ci­ple to all success.

It’s the Law of Cause and Effect, the Socratic Law of Causal­ity enun­ci­ated by Socrates in 410 BCE. It is the one I want you to focus on most. It says that every event has a root cause as well as every event is also a cause set in motion, and so on. Every­thing hap­pens for a rea­son. Every­thing is a mat­ter of choice, and how you turn chance into choice depends on how well you rec­og­nize this law.

True suc­cess is not reach­ing a wor­thy ideal but in liv­ing it. It is to evolve. It is to become and not to have. As one sage put it, “Suc­cess is mea­sured by who we are and not what we have.” Suc­cess is a label you put on a per­son who has achieved some­thing that in your eyes is of sig­nif­i­cant value.

For instance, should you con­sider a per­son who meets a cer­tain cri­te­ria to be suc­cess­ful? If so, all you are doing is look­ing at the end-​​result, one based on your per­cep­tion of suc­cess. Do you know, for instance, if that per­son is liv­ing his wor­thy ideal? Do you know if that per­son is happy? Or should you, when you look at oth­ers who do not seem to lead afflu­ent lifestyles, con­sider them failures?

The answer to all of these ques­tions is no. You are only label­ing them and doing so by merely scratch­ing the sur­face. Literally.

Remem­ber that the path to true suc­cess is an inward one. We will never be suc­cess­ful when feel that we have to mea­sure it against some­thing out­side of our­selves, includ­ing and more impor­tantly the per­cep­tions of others.

In fact, many have achieved suc­cess but are often not con­sid­ered suc­cess­ful. This is why I con­sider suc­cess and achieve­ment as two sep­a­rate enti­ties. All suc­cess­ful peo­ple are achiev­ers but not all achiev­ers are con­sid­ered suc­cess­ful. One is mea­sured by its end-​​result while the other by its process.

Let me illus­trate. One per­son has reached an annual income of $120,000 while another has reached only $25,000. Which one do you think is the more suc­cess­ful per­son? Most of you will have a ten­dency to say the $120,000 income earner is more suc­cess­ful because you are com­par­ing end-​​results (or goals). You are not con­sid­er­ing the process.

How­ever, let’s say that the $25,000 earner went through a bank­ruptcy, suf­fered an ill­ness, or had a series of acci­dents. Who’s more suc­cess­ful now? Not con­vinced yet? How about if I added that the lat­ter also has greater peace of mind, feels a deeper sense of joy, loves his work, and finds a pro­found feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion with only $25,000. In other words, his $25,000 means more to him than $120,000 means to the other.

Now, who is the more suc­cess­ful per­son? You see, the $25,000 means more to the lat­ter. The taste of suc­cess is sweeter to him. The value behind the achieve­ment is greater. And that’s the key.

Essen­tially, suc­cess is not and should never be mea­sured by the end-​​result or by how oth­ers feel about it, because the level of one’s suc­cess is deeply per­sonal and based on how one feels in achiev­ing it. It comes from nei­ther the size of the goal nor its value to oth­ers. Ulti­mately, the level of your suc­cess is mea­sured by how you per­son­ally value its achieve­ment. Period.

“Mike,” some inter­viewer once asked me, “if you had to live your life over, what would you have changed?” I responded that I wouldn’t change any­thing. If I had to choose my par­ents or the way I wanted to live, I wouldn’t be where I am if I did, and I would cer­tainly have to expe­ri­ence what I did in order to think that way in the first place.

Some of you may cat­e­go­rize that as hav­ing a pos­i­tive atti­tude, but a pos­i­tive men­tal atti­tude is more than sim­ply being opti­mistic. It is based on the under­stand­ing and the appli­ca­tion of nat­ural laws. Stephen Covey illus­trates this point extremely well. He says, “Some may be lost in their lives. If they have a pos­i­tive men­tal atti­tude, they may be able to carry that loss. But they are still lost.”

In essence, pos­i­tive think­ing is the result of align­ment and not the other way around. If you accept your set­backs as things that have hap­pened to you for a rea­son and use them as pro­pelling forces to reach that which you seek, you will become much more effec­tive and, of course, successful.

About the Author

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