Does positive thinking (or “The Secret”) really work?

One of the most famous self-help books of all time is Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Norman was a man way ahead of his time, and the release of his landmark book in 1952 is really what put the term “positive thinking” on the map. While it was received very well, and still is to this day, it is not without it’s critics. There are some people who scoff at the idea that positive thinking actually works. How can something as formless and seemingly insignificant as a “thought” actually impact our lives? I’ve heard many critics say things like “I’ve tried positive thinking and it doesn’t work. I wind up with the same crap I always get.” Sound familiar?

With the recent disaster in Japan and the massive loss of life following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, I’ve heard even more skepticism regarding positive thinking. To some, positive thinking seems laughable in the face of tragedy, and does nothing to explain the deaths of so many innocent people. “Certainly some of the casualties must have been positive thinkers, right? What good did it do them?
Why should I think positive when I can be struck by lightning, hit by a car, or have a heart attack and drop dead?” I’m certainly not wise enough to explain why all of life’s events happen when they do, and I know for a fact that positive thinking won’t eliminate every obstacle. But what I also know is that positive thinking is better than complaining, being proactive is better than doing nothing, and focusing on a solution is a lot more productive than focusing on the problem.
I find it peculiar that people are using Japan as an example that positive thinking is futile, when Japan might be the best example in the history of the world that it actually works. Historically speaking, it was not that long ago that Japan was decimated by two atomic bombs. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were all but completely destroyed, tens of thousands lost their lives, and the rest of the nation was forced to clean up the rubble, mourn the loss of their loved ones and deal with the aftermath. In the years to come, all Japan did was rebuild their cities, rebuild their culture, and rebuild their lives. A country whose “Made in Japan” label that was once synonymous with shoddy workmanship became a global leader in automobile, computer, and electronics technology. They established themselves as an American ally, a world power, and a tourist haven in a very short period of time following WWII, and until the recent events remained as strong. So I ask you this: was it positive thinking and pro-activity that rebuilt Japan, or was it inactivity and complaining—and which one do you think they’ll rely on now?


You might even agree that action is what rebuilt Japan--but still be wondering “what the heck does that has to do with positive thinking?” Well, since every action is preceded by a thought, it has everything to do with it. In fact, here is something easy to remember that puts the importance of thought into perspective:



Your thoughts become your emotions, your emotions become your actions, and your actions become your results.

thoughts>emotions>actions>results

If this still isn’t clicking for you, here’s one of my favorite analogies. I call it “The Tree.” (pretty creative, huh?) Think of your thoughts as the root of the tree. They need to be strong, healthy and positive to be the tree’s foundation. Your thoughts become your emotions, much like the roots of the tree become the trunk of the tree. Moving up the tree, the trunk begins to branch out, just like your emotions become definite actions. At the end of these branches, or actions, you will find the fruits--otherwise known as your results. To sum it up, if you want good fruits (results) it all starts with good roots (thoughts). Make sense?



So what about “The Secret?”

In recent years much has been made about “The Law of Attraction,” a term that was made popular by the book and DVD “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, who interviewed a number of notable positive thinkers and people in the self help field to compile the book. Simply put, the Law of Attraction (which is what “the secret” is) states that “what you think about you bring about,” and that your life is just the product of your thoughts. After a panel of contributors to the book and DVD were interviewed on Oprah, it became a best selling phenomenon overnight--and as you can imagine, also gained it’s fair share of detractors. Critics were quick to point out that if you could just “think your way to success” then everyone would do it, and that this gives people false hope. Among other things, critics took issue with the story of a female cancer patient whose cancer miraculously disappeared; something that she credited to a regimen of positive thinking and uplifting activities. Again they argued that this is not reality, and that people shouldn’t be told they can just “think” themselves into curing a terminal disease.


Personally, I enjoyed “The Secret,” but I can see both sides of the argument. I can see why “The Secret” has its critics because of the marketing that went along with it. Some enthusiasts watched (or read) it and determined that they could just picture a bag of money and it would magically appear in their lap. Legions of people, upon the book’s suggestion, created vision boards—cutting out pictures of their wildest dreams from magazines and posting them on the wall—only to be deeply disappointed when none of these things seemed to materialize. Visualization can be a powerful tool, and is commonly used by professional and Olympic athletes, it’s just that most people are overlooking the most important part of the equation: action. “The Secret” specifically states that you need to take inspired action if you want your goals to come to fruition--something that proponents and critics alike seem to have conveniently forgotten. So let me repeat that…YOU HAVE TO TAKE ACTION!

In regards to the cancer patient, I didn’t feel like the book claimed that “everyone” with cancer could just spontaneously cure themselves. It seemed they were just giving an example of someone who believed that positive thinking and positive feeling helped their situation. In addition, it is common practice for doctors to recommend uplifting activities to cancer patients like watching funny movies or going to see a comedian. Laughter, and a general state of happiness, has been proven to boost the immune system, therefore prolonging and increasing the quality of life.
Say what you want about feeling good, but don’t call it quackery. The mind’s connection to the body is undeniable, and we are just now scratching the surface of what this might imply.


I would recommend watching or reading “The Secret” to anyone, but I would also recommend using your own common sense when doing so. You have to keep in mind that it’s a compilation of information coming from different perspectives, and not everything that is said might resonate with you. There is no doubt that it is designed to grab your attention, and it does make some grand claims, but if you can sift through the rhetoric and pay attention to what grabs you, you might find some gems of information. One of the most important things I got from watching it is something else that is often overlooked: what you think is not nearly as important as how you feel.


Thinking vs. Feeling

Referring back to the “thoughts>emotions>actions>results” example, we can see that thoughts are an important part of the equation, but ultimately it is our EMOTIONS that lead us action. In other words, you can drive yourself crazy trying to think about a positive outcome, but unless you FEEL good in the process you are most likely sabotaging yourself. For example, you might be wanting and wishing for a particular person to take an interest in you, but unless you exude the confidence and feeling that is in alignment with that actually happening, they are most likely to pick up on your vibe (even if it’s subconscious) and tell you to take a hike. This is not to say that every time you feel bad that something bad is going to happen to you, or vice versa--but it is likely to happen more often. Let’s face it, good things seem to happen more frequently to people who give off good vibes, and bad things seem to happen more frequently to people who give off bad vibes. You can argue all you want but the proof is all around.

I don’t know about you, but I have tons of evidence from the past events of my own life that clearly show that I ultimately control the outcome. Sure, my dad was an abusive alcoholic, and I had ZERO to do with that, but what I did have was the choice of how I would let that impact my life. I could feel sorry for myself, or I could choose to learn from his mistakes and save myself a lot of time and trouble. Thinking, feeling, and acting positive don’t always make things go how you want them to go—but they sure as hell work a lot better than doing the opposite. You don’t have to take my word for it, just use your own common sense. In the words of Darth Vader, “Search your feelings, you know it to be true.”

There’s another simple but effective equation that I’d like to share. I got this from “The Success Principles” by Jack Canfield, a book that I HIGHLY recommend. It’s simple, easy, and sums up the whole point of this blog: E+R=O.


This stands for: Event+Response=Outcome.

We tend to believe that it’s the outside events that create our lives, when in actuality it is our response to those events that create our outcomes. We can’t control everything that happens to us but we can ALWAYS decide how we are going to react. This is our point of power, and this is a beautiful thing. It means that while you can’t control the waves and the wind that you are still the captain of the ship, and whether you wind up in a tropical port or hitting the rocks--it is up to you. Let your thoughts steer you in the right direction. It will make the journey, as well as the final destination, much more enjoyable.

"Murphy’s Law" is a big, fat lie!

We all know what Murphy’s Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” We hear it all the time on TV, on the internet, from co-workers, bosses, friends and family. It’s another saying like “Thank God It’s Friday” that seems harmless enough, but upon closer examination (which I highly recommend for all seemingly harmless sayings) it’s obvious that it’s complete crap.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong? Really?


When I’m walking down the street, I could fall and break my femur, I could get attacked by a rabid squirrel, or I could get hit by a bus—but how often do these things actually happen? Rarely, and that’s an understatement. If you really think about it, there is an infinite amount of things that actually could go wrong, but a very tiny percentage do. This led me to do some extensive research (aka Google) on this Murphy character and how they arrived at their brilliant deduction. The answer wasn’t anything that I expected. Here’s what I found:

Arthur Bloch, in his 1977 book "Murphy's Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG", prints a letter that he received from George E. Nichols who recalls the event that occurred in 1949 at Edwards Air Force Base, Muroc, California that, according to him, is the origination of Murphy's Law. An excerpt from the letter reads:

“...The Law's namesake was Capt. Ed Murphy, a development engineer from Wright Field Aircraft Lab. Frustration with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gage bridges caused him to remark - "If there is any way to do it wrong, he will" - referring to the technician who had wired the bridges at the Lab.”

So there you have it. We’ve somehow managed to transform the good Capt. Murphy’s insult of one of his bumbling technicians into a “law” that states that anything that can go wrong will, and by golly, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it! This is a shining example of why it’s so important to examine our speech—the history, meaning, and origins. We often take these sayings at face value and assume that some brilliant, bearded psychologist from antiquity must have worked painstakingly through arduous days and candle lit nights, pouring over volumes of research dictated onto parchment paper with a feather pen, before finally exclaiming, “Eureka! I’ve got it! Anything that can go wrong—will!” But alas, the real truth is that some dude just thought his tech was a dip$#*!

Now that I’ve exposed Murphy’s Law for the complete BS that it is, this should be a life transforming day for you. Tell your wife that you’d like to go ahead and build that addition on to your house that you’ve been talking about, and do it all yourself! Who cares if you have trouble hanging a picture and you once failed 9^th grade Shop class? After all, what could go wrong? On second thought, it’s usually better to let the pendulum settle somewhere in the middle before swinging it violently to the other side. We’ve just now discovered that Murphy’s Law holds no water, and much like coming to grips with the Earth being round, it’s going to take some time to get used to.




I have my own “law” that I follow and I am more than happy to share it with you—it’s called “Tieffy’s Law.” It simply states, “It’s going to work because I’m going to make it work—dammit!” It’s not always pretty, it’s not always exact, and it rarely follows the original plan as originally constructed. But one way or another, the end result is going to be something I’m satisfied with or by golly--I’m not finished yet! Life rarely works out exactly how we want it to, but there are greater forces working for us than against us. Keep on moving, make adjustments on the fly, and don’t let the details drive you crazy. You will be victorious in the end, and you might even discover that everything that could have gone right—did.

Why You Should Love Your Critics

I grew up as “the fat kid.” I’m sure some people saw me as more than that (like my mom), but that’s how I saw myself. From the time I was 8 years old until my senior year in high school I was obese. I’ve had my share of tough moments in my life, but growing up fat was the most difficult—hands down. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Every day I would dread going to school knowing that it was only a matter of time before one of my adorable schoolmates referred to me as fat boy, tub o’ lard, porky pig, or the ever popular “fat ass.”

Though I’m not completely sure why I started to gain weight at age 8, it just happened to coincide with my alcoholic father having an affair, and my parent’s subsequent divorce. It doesn’t take a clinical psychologist to piece together what was going on with me at the time: fear of abandonment, instability, breakdown of the family unit, comfort through eating, yada yada--you get the picture. My mom was also forced to work two jobs to support my older sister and I, so I was like a fat McCauley Culkin. Home alone and eating everything in sight.

The first thing that being an obese child does, aside from obliterating your self esteem, is that it gives you an intense fear of criticism. You sort of feel like an open wound walking around just waiting for someone to come up and dump more salt on you. The reason that an eating addiction can be more difficult to deal with than other addictions (like drinking, smoking, gambling, drugs) is because it’s the one addiction that you can’t hide. You could have a severe drinking problem, but if you’re just stopping by Super Fresh for groceries, who would know? To the contrary, everyone knows when you have an eating problem. No matter how many times you’ve fantasized about it, you can’t escape your own body.


From an early age I tried to avoid criticism at all costs, and while it was impossible to avoid completely, I did develop numerous strategies to dodge the barrage of insults. Taking a page from the “if you can’t beat em, join em” book, I started to deflect some of their taunts by picking fun at myself before they would have a chance to. This diffused most of the negative energy directed my way, and took some of their fun out of teasing me, but it did nothing for my own self-esteem. It’s one thing to let people insult you, but believing what they say and reaffirming it yourself over and over again is like carving your fate in stone. Sooner or later we all become exactly what we think we are.

Fortunately for me, I lost a lot of weight between my junior and senior years in high school. This greatly improved my self-esteem, but a lot of damage had been done. I still found it difficult to speak my mind for fear of “rocking the boat,” and I tried to avoid situations that caused conflict. At the same time, I had the growing urge to be a singer, songwriter, and performer. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is the wrong field to go into if you are afraid of criticism. In fact, you have to be prepared to take much more than the average person, because wherever there is art, there are critics. Ultimately, criticism will play a huge role in determining your level of success; though it is not the criticism itself but how you choose to process it that becomes the determining factor.



The first year or two in Laughing Colors (my rock band) were sort of a drunken bliss for me. We played a few times a week, surrounded by a group of friends who always told us how great we were--insulated from the opinion of the masses. As we grew in popularity I noticed a strange thing starting to occur: the more people liked us, the more people thought we sucked. How could this be? In my mind we kept getting better and better, and the crowds that came to see us were growing exponentially—so where was this hostility coming from? This was one of my first lessons on criticism: the level of criticism you are experiencing is usually in direct proportion to the amount of success you’re enjoying. Of course there are exceptions, but I’ve seen this little formula work in my life time and time again, and I’ve come to view the periods where I’m receiving very little criticism as a clue that I must not be accomplishing very much.


Don’t misunderstand me. This doesn’t mean that it’s time to saddle up and head out to intentionally piss people off. I still prefer to avoid conflict. I’ve just learned that criticism is a natural bi-product of progress and success, and that when someone says “you’re wrong” or “you suck” then I’m usually on the right track.
Think about it, you don’t need to be a controversial person to attract criticism, all you have to do is open your mouth and speak your mind. If you told a crowd of 100 randomly selected people your inner most thoughts on politics, religion, and the world in general, I bet 75 of them would think you were a complete idiot. You’d be lucky if you got 50 of them to agree with you on any one topic. That’s how much opinions vary, and that’s how easy it is to draw criticism. So the first step to overcoming your fear of criticism is: share your opinion, take some criticism, shake it off and move on. See? That didn’t hurt too much, did it?






I am by no means immune to criticism, nor am I immune to fear. I just don’t let them stop me in my tracks the way I used to. I can still vividly remember Laughing Colors first in-print album review. It was for our second album “What’s So Funny?”, and it was reviewed by the only Maryland music magazine worth reading--Music Monthly. They called us up to let us know it was going to be reviewed in the new issue, so as soon as it came out we ran out to the nearest news stand to see what kind of awesome things they wrote about us. All of my friends from high school thought we were the shit, so conquering the rest of the world was a mere formality, right? Bwahahahahahaha!!!


I’m sure I’ve probably given it away at this point, but our album, our precious new baby, got a scathing review in Music Monthly. I specifically remember them saying that the full length LP had enough decent songs to make “a good EP,” but no more than that. They called some of the songwriting “immature” and said that the entire album was “disjointed” and “directionless.” I was devastated. Not “tragedy in the family” devastated, but definitely in the “my hot girlfriend slept with another guy” range. I mean, who did these people think they were—Rolling f-ing Stone?!!! What right did they have to tell us that our album was “disjointed!?” (Probably the same right they had to tell us we were going to be the next Pearl Jam--which we would have agreed with enthusiastically while calling them geniuses.)


The rest of the band was not happy, but I was fuming. I thought about writing Music Monthly a nasty letter and letting them know exactly how I felt. After careful consideration I determined that writing them a letter would be stupid and petty. Then I got another bright idea: I would write it under an assumed name so they wouldn’t know it was from me! As if that was somehow less stupid and petty. Luckily my reasonable mind prevailed for the time being and I opted not to write them. But I knew the guy who wrote the review, and God help him if he ever showed up to another Laughing Colors show.


I imagined myself up onstage at Hammerjacks in front of a capacity crowd, when I spot him sauntering in through the front door through a haze of cigarette smoke and bobbing mullets. With a sharp wave of my hand the band stops playing on a dime, and the crowd who was just jamming along seconds earlier turns and looks in his direction, as complete silence befalls the room. “Seize him!” I yell while pointing directly at him, and he turns to run out of the club with urine cascading down the front of his stone washed jeans. The mob, who are now somehow equipped with torches, chase him into the parking lot like he’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame, until finally he succumbs to the angry throng. “Who’s disjointed now?” I cackle under my breath.




Fortunately this remained a fantasy. Time went by, and as the sting of being lauded by Music Monthly gradually subsided I learned some great lessons from that review. James Davies (better known as Jimi Haha, the lead singer of Jimmie’s Chicken Shack) was very helpful in his advice by reminding me of the quotation of one Andy Warhol, who said “I don’t read my press, I weigh it.” For an artist this is key. Bad press is one thing, but the death knell is to not be talked about at all. It should be noted that Jimmie’s Chicken Shack received a glowing review of their debut album “Chicken Scratch” in the same issue of Music Monthly. Instead of letting that bother me, I decided that a healthy level of jealousy is great inspiration. I’ve told Jimi on more than one occasion that they made us a much better band by setting the bar higher than we would have done ourselves.


As a band, we didn’t say much about the review to each other, we just went back to work. We were young and hungry and still growing as musicians and songwriters. I remember reading the review over again some months later, but this time from a different perspective. The knee jerk reaction is to get defensive when someone criticizes you, but if you can come from a place of peace and strength and not take it too personally, you might find some golden nuggets of advice. Maybe Music Monthly had some good points? Maybe we needed to mature as songwriters and define our sound and direction. This was about the time that our new drummer, and my hero, Will Dorsey joined the band. Finally Laughing Colors had “a sound,” and everything started to click for us after that.


When we released our next EP “Depth,” Music Monthly loved it--and they gave us an even better review for our follow up LP “The Pattern Seed.” We got a lot more great press from these albums, and to my knowledge, never received a poor review for either one. In retrospect, I look at that first Music Monthly review as very honest and pretty accurate. I don’t think we were so influenced by that one review that it changed how we played, but we definitely took some of the key points to heart. If you try, you can turn almost any criticism into good advice--just rephrase it. If someone calls you immature, maybe it’s time to work on you maturity. If someone calls you directionless, maybe it’s time to get some direction. If the criticism doesn’t fit you, then forget it and move on. Usually criticism stings the most when you know deep down that it’s true. If it’s not, why worry about it?










Today I have learned that any worthwhile undertaking will draw criticism. There’s just no way to avoid it. It would be like going surfing and trying to avoid the waves. Your only choice is to learn how to surf. I’ve also come to see criticism as a sign that good things are on the way—you can’t have spring without the pollen. Sure, it would be great if the whole world loved what we did, said, wrote and sang—but that’s just not possible. As long as I am getting a favorable review from the only critic that really matters (me), then I am no longer “directionless.” Learn to love, embrace, and even thank your critics. They are the first sign of your success.