The law of attraction aka The Secret has been endlessly preached by those whose lives have changed forever by this small but all too powerful life hack.
From people who claim they have found the love of their life to people who made buttloads of money, it is clear that this universal law has wonderous effects on people.
I’m not here to shatter the believer’s dreams, but to give you a scientific reason as to why this works on a psychological level.
This ain’t a law governed by the universe but more of a powerful mentality.
Let me explain.
What is The Law of Attraction?
But first, let’s talk about how this law works:
The main gist of this law is to visualize and focus on the things you want, hence attracting the things you desire most and repelling what you do not desire.
To the ones who believes this, this law appears to magically provide certain desired opportunities to him / her. However, psychology says otherwise.
The REAL Magic Behind The Secret
There’s a psychological phenomenon called priming.
The act of priming your brain is the act of conditioning your brain to look for certain types of information and exclude everything else.
For example, if I passed you a dictionary and asked you to look for the definition of “Love”, you are mostly looking for the words starting with “L” and read its definition.
Throughout the process, you did not bother about the other pages which do not have “L” initials nor did you care about the words other than the word “Love” because those weren’t important.
You had effectively filtered the useful information like a Whatsapp group ninja and pay more close attention to the pages that can bring you closer to “Love”.
So how does this psychological phenomenon apply to the Law of Attraction?
Here’s how.
Imagine that you are financially fine but wished you could have more streams of income. (Don’t we all?)
So you apply the process of focusing on your goal which is to be richer and you do this regularly.
What you are effectively doing is priming your brain to seek out opportunities to make you richer.
Opportunities like better jobs, investment vehicles, personal finance courses or books are virtually present everywhere at any time.
But you never noticed these things until you have PRIMED your brain to do so.
So you now start to grab these opportunities by the horns and start upping your financial game, bringing the goal in mind closer to you.
This mindset only makes things within your grasp all the more obvious. You can’t magic-genie your wish out of thin air. You can never ask the universe for a fish when you’re stranded in a dessert.
It is similar to back then when I was still in love with my high school sweetheart which dumped me 6 months later. All I did was visualize and focus on the hope that she will change her mind and come back to me.
But the only thing I did was sob on my bed for weeks and expect the relationship to heal itself like Deadpool. It still boils down to your ability to take action on the right opportunities.
If anything, treat this Law of Attraction as a supplement, not your whole diet. Equip yourself with a wide range of mental models and principles for success.
Whether you believe in this or not, you gotta admit - given the scientific evidence - it works wonders.