Creating Positive Coincidences

It is an undisputed fact that the mind can influence the physical body but can the mind influence the world beyond your body?

In other words, can the mind create coincidences and influence reality? People all around the world have experienced this in their own lives and will say that the answer is yes – your world can be shaped by your thoughts and beliefs.

The following story describes one such incident – how one man discovered the power of his mind in creating coincidences. He went on to use this ability to become so successful that his work is almost a household name in America.

For the purpose of this story, let’s call this man Scott. His full name will not be revealed until the end to make this story more intriguing. This story was told in a book Scott wrote in 1998. In the early 1980s, Scott had heard of a process called affirmations from a friend. The process he learned was simple.
Visualize what you want and write it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain it.

Scott was told that the process did not require any faith or positive thinking for it to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that the technique would influence the environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goals. In other words, it would spawn amazing coincidences to move you toward your goals. The coincidences could be things that were seemingly unconnected to you and beyond your control.

Scott was very left-brained and logical in his thinking. He had his doubts about the process but figured that there was no harm in trying.
“Within a few weeks, coincidences started to happen to me.” wrote Scott.
“Amazing coincidences, strings of them. I won’t mention the specific goal I was working on, as it was a private matter, but within a few months the goal was accomplished exactly as I had written it.”

But Scott was not yet convinced that affirmations helped. Coincidences do happen on their own and Scott considered the test inconclusive.
So Scott picked another goal – to make some gains in the stock market. He wrote his affirmation down every day and waited for some inspiration. It came to him in a dream. He woke up one night with the words “Buy Chrysler” repeating in his head.
He bought shares in the inspired company during one of its most bleak periods yet it began to rise soon after and he made some good returns on it. He repeated the experiment again and managed to pick another successful company, with stock symbol “Ask”.

Armed with this confidence in the power of affirmations Scott decided to apply it to a more challenging goal – getting into the highly competitive University of California at Berkeley MBA program.
The problem was that he had already taken the entrance exam, the G.M.A.T, and only hit the 77th percentile score. He knew he needed to be above the 90th percentile to at least have a chance of being accepted.
Scott picked the outlandish target of 94 as his goal and again applied the affirmation technique.

Despite not being able to go much higher than the 77th percentile in the practice exams Scott was surprised to learn that he did indeed hit the 94th percentile for the G.M.A.T – just as he had written in his affirmations. He graduated with his Berkeley MBA in 1986.

A few years later he tried pursuing a more serious goal, that of being a syndicated cartoonist. He knew the odds of his cartoon submission being accepted by a major newspaper were roughly 1 in 10,000.
He beat those odds and his cartoon was accepted. He was soon earning a decent living with his cartoon strip but he wanted to achieve something bigger.
He decided he wanted the most successful comic strip on the planet. Scott felt that the best measure of “most successful”; would be number of books sold.
In June 1996 his book The Dilbert Principle hit the number-one spot on the hardcover nonfiction list of the New York Times. It stayed in the top three all summer. In November his second book, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, also made the bestseller list, giving Scott the number-one and number-two positions simultaneously for one week. For that brief period of time, Scott indeed had the "most successful" comic strip on the planet.

As you may have guessed, the person I’m talking about is Scott Adams, the creator of the highly successful Dilbert comic strip. Scott writes about these experiences with affirmations in his book The Dilbert Future. He does not profess to know why it works but leaves the conclusion to the reader. When asked if I am surprised at the success of the Dilbert comic strip. I definitely would be so, if not for my bizarre experience with affirmations. As it was, I expected it.