The Millionaire Course

by Marc Allen

  One of the most important things I can show people is this: Whatever problems, obstacles, or shortcomings you have don’t matter — in the long run the only thing that matters is where you focus your attention. This is not a theory — I have found it to be true in my life, over and over:

  As soon as your dream becomes stronger

  than your doubts and fears,

  your dream begins to manifest.

  We prepare ourselves first by dreaming, and then by imagining a plan; in doing so we are simply and naturally focusing on the full half of the glass — on our gifts. Somewhere in the full half we can always find creative solutions for any problems or obstacles that arise. This process is effortless, and can show us how to live the life of our dreams, doing what we love to do in our lives.

  All of us are talented, and none of us are perfect. All of us have unique strengths and abilities, and all of us have unique weaknesses and imperfections. All of us have been given the ability to shine brilliantly in some areas of life, and we are all clueless and ignorant in other areas. All of us are gifted, and we all need help.

  If we had to be perfect before we could succeed in life, none of us would ever succeed.

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PLAN

  If we wait before we begin the projects we fantasize about until we see the entire plan of how they’re going to come to fruition, we’ll probably never get started. You don’t have to see the entire plan — it’s going to change and evolve over time anyway. All you need to do is to see the next step in front of you, and then take that step. Let the universe work out the details of the plan farther on down the road.

  Keep focusing on the half of the glass that is full, and move forward in spite of any fears and doubts that come up.

  NOTICE AND ACCEPT THE HALF-EMPTY SIDE

  All of us have doubts and fears. All of us have problems and difficulties and conflicts. All these things need to be fully acknowledged — they are certainly not to be denied — but focusing excessively or even compulsively on the empty half of life leads to neurosis and failure.

  When a problem arises from the half-empty side of life, look carefully at it, acknowledge it and express it, and then bring in all the creative fullness of the other side of life, the full side, to confront it and deal with it. Hide nothing from yourself — the good, the bad, and the ugly — but don’t focus too long on the problems. Get your creative mind working on solutions instead, and those solutions will appear. (This is an ever-recurring theme throughout this Course; we go into it in depth in Lesson 10.)

  SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE FOCUS ON THE FULL HALF

  When you focus on the half-full side of life, you discover something marvelous, in the fullest sense of the word: The half-full side quickly grows fuller and fuller, and connects you with a world of opportunities and abundance.

  When you focus on your strengths, you become stronger, more confident, more able to take risks. When you are aware of your unique gifts, you have a good amount of healthy self-esteem, and over time you come to believe you are capable of creating success, as you define it, as you desire it. You come to believe it not through making some kind of leap of faith, but by seeing the results that actually happen in your life. You fully realize at some point in this process that you are capable of living the life of your dreams, regardless of your flaws, fears, doubts, excuses, neuroses, shortcomings, poor education, lack of experience, lack of money, dysfunctional family, etc., etc.

  Keep focusing on the fullness of your life:

  Keep remembering your dreams, your strengths,

  your unique talents and skills.

  Be absolutely, uniquely, fully yourself

  and you have everything you need

  to create the life of your dreams.

  GOOD QUESTIONS TO ASK

  To help you become aware of which half of the glass you tend to focus on, ask yourself these questions:

  • What are the things that are keeping you from living the life of your dreams?

  • What are all your excuses? (Here’s a key to success: None of your excuses are valid.)

  • What are all the good things you bring to the party?

  • What gifts, abilities, strengths, and talents do you have?

  If you tend to spend more of your energy focusing on the empty half of life, remember: As soon as you spend more time on your dreams, plans, and gifts than on doubting and complaining, success will come to you as naturally and inevitably as spring follows winter.

  SEE THE BENEFITS WITHIN ADVERSITY

  A LIFE-CHANGING PHRASE

  Many years ago, I heard a single phrase that had a great impact on my life. I don’t remember where I first heard it or read it, and for years I didn’t know who first said it, but the words resonated with something in me, and I immediately wrote the phrase down:

  Within every adversity is an equal or greater benefit.

  As soon as I heard it, I thought, This is important. I need to remember this. I put it on my desk, right by the phone, where I saw it often.

  At the time, I was at just about my lowest point financially; my business and life were a series of emotional struggles. That single phrase almost immediately helped shift my perspective in some critical areas of both business and life. It has opened many new doors to me that I didn’t even know existed — doors to new levels of abundance and fulfillment. It has turned out to be an invaluable key to success, one of the most important of all, one I return to and use over and over.

  Years after I heard it, someone told me it was from Napoleon Hill, the author of the classic book, Think and Grow Rich, and the exact words are “Within every adversity is the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

  I later heard it phrased in another way that is just as good: Within our problems, within our apparent obstacles, are opportunities.

  Do you see how remembering this key in difficult situations can immediately shift your thinking from the half-empty to the half-full side of the glass? It can open the floodgates of your imagination and release a vast amount of previously undiscovered ideas, creativity, and intelligence.

  Within every adversity

  is an equal or greater benefit.

  Within every problem is an opportunity.

  Even in the knocks of life we can find great gifts.

  I just discovered the last line of that key a few years ago in The Bhagavad Gita, the classic sacred work that originated in India over five thousand years ago.

  When you work with these keys for a while, they become part of who you are. When your subconscious mind incorporates these messages, your life changes dramatically. You see evidence of this everywhere throughout the day, even in your dreams at night.

  PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR DREAMS

  Keep working with these keys, and you’ll start to have some amazing dreams — if you haven’t had them already!

  Pay attention to your dreams as you work with this material. Your dreams will help you in this adventure; they will give you a great amount of guidance. As you go to sleep, repeat to yourself, I will remember my dreams, and their meaning will be clear to me. This is a great little technique that can open up the world of dreams for you, and allow you to tap into the wisdom and power of your subconscious mind.

  I’ve had dreams that dissolved all kinds of apparent obstacles in my life, dreams that were worth years of therapy, dreams that showed me the full half of the glass of my life in brilliant detail. I’ve had dreams that have showed me my vocation and purpose in life. I’ve heard new songs in dreams. Sometimes dreams will have short little messages — sometimes profound, sometimes mundane, practical things to remember to do.

  In one dream I was talking to a musician friend of mine, and I said, “You know, success in music is just 5 percent talent and 95 percent management.”

  That’s great advice for artists of all kinds.

  In another dream I had, someone came up to me and said, “Can you really get what you want in life?” A TV screen suddenly appeared in fro
nt of us, and someone on the TV said, “Not if you think like everybody else.”

  That’s great advice for everyone.

  Your dreams are important: They are messages from your subconscious mind confirming it has received its instructions and is moving you on to new levels of success, understanding, peace, and power — as much as you’re ready for at this moment.

  FINDING CREATIVE SOLUTIONS

  In The Architecture of All Abundance, Lenedra J. Carroll gives us another great key: a simple exercise that can show us how to open the gates of discovery within us and find creative solutions to the problems we encounter. She calls it “the twelve What Ifs.”

  When you’re confronted with a problem, first take a while and reflect on these questions: What possible benefits can there be within this problem? What opportunities? What gifts?

  Then take a sheet of paper and list as many possible outcomes of the problem as you can. What if this happened? What if that happened? What if I did this? What if I did that? Lenedra Carroll suggests listing twelve possibilities, twelve what ifs.

  When I first tried this, I got to just two what ifs — and the next time just to three — before the perfect solution appeared, and I had no need to list more. I’ve done it many times now; the most I’ve been able to list so far has been seven or eight. But every time I’ve done it, it has been very helpful; sometimes when I’ve done it, it has been a mentally and emotionally expansive experience that has led to solutions I wouldn’t have dreamed of otherwise.

  This is a superb exercise for discovering creative possibilities. There aren’t just one or two possibilities for us in any given situation; there are at least a dozen, with an infinite number of variations within each one of them.

  Create a list of “What ifs” for each problem

  or obstacle you face,

  and a great many new creative possibilities

  will be revealed to you.

  Keep working with these keys, and creative solutions will appear to even the greatest problems and obstacles you will ever encounter.

  KEEP PICTURING SUCCESS

  DREAM, IMAGINE, BEUEVE, CREATE

  My wife gave me a silver picture frame, with four words inlaid into the silver, one on each side: Dream, Imagine, Believe, Create.

  I treasure that little frame, because it sums up the whole process I keep trying to communicate to others. First you allow yourself to dream. Then you imagine different possibilities, and let some of them evolve into concrete plans. Then you start creating exactly what you’ve planned. Belief is a by-product of the process: As soon as you see it working, you naturally come to believe it.

  This is not rocket science; it can be expressed in simple words everyone can understand.

  The key to achieving success is

  to be able to clearly imagine it.

  It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? These principles are easy to understand — though implementing them can be challenging. Yet dealing with the challenges and obstacles that arise when we dare to dream and to act on those dreams is certainly one of the most expansive and fulfilling things we can do.

  A PULL TOWARD EXPANSIVENESS

  If you’ve ever had a peak experience, or even a moment of insight that shifted something within you, you know it’s not easy to clearly describe it to others. It’s the same with these keys. Some of them won’t affect you in any way, but many of them will resonate with something in you that is ready for change and expansion.

  We are evolving beings; it’s in our genetic code. When we do the same repetitive activity over and over, we become bored, and we naturally start to look for new challenges. A friend of mine quit his well-paying job simply because he was no longer learning anything new. He started over in an entirely new industry just so, as he put it, he could “fuse new synapses.”

  We want to grow; we want to learn new things; we want to be challenged in some way. A deep part of us senses that new growth is part of our great purpose in life. And yet, so many of us ignore it and resist it and settle for less than we’re capable of — why?

  There are many different reasons: maybe we feel we need security, or a regular paycheck, or we have obligations to others, or we don’t have enough self-confidence, or we’re afraid of failure, or we think we need more time, talent, or money than we have — the list goes on and on and on.

  But the bottom line might be this: We failed to dream, or have forgotten our dream. And so we settle for so much less than we could have attained.

  Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Most people live lives of quiet desperation.” That was putting it bluntly, even harshly. I prefer the way Martha Graham, the great dancer and choreographer, expressed it: “We are driven by a divine discontent.” We feel a pull toward expansiveness, a desire for something greater. If we don’t do something about it — take even a few small, tentative steps forward — we will remain unfulfilled.

  Where do we start?

  With a dream.

  What do you dream of doing, being, having?

  What kind of life and what kind of work do you feel pulled toward?

  We start by daring to dream, and daring to make a plan to accomplish that dream — and then suddenly the steps become obvious, and we discover we have everything we need to take those steps and implement that plan. We discover this powerful key:

  We’re surrounded by opportunities, always.

  We see them as soon as we begin to look for them.

  We find them when we ask for them.

  RESISTING THE PULL TOWARD EXPANSIVENESS

  At the same time, we discover all kinds of resistance to our dreams — and it seems like the greater the dream is, the greater the resistance. Some of it comes from other people, but most of it comes from within us. In this Course we find ways to deal with our inner resistance (especially in Lesson 8, but all throughout the Course as well). Once we deal with our inner resistance, our outer problems have a way of shrinking to a manageable size, or even dissolving. That’s why I so often repeat that almost all the work — all of the important work — is internal. Get the inside right, and the outside will take care of itself, easily and effortlessly, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all.

  You’ll know you’ve overcome your doubts and fears when suddenly you discover you have created exactly what you were wishing for — it has magically appeared before you, in living color, in physical reality.

  THE KEY TO BEING LUCKY

  Now that I have attained so much, people often say I am “lucky.” Why do some people seem to be lucky and others unlucky? Somewhere along the way I heard a good explanation: Luck doesn’t just happen to us, at random, for no good reason — we create our own luck when we keep picturing success and preparing for it, and taking whatever steps we can take.

  Luck is preparedness meeting opportunity.

  When you prepare,

  opportunities present themselves.

  The opportunities were always there, but you didn’t see them before because you hadn’t prepared for them. Once you prepare for them, they become obvious to you. They are everywhere.

  It seems as if we have no control over the opportunities that come our way, but we can certainly start preparing for our success. There is always something we can do today or in the near future, even if it’s just a small step: a simple one-page plan on paper, a bit of research, a phone call, a note in your calendar to do something.

  Those who succeed have a clear,

  focused picture of their success.

  The level of success they attain matches

  the expansiveness of their dreams.

  DO I DESERVE SUCCESS?

  Do you have a hard time picturing success because you feel, on some deep level, you may not deserve it?

  This is a question most people — including me — have grappled with. Do I deserve it? There are lots of doubts and fears suggesting maybe I really don’t deserve success. Maybe I haven’t worked hard enough. I’m certainly lazier than
most people seem to be. Maybe I don’t have the necessary talent, energy, abilities, education, money, looks, competitive spirit, fire in the belly, emotional stability, background, luck, or whatever I think is necessary for success.

  I wrestled with this stuff for several years, and then one day I realized something (because of my background and upbringing, this key came to me in religious terms, but you can state it in a completely secular way if you wish):

  Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive.”

  He didn’t say, “Ask and you will receive —

  if you deserve it.”

  It’s not a matter of deserving success. Don’t even bother to go there. Don’t even worry about whether you deserve it or not. It’s a waste of time and energy because it’s all based on fears and doubts that are unfounded — just as all our fears and doubts are, once we really get down to it.

  If you can’t just let it go, if you still grapple with the issue, look at it this way: We’re all God’s children — whatever term you want to use for it — we’re all the children of an abundant universe, and we all deserve the kind of success we want to give to our own children. We all deserve to have happiness, peace, and personal fulfillment.

  IS IT GOD’S WILL?

  This is another question I grappled with for years. I have prayed for years to do God’s will, but is it truly God’s will for me to have great success? To have a mansion on a hill? Piles of gold? A well-balanced investment portfolio? Didn’t Jesus live in poverty? Didn’t he say it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a rope to pass through the eye of a needle? (That’s the correct translation, incidentally: not a camel, but a rope. Not that it matters; both are nearly impossible to get through the eye of a needle.)