I’ve been receiving some great questions recently-here’s one from Arturo Alvarez regarding the Law of Attraction.

Q. Hi Darren!! I work in the restaurant business and it takes most of my time, and at this point I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired of it. How do you apply the Law of Attraction to your own personal success?

A. One thing you will come to realize about me on this blog is I love straight, candid, tell-it-like-it-is talk, especially as it relates to the serious business of self-improvement. There is too much polite puffery and aggrandizing of success principles in today’s marketplace, in my opinion.

Let me clean up some misconceptions about the Law of Attraction that have gone haywire in the hands some savvy marketing of late…

1.) The Law of Attraction is not some big “secret” that was etched on tablets, buried by a secret society, and now is finally discovered and revealed. It is a simple and basic principle taught openly for hundreds of years.

2.) You can’t just sit on your tush in your living room imagining checks coming into your mailbox. You won’t have that living room for long. You have to ACT on your thoughts. You have to walk out your door and productively make something happen to get what you want in life. “Doing” has to follow “thinking.”

3.) It is not some mysterious, esoteric voodoo, as it sometimes sounds like it is being described.

Look, it is very simple; here is how “it” works…

What you think you are drawing (or attracting) into your life has always existed-you are now just seeing it. Let me give you an example-if I asked you to recount the number of Volkswagen bugs you have seen on the road in the last week, it would probably be very few, if any. If I challenged you to see how many VW bugs you can count in the next week, I bet you would be shocked at how many you would see. Now here is the big $64,000 question-did you attract VW bugs into your life all of a sudden, OR did you start focusing your attention on something that has been surrounding you all the time?

We are surrounded with billions of sensory (visual, audio, physical) inputs of information each day. To keep ourselves from going insane, we ignore 99.9 percent of them. You only really see, hear or experience those you focus your mind on. This is why when you “think” something, it appears that you are miraculously drawing it into your life, when actually you are now just seeing what was already there. In essence, you ARE “attracting” it into your life because it wasn’t there or accessible TO YOU until your thoughts focused your mind to see it. Make sense? It’s not mysterious at all, it’s actually quite logical. This is why what you think about is important-it will be precisely those things, circumstances and people you will now see, thus attract and experience, to validate those thoughts.

So, Arturo, to address your question directly-stop thinking about how sick and tired you are of the restaurant business-you will only draw experiences and references to validate those thoughts. Become clear about what you really want to do (direct your mind to see what’s around you to achieve it) and go out and do something to act on your ambition. Read, study and practice what you need to know and go meet the people you need to meet-the clues will be all around you, once you focus your mind on your objective. Your key will be taking action on what your newly focused thought process brings to your attention. Go make something happen, Arturo. You can do it! The fact you wrote in with this question means you already have the mindset and are taking action toward the change you seek in life. You are on your way!

Ask your success question and you might get to ask it on TV or have it answered in SUCCESS magazine or on this blog.