4.
Vísualíze Success

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get to the office.

Robert Frost

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Lily Tomlin

When I go to the beauty parlor, I always use the emergency entrance. Sometimes I just go for an estimate.

Phyllis Diller

I want you to imagine a steel beam about one foot wide and one hundred feet long.

Let’s say I take that steel beam up to the top of a forty-story office building and lay it across to the top of a forty-story office building on the other side of the street.

Now here’s the deal: If you walk across that beam from one building to the next I’ll give you $100.

If you’re like most people you’ll say forget it. “Walk across that narrow piece of steel forty floors up? No way. I could lose my balance and fall.” And you probably would have too.

Now I go across the street to the other building and hold your twelve-week-old baby girl over the side and tell you that unless you walk across that beam right now I’ll drop her.

If you’re like most people you’ll walk across the beam. Not only that, you’ll probably make it easily, walking across it as effortlessly as you walk across a bridge.

Why did you react so differently? The task— walking across the beam—didn’t change.

You reacted differently because the goals you were visualizing changed.

The first time your goal was not to fall.

The second time your goal was to save your baby.

The first time you were concerned about the getting there—how you should place your feet, how you should hold your arms for balance, how fast you should go, how long your stride should be, how you should keep from falling.

The second time you didn’t think about any of those things. All you thought about, all you visualized, was saving your baby. And your mind automatically figured out how your body should move in order to get there.

In the same way, if you set your mind on goals— on getting ideas, for example—your mind will figure out a way to get them.

Or ponder the case of the guy who was trying to develop a computer program that would determine where and when and how fast a center fielder should run when a baseball was hit in order to catch it like Willie Mays.

He had to consider the wind and the humidity at the ball park, the sound of the bat hitting the ball, the kind of pitch the pitcher threw, what that particular batter had done in previous situations against that particular pitcher and that particular pitch in that particular ballpark, and how that particular batter had been hitting the ball lately.

He had to consider the speed of the ball as it left the bat and how that speed would decrease the farther it went.

He had to consider the direction and rotation of the ball and the angle of its rise and descent.

Then he had to consider how fast the fielder should run, and in what direction and at what angle, in order to catch the ball before it hit the ground or the wall.

I don’t know if he succeeded in developing such a program.

But I do know that Willie Mays did all that without consciously thinking about any of it.

He just saw the ball being hit and ran to the precise spot on the field where the ball was going. All he visualized was the goal—catching the ball. His brain took all the information that his eyes and ears and memory were furnishing and did all the computing for him: It told his body where to go, his legs how fast to run, his arm how high to reach, his hand which angle to turn.

Let me give you another example:

Research Quarterly reported on a study that showed how practicing basketball free throws in your mind affects your performance.

One group of students actually practiced shooting free throws every day for twenty days, and each student was scored on the first and last day.

Each student in the second group was also scored on the first and last day, but they did no practicing in between.

Students in the third group imagined shooting free throws every day for twenty days, mentally correcting their errors when the ball didn’t go in; they were also scored on the first and last day.

Students in the first group—those who actually practiced—improved their shooting by 24 percent.

Students in the second group—those who did nothing—showed no improvement.

And students in the third group—those who practiced in their imaginations by visualizing—improved their shooting by 23 percent.

Experiments with dart throwers showed the same thing—that mentally throwing darts at a target improves aim as much as physically throwing darts at it.

Case closed.

Because don’t you see? Once again it’s a quantum leap versus a minor leap situation.

If your mind can control the way your body behaves and acts on twelve inches of steel forty floors up, or on a baseball field when a ball is hit, or in front of a dart board, or on a basketball court—if your mind can control the way your body works to that extent, just think of the way your mind can control the way your mind works.

So if you want to get ideas, imagine having gotten them.

Visualize the scene the way the students visualized the ball going in the hoop, the darts into the target.

Visualize it the way divers visualize the dive, pool players the shot, tennis players the slam, golfers the putt.

Do not imagine that you will get the idea. Imagine that you already have it. Imagine being praised and thanked and rewarded.

There’s a good chance you will be.