Why seeing silver linings is so dangerous.

Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, as as well as gurus from The Secret, would tell us to simply visualize and think our way to wealth. Alex Becker tells us in the 10 Pillars of Wealth book that everything is our fault – both good and bad.

There’s massive pieces of truth in this but are slightly incomplete.

Visualization and mindset conditioning is a popular idea because it can actually be extremely effective. However, critics point out that without the “hard work” it is incomplete.

If you’re not in the environment where hard work can pay off though, then you still lose, no matter your mindset.

You’ll never be in the right environment with a bad mindset though, because you’ll always find a reason to not do something, think it’s “too hard,” or too risky or whatever. You have to be in a situation where it’s possible to do the work that your mindset would allow to happen.

If you’re a prisoner, or someone on house arrest like most of the world in a Coronavirus world, having a better mindset is not going to help you one bit. However, being in a better environment would be helpful, such as not being a prisoner, or moving to a country that doesn’t revoke all rights in the event of a scary sickness.

Take a step back and see whether the actual situation you’re living in is the problem or is it purely a mindset issue. A prisoner doesn’t need better affirmations to start a business, instead, a prisoner needs to break out of prison first.

Maybe you’ve been blaming your poor mindset this whole time, but it’s actually something external that’s preventing your growth.

The events that happen to you may not your fault in a cause and effect sense of the word. But how you react to those events IS your fault. Alex Becker says you’re responsible if your loved one got in a car crash, and that mentality works very well because it keeps you feeling in control. But you’re not really in control on whether a freak accident occurred, but you ARE responsible on how you react to everything.

If you want to start a business but are a prisoner, maybe you break out, maybe you ride out your time. If you sit back and say, “Well, I’ll ride out my time and the silver lining is that I can get a lot of reading done in prison with no distractions from the outside world!”

But the silver lining to things is blinding.

You could say the silver lining to genocide in Rwanda is that it keeps the population down and quality of life for everyone else improves. “Ahh, what a wonderful world to see the beauty in all things!” But do you really want that silver lining?

While the silver lining exists in everything, you should consider trying to create better situations in the world where it’s not quite such a stretch to find a silver lining.

Meaning that you can see the silver lining with your great mindset, AND alter the external to better fix that by preventing warlords of ever getting into power to start something like genocide.

What thing did you not progress in because you thought it was a mindset issue, but you needed to be in a totally different environment to let that mindset prosper?

What silver lining did you see in a terrible event that was so positive that it made you feel like you didn’t need to truly fix or prevent the problem from happening?