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A Law More Useful than the Law of Attraction
One of the strangest things about my adolescence was how much effort I would put into something only to see it end up being mediocre or start promisingly but then fizzle into nothing or just totally fail.
It was insanely frustrating because I had been taught that if you work hard and think positively you could achieve whatever you wanted. I saw little to no fruits of my labor. In fact, the main fruit was bitterness. I would see other people excel around me and I assumed they were working hard too. So why were they successful but I failed?
Maybe it’s because they weren’t working so hard.
In the book, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy outlines what he referred to as, “the law of reversed effort.”
The law is explained in two parts. Firstly, the law of reversed effort states that the more importance and therefore the more effort we put into a task, the more likely we are to fail at that task.
Secondly, when our imagination and our desires are in conflict, our imagination always wins because that is the predominant thought in our subconscious. But when we notice this, we begin to use effort to defeat our imagination but it never wins because effort implies an obstacle.
