By Michael Masterson

One of the great fallacies in the self-help industry is the notion that you can change your life with "positive thinking."

The purveyors of positivism, starting with Napoleon Hill and including the people who now promote The Secret, contend that we all have, at our conscious disposal, the means to transform ourselves into walking, breathing success machines.

Some self-help gurus sell positive thinking because they know it is one of the most lucrative products to put in the marketplace. Change one thought and you can change your life! What better promise can you make to an underachieving, wanna-be-rich-and-successful couch potato?

And purely from a profit point of view, they are right. Positive thinking products making quick-and-easy promises account for more than a billion dollars a year in direct-mail and Internet sales. And that's just for the companies I personally know. The total number is probably multiples of that.

I am not saying all proponents of positive thinking are hucksters. Many are honest men and women who believe in the concept because they use it successfully in their own lives. They are usually people who have always been accomplished, excelling in sports or academics or business almost from the start. Their repeated successes gave them confidence that they can do just about anything. And they readily tap into that underlying feeling of confidence whenever they face a new challenge. In their hearts, they know they can succeed. So when they take on anything new, they can't help but believe they will be successful.

But what about the rest of the world? The 80 percent of the population that got C's in school and sat on the bench during ball games and had little or no success in business? What messages are buried in their hearts? 
 

By Robert Ringer

Detachment is an incredibly powerful tool that I wish I had understood much earlier in life. There are many things from which you can detach yourself, and one of the most important is the habit of judging people, actions, and circumstances as being right or wrong, good or bad.

As Deepak Chopra says in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, when you are constantly classifying, labeling, and evaluating, you "create a lot of turbulence in your internal dialogue." The more internal bickering that takes place, the less time and room (in your mind) for constructive thinking.

Worry, irrelevant thoughts, and fears only add to this internal bickering. All of these are abstracts from which you should make a conscious effort to detach yourself. Even more important is the necessity to detach yourself from needing the approval of others. When you are attached to peer approval, you tend to make bad decisions.

Then there is the pain and discomfort of your present situation. The more you struggle against the unpleasant circumstances of the moment, the more time and energy you waste. It's okay to want things to get better down the road, but don't waste time and energy wishing things were different than they are right now.