Thoughts Become Things

Thoughts Become Things

One of the first times I heard that saying that, “Thoughts Become Things,” said by this fellow named Mahatma Gandhi (I think he knew a thing or two), I was thinking huh?

Seriously, how do thoughts become things?

I mean really, if I think of an elephant, does an elephant appear in front of me?  Well no duh.  I just thought of an elephant and a pink one at that and nothing.  No pink elephants in front of me, behind me, around me, or anywhere near me.

Why would this Gandhi guy that everyone talks about say such weird things?

I guess the more important question is do you believe him?

Well as I started learning more and more about myself, success, and personal development, it became quite clear that thoughts do become things.  Unfortunately, the saying reminds me of my engineering days at the University of Illinois.

So what does engineering and thoughts becoming things have to do with one another?  Well I’m glad you asked.  Let me tell you what engineering and thoughts becoming things have to do with one another.

Nothing.  That’s what.

Nothing except that back in the day when I was doing my engineering homework, I didn’t understand a thing I was doing!  Kinda like that quote.

Lucky for me, my roommate in college was a child prodigy!  Or so I thought!

So here I am, working on my engineering homework for hours upon end without any results and around 1 am (true story here), my 16 year old college roommate who’s taking the same classes as me as a sophomore in engineering (did I mention he was only 16), comes strolling back in from a night out at the bars – yes, he had a fake ID that got him in – and then promptly sits down, half drunkenly, to do his engineering homework which I had just spent the past 5 hours slaving away at with very little progress.

Whew, that was a long sentence.

Anyway, 30 minutes later, he’s done.

Oh, and did I mention I’ve been slaving away at it sober for the past several hours with no results?  And of course, I still didn’t make any additional progress in those 30 minutes that it took him to finish.

Now I had one of two choices.

First, I could beat the heck out of him for being a smarty pants just to make myself feel better.    That thought did cross my mind.  It didn’t last very long though because I was utterly defeated already (or so I thought).

Or second, I could ask him for help.

Now you might be thinking that I should choose the second choice – that it was the obvious choice right?  Well what if I told you that all roads led to the first choice – which again, crossed my mind after I had made the second choice.

Why?

Why you ask?

Because here’s his response to my request for help, “Oh, you mean you don’t understand it?  But it’s so easy.”

SMACK.  At least that’s what I wanted to do to him.

I then proceeded to swallow my pride and ask him if he could explain it to me and help me through it.

So in his youthful nativity, he said, “Sure.”

He then proceeded to show me how he got from step 1 to the solution.  I don’t remember the exact wording or the homework question for that matter.  I do remember him saying something like, “You just take this and get this and then do this and there’s your answer.”

At which I stared at him with a blank face kind of like a funny joke going completely over my head (because his explanation did go completely over my head and I did feel like a joke).

So I asked him, “but how do you get this from this?”

O.k., to make a long story short, in his genius brain, he did about 5 steps in his head (5 steps that I required an advanced engineering calculator to figure out) and got to step 2 and then did another 4 or 5 steps in his head to get to the final answer.  Us normal folk needed to go through and write down all 10 or so steps in order to get the answer – which he just did all in his head.

Once I got those 10 steps down, I finally KINDA and not really understood it because it hadn’t really sunk in yet and at least I knew how to get the answer.

You see, Ghandi is like my 16 year old college roommate.  He kinda skipped a few steps between the thoughts and the things.  And if you haven’t been trained properly or you’re not a personal development genius, you’re kinda lost thinking that Pink Elephants will be appearing everywhere you think about them.  It’s just not the case.

So you see, that’s the thing, thoughts don’t just become things.  There’s a few steps in the middle there.  The amazing thing is that thoughts really do become things… once you know those steps in the middl

e.

This can all be explained in the believe cycle which I’ll talk about later.  For now, let me just pretend I’m a 16 year old prodigy and say, “Thoughts become things.”

And when you think about what you want… what you truly, really, desire… you can make it manifest and make it real.

Think about it.  Pun intended.