The Secret

Hey, this is Leo from Actualized.org, and in this video we’re going to talk about The Secret.

Let’s talk about the secret. By the secret, I’m talking about the movie The Secret. This is a personal development movie, really The Secret is, if we just give away the punchline, the law of attraction. The law of attraction is The Secret.

You can find this movie floating around on the internet somewhere. It’ been really popular in the last five or ten years. I think it’s been popular because it’s somewhat controversial. I already have a video up there that’s pretty popular about the law of attraction, where I talk about what it is. I bring it down to Earth.

I actually want to make some comments about The Secret itself, because some people will watch that movie and will walk away misled or confused, or with some sort of questions, and I wanted to address some of those. Especially because I’ve studied so much personal development stuff, and I’ve worked a lot with the law of attraction in the last year.

The Misleads

I have some ideas about where The Secret is misleading you. Let’s talk about that. I actually, to prepare for this video — most videos I just shoot on the fly — but this one, I actually sat down and rewatched The Secret. I haven’t watched it for maybe two or three years, so I kind of remembered it, but I wanted to sit down and watch it and break it down point by point, so that I was going exactly based off what they were saying, and not misinterpreting what was being said in the actual language of the movie.

First of all, when I watched that movie, I wanted to come in there and actually when I sat down to watch it it was interesting. I said to myself “Well, The Secret”. I kind of had a bit of a negative feeling about The Secret, and I wanted to start criticizing it. I started to watch the movie and try to pick it apart, point by point.

I was saying “Well, this is wrong here, this is wrong here, that’s not quite right. This is misleading.” While I did do that, eventually, by the time I got to the end of the movie the message of the movie, the overall message of it was actually so powerful that I couldn’t even criticize it.

To myself, I had to say “Well, that’s true.” The overall gist of the movie is completely true, and this is what people need to know. While I think that is true, I think the law of attraction in and of itself is an amazing, very powerful tool to advance your life, to advance your career, to advance your relationships, to advance your personal development, I think the way in which The Secret gave it to you is not the best way to apply it.

My eyes literally watered up with tears when I was watching some of the scenes in The Secret, because I connected them with how I used the law of attraction in my own life, and I thought “Damn, that’s really powerful. It can actually work like that.”

I think also, some of the metaphysics behind The Secret, and some of the marketing that’s layered on top of the concept of the law of attraction that comes with The Secret, that marketing is a little bit geared towards the mainstream. It can definitely be misleading.

I know I watched The Secret three years ago, and after watching it — I mean, it can make you feel good, it can inspire you, but it doesn’t actually give you the techniques and the how to of how to apply it. It tends to be like a motivational, inspirational thing. From that, I see that most people fall through on it, and don’t actually start to use the law of attraction in their life.

I’m much more concerned about how do you actually apply the law of attraction rather than some of the airy-fairy stuff that goes around with it, and just getting you pumped up for a few hours after watching the video. Although that can be nice too.

I think ultimately, I have nothing really bad to say about The Secret, but I will criticize it on a couple of technical points. Let’s get in that. These are some of the things I saw in The Secret that I perceived as being misleading. At least they can be, unless you’re very educated about how this works, and you’ve worked with the law of attraction before.

If you’re totally new to the law of attraction, and you just watch it, I think you’ll get misled by the following points. Let’s break into that.

Forces Out Of This World

Point number one is that there’s a suggestion — it’s not quite explicitly suggested, but there’s a suggestion, implication, that there are paranormal forces at work, that make the secret manifest, that make the secret work. That somehow there are thought waves, blasting through the universe.

That when you think a thought, somehow a wave comes out of your head and it hits some object, and then that object gets attracted to you magnetically. That’s not how the law of attraction works at all. To take away that from The Secret would be do be greatly misled.

The law of attraction which actually — let me state that for those of you who aren’t very familiar with it — the law of attraction simply states that whatever you think about, you will get more of in your life, whether that’s negative or positive. If you’re thinking about something positive all the time, you’re going to tend to get those positive things. If you’re thinking about negative things all the time, you’re going to tend to attract those negative things, not repel them.

When you’re worrying, when you’re constantly worrying about the problems in your life, what you’re actually doing is attracting more of those problems and keeping them in your life. The solution to that is to start visualising, start thinking about all the stuff you want to create.

I think that that message is a very powerful message, very true, and this can totally transform your life if you start to live and act in line with it. This is not going to happen by some sort of paranormal psychic force.

Simple Mechanics

This is going to happen by very ordinary, plain mechanical laws. There’s nothing really sexy about the law of attraction. It’s not some “woo” forces that’s coming out of your head, and pulling something toward you. It’s just a mechanical law.

Think about it like this. To explain this properly, think about how does anything get accomplished in your life. Really think about this. How does anything come into your life? You’ve got this body, that’s all you’ve really got to control. You’ve got this mind, that’s controlling this body, and literally, your mind is like the puppet master controlling this body.

You can move your arm up, arm down, hands, feet, move your body, twist around, look in different places. Realistically, that’s the only way you interact with the world, mechanically, through your body. That’s enough. You don’t need any psychic forces or special quantum energy, or anything like that. None of that bullshit. All you need is your hands and your feet, literally.

If you’re going to visualise a million dollars for yourself, and you want to go out there and get that million dollars, fine. That will totally work. Realize that you’re the one that’s coming out there and getting it, ultimately. It’s just going to be a long process.

To get a million dollars, realistically, you’re going to have to start a business, maybe climb the corporate ladder, invest in something, manage your money well, have multiple jobs or create multiple projects. That’s how you create a million dollars. When you visualise a million dollars, that will lead you towards the million dollars by taking all those actions.

What’s happening there? It’s your fingers. Your fingers are typing on the keyboard to create that business plan. Your eyes are looking around the world and looking for people to talk to about it. Your mouth is moving, words and sounds are coming out and affecting other people, who will then pay you the money that you’re looking for.

Your feet will actually walk you into the office building where you’re going to receive your check. This is how it’s happening mechanically. Mechanical, ordinary, physical, Newtonian laws. There’s nothing crazy going on here, no paranormal forces. At least nothing that’s been scientifically proven.

Hidden From The Everyman

The next point is that there’s this implication right off the bat with The Secret, just even by the title, but right in the beginning, in the intro, is that they really suggest the secret has been hidden from people, from ordinary people, for a long time and that somehow millionaires and billionaires — there’s this elite class of people in the world that somehow know the secret and they’ve been holding it back from the little guy.

They’re trying to oppress the little guy. It’s like this struggle between the bigwigs and the little guy, and the masses don’t have this knowledge of the secret. That’s total nonsense. No one’s been holding back the secret from you. In fact, it’s been publicly available in books and through various religions for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It’s all out there.

The trick is not that somebody is withholding this information from you, it’s that you’re withholding it from yourself. You’re not believing in the power of visualisation. You’re not believing in the power of what positive thinking can get you. You’re not buying into the fact that this worrying that you’re doing all the time, it’s actually attracting more of the bad stuff into your life.

You’re not buying into that. It takes time to really get your mind to start thinking along the line of the secret. It did for me, and I study this stuff incessantly. I can only guess how it would affect someone who hears it for the first time. It takes a while to get introduced to this idea and to accept it.

Most people, their egos won’t let them accept it, or they’re such a victim in life that they don’t want to accept the fact that they’re actually responsible for a lot of the problems they’re creating. It’s easier to blame other people.

In fact, The Secret kind of perpetuates that. It’s blaming someone, like the bigwigs, for holding back the secret. No one’s been holding it back from you. Let’s get that out of the way.

Quantum Physics

The next point is quantum physics. There are a couple of quantum physicists on The Secret, talking about stuff, and there’s this whole theory of quantum mind. Some of the stuff that’s been going on in quantum mechanics — which is now a pretty old field, it’s basically over a hundred years old — but there’s these notions that the secret has been well proven scientifically.

The law of attraction has been proven scientifically by quantum physics in some way. This is complete nonsense. It hasn’t been proven at all. In fact, there’s been a lot of speculation about whether quantum effects are going on in the mind. The leading consensus from scientists is that there are no quantum effects going on in the mind.

This is a philosophical mistreatment of the notion of quantum mechanics. We’re talking about very different scales here. You mind operates on the scale of cells. You’ve got neurons. Those are very large, big objects, compared to what quantum mechanics talk about. Quantum mechanics talk about not even atoms, but subatomic particles within the atom — quarks and stuff.

The leading consensus is that your brain doesn’t function because of quantum effects. It’s made up of quanta, everything in the world is made up of quanta, just like everything in the world is made out of atoms, but that doesn’t really mean anything.

That doesn’t mean you’re using the quantum properties of those, or atomic properties to solve a problem in your life. I’m thinking about, and I’m talking, but I’m not using quantum effects to do it. In the same way I’m not using nuclear forces in my mind to do it, even though my mind is held together by nuclear forces.

What are nuclear forces? Those are forces between atoms. Yes, my mind is composed of atoms, which are held together by nuclear forces, but to say I’m using nuclear forces to speak to you is silly. It’s kind of a pop cultural broscience-y type of idea. There’s really no hard evidence for quantum effects in the brain.

In fact, from all the research I’ve read on this stuff, they say at the temperature of the brain, which is almost a hundred degrees, any kind of residual quantum effects that could have been going on, are totally negligible. The chaos and the temperature of the brain will basically nullify any of those quantum effects.

This is still groundbreaking research, but to say that it’s been proven scientifically is nonsense. There’s no quantum connection here. You don’t need a quantum connection. The fact that you even try to find a quantum connection is silly. Why do you need one?

Mechanical laws — like I said, your hands and arms moving, your feet moving, your mouth talking, your eyes blinking — that’s all you really need, mechanical laws. You don’t need to go and get all crazy on it.

I think there’s a tendency to want to go into quantum mechanics and quantum physics, because it sounds very official. It sounds like “Oh well, a quantum physicist said it, so it must be real. It must be true.”

There’s no need to do that. Quantum physicists don’t need to tell you that if you think about the things you want, you’ll tend to get those things, and if you think about bad things, you’ll tend to get those too. It doesn’t happen on the level of quantum mechanics. That’s on the level of psychology. A psychologist is a better person to ask about that than a quantum physicist.

The Focus On Material Things

The next point I will criticize The Secret on is the focus on material things. I understand why they do this. I do this in my videos sometimes too. If I’m talking about something and I want to bring up an example, I’ll say “Money, business, career, relationship, physical appearance, losing some weight”.

Those are easy examples to use, people can relate to them very easily. The Secret is very focused on using the law of attraction, and it’s talking about how you can use the law of attraction to manifest a car, to manifest a vacation house, to manifest a trip to Hawaii, to manifest a bicycle, to manifest something tangible in your life.

This is actually the worst way to use the law of attraction. That’s not how I use the law of attraction at all. You don’t want to be attracting physical things to you. It’s easy to talk about these things, but I use the law of attraction every single day, and I use it to work on myself. What I want to attract to myself is more confidence.

I want to attract more discipline, a harder work ethic, being more charismatic. I want to attract more energy to go to the gym, to workout, to do all the work I have to do. I want to attract better reading skills. I want to attract better speaking skills. I want to attract inner things, things inside you, intangibles.

That’s so much more powerful than attracting tangibles, because if you attract the intangibles and you work on that — like I say, you want to learn to control your mind and your own psychology — then everything else will come to you.

You don’t need to dream for a million dollars. Dream for yourself to become someone who thinks like a millionaire, and you’ll get millions of dollars. I go more direct. I go to me, the cause of it, the agent.

Plus, what’s going to be nice about that is that once I build up the skills, those skills will spill over to other areas of my life. If I’m trying to attract more energy, more physical energy, that’s not only going to help me at the gym and get me a nicer body, but it’s also going to help me in my relationship, it’s going to help me have great sex, and it’s going to help me work harder in my business.

It will affect all those things. A little bit too much focus on material things, I would say, in The Secret.

Rearranging The Universe

The next point I’m going to make is that they really — they have this quote that says “The universe will rearrange itself for you, based on your thoughts”. This is also, I feel, misleading. That’s not going to happen. I don’t care how long you sit there, and how much you think about having a million dollars, the universe is not going to rearrange itself for you.

What’s going to happen is that if you just sit and think about that stuff, then it won’t happen. If you go out and follow up and take action, then it potentially could happen. The action taking component is important. To somehow say that “Well, it’s out of my hands. I just visualised it so it’s out of my hands now. The million dollars are somehow magically, luckily going to show up, because I’ve been thinking about it.”

That’s a bastardization of how the law of attraction works. Something could come your way, but that’s not how you want to live your life, with this wishful thinking, prayer kind of mentality. Don’t pray for things, pray for yourself to be better, to acquire those things. You’re going to acquire everything yourself. It’s not going to magically come to you from the universe. Nothing’s going to rearrange itself for you, to your liking. That’s nonsense.

Do You Believe In Magic?

The next point is — there’s this scene, very vividly they show a boy who wants to buy a new bicycle, and he keeps thinking about this bicycle, and drawing pictures of it and stuff, and then he doesn’t get it. Then, one day he walks out and realizes and sees his grandfather bought it for him. There it is, sitting in the front lawn, this bicycle.

A scene like that, it’s also misleading. The problem there is that it’s pushing you towards this idea that you should expect things to just magically appear for you. It’s the idea of synchronicity — you think about somebody, and then all of a sudden that person shows up. You’re thinking about a new car, and bam — all of a sudden it’s there.

Again, it’s that magical, wishful thinking, prayer type of mentality that I don’t like to encourage. Instead, go out there and work for that bicycle. Visualise the bicycle — nothing wrong with that. Want the bicycle. Don’t worry why you don’t have a bicycle.

But the way you’re going to get that bicycle is by moving your hands and your feet, and ultimately going out there and buying it. The way you’re going to buy it is by earning the money. You’re going to earn the money by going to a job. There’s going to be a very non-mystical explanation for how the bicycle actually landed at your doorstep. It’s not going to be by luck.

Effortless And Natural

The last point, I would say, is that they say the process should be easy and effortless, and that you should always be feeling very good. As soon as you’re not feeling good, you’re not in alignment with what you’re going after.

Let’s say you want a million dollars. You should be feeling good about that million dollars. If for some reason it’s feeling effortful and difficult, then you’re not doing it right. You have to force your mood.

The point here is that if you’re really a grounded person, and you’re a very solid executor in life, you’re very hard working, and you know you’re totally on your life’s purpose, and you do something that’s very important for you and the world, something that’s very meaningful to you — if you’re going that, you’re still going to face a lot of hardship, a lot of struggle.

It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be effortless. To set that kind of expectation is actually to create failure. Yes, you should resonate with the goal you want. You should actually want the million dollars. It shouldn’t be just some sort of goal you’re lukewarm about. You should actually want it. Imagine it, get yourself emotionally involved with that goal.

Also, realize it’s going to take work to get there. Sometimes it’ll be effortless, sometimes it’ll feel nice and be easy because you’re on track with your life purpose and your goals. That feels nice. But a lot of times it’s just going to be mundane, brute force work.

That’s the point I’m going to end on. I really was thinking about “Is there a real secret?”. Is there a real secret to personal development? Is there a real secret to life? I think if I was to say what my secret is, after studying hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal development material, hundreds of books, all this stuff, and trying a lot of this stuff myself and on my clients, I would say the real secret is discipline.

Discipline your mind. That’s the real secret to success and happiness in life, a disciplined mind. This idea’s not new. This idea goes back to the ancient mystics. This idea goes back to Buddha. This idea goes back to people like Lao Tzu, and ancient hindi texts, and ancient Roman and Greek philosophy.

Ultimately, the ancients had it right. You need to discipline your mind. You need to master your mind. You need to understand your psychology, not just logically, but also practically. You need to live that.

When you do, the rest of it will take care of itself. The fact is, you can’t even do the law of attraction properly, the techniques of it. I actually have a lot of techniques I use, and I didn’t get to cover them here because it’s just too much. I cover them in other videos.

Ultimately, you need incredible discipline to actually use the law of attraction. This is the thing The Secret misleads us on the most. They have this thing: “Well, just some wishful thinking, some visualisations”. And they say it’s going to be easy and effortless.

Actually, to properly apply the law of attraction takes incredible discipline, incredible control of your mind, ridiculous discipline. When I do the law of attraction, I do it religiously, like a religious zealot. I’m not a religious person, but I do this religiously. Every single morning, I do my law of attraction work, for half an hour.

I do it very religiously, because I know how powerful it is, and that it is one of the most powerful tools to get what you want in your life. It’s not easy. It’s not effortless. No way — if it was easy and effortless, everyone would have what they want. It’s going to be hard and tough, and there are things you still don’t know about how to really use the law of attraction. For that, you’ll just have to check out some of my other videos.

Wrap Up

This is it. This is what I have to say about The Secret. I’m signing off. Go ahead and post me your comments down below. Of course, like this and share this. If you liked it, click the like button for me.

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