213Afterword
Afterword:Teach yourself the power of
Index negative thinking
I discovered something remarkable quite by accident
one night as I was conducting a workshop on goal achieve-
ment. I discovered the power of negative thinking. As
the people in the workshop struggled to list their goals
on a piece of paper, I ran out of patience.
“How will you get what you want if you don’t know
what it is?” I asked the room, half of which still had
empty sheets of paper and empty facial expressions.
“Okay,” I said, “Let’s put these goals away. I want to
try something different. Take out a new sheet of paper
and do this. Write down what you don’t want in your
life. List every major problem and source of discomfort
you have. All your worries. All the negative things you
can think of, even if they haven’t come into reality yet.
Even if they are just things you don’t want to happen in
the future. Take your time and be thorough.”
What I saw happen next startled me. The entire
room’s energy level picked up, and everyone in the
workshop was writing and writing and writing. It wasn’t
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