A PHILOSOPHY OF “CASH-VALUE”
I have seen talented people squander promising careers, audiences, and prospects because they practiced bad habits in work and life. I have also watched people who appeared unexceptional attain notable success due to good habits.
But this book is about neither.
The Miracle Habits is about more than cultivating sanctioned notions of success or acceptance. It is not about being 10% happier, “good enough,” or reorganizing your sock drawer. Rather, as the title implies, this book is about fostering miracles. Not as a once-in-a-lifetime experience but as a recurring and natural part of life. My definition of a miracle is simple: a fortuitous event or circumstance that exceeds all conventional expectation.
I believe in storming heaven—that is, in reaching unapologetically for the peak of what you want. Much of today’s therapeutic and self-help talk of “purpose,” “gratitude,” and “meaning” is, in my view, misleading. Such terms are placeholders for the avoidance of naming what we really want in life. True purpose and meaning are found in personal power—in cultivated providence, epic performance, and ideal self-expression. Whatever your aims, needs, or wishes, The Miracle Habits demonstrates how to invite extraordinary (and ethical) possibilities into your life.
Be sure that you’re in the right place: we are embarking on a path of attainment. As I’ve written in my previous book The Miracle Club, I believe that the contemporary seeker suffers from personal division and, ultimately, disappointment if he or she avoids the principle of accomplishment. I refuse to call aspirational wishes by terms like “identifications” or “attachments.” These labels emerge from ancient and culturally conditioned religious traditions (all religions are culturally conditioned), which I consider poorly suited to much of modern life. Impulses of self-development and creativity dwell innately in your personhood. Honoring and ethically framing those impulses should be the aim of spirituality. By ethics I mean doing nothing to deny the self-development of another person that you seek for yourself. The friction you experience when deterred from creative impulses should be noticed—and heeded.
In early 2020, I heard from Colton Holmes of the Front Range area of Colorado.* Colton and his wife had recently left a spiritual community. Their former community offered them a familiar paradigm, which they came to question. He wrote me:
We recently moved out of an ashram after eight years. I have struggled to let go of the ashram mentality that external things like money, retirement, and all of worldly existence essentially are only distractions and obstacles on a spiritual path. I personally feel, as I believe you do, that many of the old spiritual traditions need to take a good look at themselves. These traditional institutions teach in a way that supports the institutions themselves more than develops the students at a certain point.
I am in sympathy with that statement. And I take it further. I believe that you as a creative being—one said in spiritual traditions from Hermeticism to Judaism to be made in the image of the creator—should expect miracles in your life. Although we face myriad complexities, and we experience multiple laws and forces, I believe that the song of self-expression, in its fullest and most varied sense, exists and yearns to spring forth from every person’s psyche. Practices that curb that song produce inner conflict and frustration. I have witnessed too many colleagues on the spiritual path experience a terrible inner division between conditioned notions of non-attachment versus pursuit of their artistic, domestic, or financial wishes. Moreover, my experience, both personally and communally, is that the individual cannot be truly happy without singing the song of the self—without pursuing his or her deepest wishes, however defined. In matters of self-development, I see no division between depth and height, or spiritual and worldly to use general terms. The manner of your pursuit matters more than the nature of your pursuit. But it is vital that the individual find a path that most fully expresses the self, as he or she defines it.
Some spiritual traditions teach that we lack self-perspective and are too divided within to speak of possessing or understanding authentic wishes. Experience has taught me to dissent from that judgment. I believe that at certain sensitive moments, we, as individuals, possess higher perspective—not ultimate but higher. We are not the victims of a cosmic joke that deters us from knowing ourselves and what we truly wish for. Released from peer pressure and conditioning, we are more mature than we know.
The pushback against aspiration in both spiritual and literary culture can produce ironic and almost humorous results. In 2019, The New York Times op-ed page published an essay by a Princeton University writing instructor arguing against the “desire for greatness” and extoling the value of being “good enough.” This is an increasingly popular theme among social critics, including bestselling columnist David Brooks. How did the “good enough” essay land on that coveted page? The author won first-place in an essay-writing contest sponsored by the Brooklyn Public Library. This was noted without irony.
Can we really become what we wish? Only you can answer that question for yourself. But that we have been given a song I have no doubt. You cannot express it, and you cannot apply the creative faculties of your mind, however, until you come to terms with what you truly want. Do you know what you want in life? I believe the first chapter, Unwavering Focus, will help you respond meaningfully to that question. It is central to our journey in this book.
I contend that you can take this journey and develop miracles based on how you live moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, day-by-day. Put another way, based on your habits. The subtitle of this book is, The Secret of Turning Your Moments Into Miracles. At the instant that I was standing on a Brooklyn street corner pondering what to use as the subtitle to this book, I saw this sticker on a lamppost:
Call it happenstance, causation, or synchronicity—I’m undecided, but I elected to accept it as a cue, which brings me to another point. For all my talk of success, broadly defined, this is not a secular self-help book. I take a spiritual view of life. When I say spiritual I mean simply extra-physical. I believe that our lives are composed not only of cognition and motor function but that our psyches also possess causative or selective abilities, which surpass ordinary sensory observation. You can use the term New Thought, magick, positive thinking, ESP, or whatever label you like, but I am convinced from personal experience, from generations of testimony, and from the extraordinary questions emergent from fields including neuroplasticity, quantum mechanics, placebo studies, mind-body medicine, and psychical research that our minds interplay with the surrounding world in a manner that displays extra-physical effect on outcome. I have explored that thesis in several books, including One Simple Idea, The Miracle Club, and Magician of the Beautiful, and I will not fully retread it here. As with those books, I write not as a guru, teacher, or clinician—but only as a seeker. In that vein, my ideas are philosophical and metaphysical.
This book deals with hands-on daily behaviors that in my observation and experience cultivate the extraordinary. We occupy realms that can be considered transcendent, timeless, and spiritual—and at the same time workaday, linear, and habitual. The difference among these is artifice. But we do experience them differently. Likewise, all realms of life and all roles we play within them make varied and valid demands on us. To neglect the so-called spiritual for the material, or vice versa, is a formula for lopsidedness and, ultimately, dissatisfaction. I do not ask you to choose among these worlds. I do not myself. The question of selecting a main approach to life, or choosing one world over another, arose in a 2020 letter from a reader. I quote from it in full since the writer highlighted this issue skillfully:
I’ll do my best to be succinct here.
I listened to your two podcasts with Duncan Trussell and I was electrified … perhaps literally, ha … by the ideas and concepts.
I’ve since listened to several of your books and those of Neville Goddard, Napoleon Hill, Joseph Murphy and others.*
I’ve been on some form of spiritual path for many years now, but when I found you and these other great teachers, something profound clicked into place for me.
You have expressed your admiration for Neville Goddard time and time again. I think it wouldn’t be out of line to say that you hold him at the top of your esteemed guide/teacher list. As do I.
My most burning question (although I have many) is this: How have you come to reconcile the rather blatant contrasts between Neville and other authors (I’m specifically thinking of Hill) when it comes to the fruition of our desires?
Neville seemed so often to give personal and third party examples of individuals simply thinking of a desire (using his methods), only to have that idea manifested. For example: someone thinking/meditating on a house they want, and then receiving it. Or someone wanting a scarf, and then receiving it.
Hill, and you I would say, are more in favor of a method that COMBINES desire with using all available methods of action (meditation, gratitude, love, forgiveness, etc.). This being the most effective and honorable way to achieve one’s desires/goals.
I love Neville’s way of expressing these ideas so simply and beautifully. I too am able to listen to his teachings over and over again. I’m just really interested in how you’ve come to reconcile the differences between all of these great teachers.
Again, I am so grateful to have found you and your work.
Your friend,
Bryan Nolte
Green River, Wyoming
I responded this way:
Hi Bryan, That’s a perfect framing of the issue, and of my point of view, and I really respect that question. I’ve wrestled with it myself. I believe that Neville imparts an ultimate truth, which is that intelligence is the final arbiter of reality. But I also believe that in our daily lives there exist many interventions. We experience many laws and forces, and our experience of the world is very “real” within the ordinary sphere of perception. Quantum physics is real, the space between atoms is real—but I nonetheless experience mass when I stub my toe or move an object. So, I feel that the individual must honor what is required in the world of Caesar. Actualization may accompany action in ways that don’t require choosing, say, between Neville and a more positivist approach. In any case, we must fulfill the world’s expectations—I have to go and buy a ticket, as he did, when going to the theater. Things do arrive through established channels. I hope this helps. Stay in touch.
Best, Mitch
If this book is any kind of adjunct to The Miracle Club, and I hope it is, it can be considered a full-bodied exploration of the daily actions that work in concert with the metaphysical. I plan to write a future book focused strictly on the powers of imagination and the ultimate energies of thought, at least as we experience them. But for now my wish is to fulfill a call issued by William James during a symposium at UC Berkeley in 1898 when he urged American philosophers to break with the scholastic traditions of the old world and devise philosophies of “cash-value, in terms of particular experience.” The emphasis is his, and the phrase forms the title of this chapter. James’s call for a philosophy of direct application to life electrified me. I believe that the steps in this book will bring you concrete, measurable benefits in conduct, effectiveness, and experience in the near-term and require only a sincere wish to practice them.
In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “imitation is suicide.” I want to honor that principle, as well. In an era of countless life-coaches minting themselves on YouTube and so on the last thing I want to offer you is fare that could be found elsewhere. Not that I won’t say things that others have said, and sometimes better—but I promise you that everything I write about is something I have lived and that I recommend to you from experience. There are no platitudes or untested principles in this book. I likewise encourage you to engage the book from your own lived standards: test and verify everything that I say. Throw out what is useless to you. Make these habits and practices your own.
The thirteen “Miracle Habits” are:
HABIT 1: UNWAVERING FOCUS
Holding to one core aim—with absolute passion and singularity—will revolutionize your life. This is life’s toughest but most magical bargain. It requires hard decisions and great labor. The payoff is extraordinary.
HABIT 2: TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
Everything is one—including the “inner” and “outer” you. Allow yourself the freedom to radically alter one aspect of life and everything changes. Create a total environment. With no one’s rules but your own.
HABIT 3: RADICAL SELF-RESPONSIBILITY
No single habit is more ennobling and charismatic than keeping your word and honoring your commitments—all of them. You must also ask for what you want in return. Value the enacting of solutions over the deciphering of causes.
HABIT 4: SOLIDARITY
I despise cheap paeans to “service.” The most unreliable people I know pay lip service to such bromides. Giving and service must be done with muscularity. Identify and act in cases where your help is authentically needed. Help means time, money, and loyalty.
Gossip, rumor, and frivolous opining do more to degrade you than you can imagine. If you spend just one hour desisting from them you will stand more fully erect.
HABIT 6: GET AWAY FROM CRUEL PEOPLE
Hostile actors, gaslighters, and cruel people abound. They have no place in your life under any circumstances. Burn rotting bridges and watch new ones emerge beneath your
feet.
HABIT 7: CHOOSE YOUR COMRADES
Once you’ve expunged cruelty you must select friends and colleagues who fortify you. Every successful person you witness is an amalgamation of people. Choose your comrades wisely.
HABIT 8: SPEND FOR POWER
Your habits of spending and saving are a core determinant of your power in the world. Spend money only on things that enhance your capacity to produce more of it.
HABIT 9: NEVER DITHER
Acting quickly and with agency is a mark of success. Time dissipates energy. Speed harnesses it. Do not divide your energies or dwell on frivolous projects.
Strengthening yourself physically is a necessity. If you neglect strength and wellness now it will take all of your energy to correct these deficits later.
HABIT 11: OPPOSITION IS FRIENDSHIP
Failures, setbacks, and even shunning are painful—but they are the only channels of authentic growth. Without them we would remain emotional and intellectual children.
HABIT 12: HARD-WON FAITH
Faith means realizing there are universal principles at your back. Faith can be flexed and strengthened. Make your own rules on the spiritual path.
HABIT 13: RULE IN HELL
You will experience far greater satisfaction by honoring your natural authority rather than conforming in order to win security or prestige. Respectability impedes growth.
I believe these habits will not only improve your life but, in time, will transform it. The first changes may arrive quickly, especially if one of these practices disrupts a negative pattern or shatters a calcified or unproductive behavior. Or the changes may be long term in nature. For most readers, I venture that you will experience immediate—and possibly dramatic—benefits, after which things may plateau. But if you maintain these habits in a disciplined and steady way you will reach a point where myriad barriers lift and multiple doors open. You will experience a range of remarkable opportunities.
The reason for sudden change, plateau, and then long-term benefit can be found in the tension of inspiration versus discipline. Discipline matters more than inspiration. Inspiration can hit at propitious moments and make a great difference. But inspiration arrives inconsistently. Discipline, by contrast, is a consistent if less dramatic ensurer of desired, though not always predictable or expected, outcomes. That’s why these steps are called habits. They must be constant. The results, when they come, may appear extraordinary. But there exists a rootwork beneath them.
We are taught to view habits in the negative, like smoking, craving caffeine, or engaging in compulsive behavior. Colloquially, we see habits as automatic and incessant. Behavioral scientists do not fully agree on how habits are formed, but brain scans reveal that repeat behaviors forge new neural pathways, which physically reinforce habits. That suggests that significant, positive habits can be cultivated. But behaviorists warn that we can rarely sustain the requisite motivation to form desirable new habits. This book is for people who want to do rare things. If you possess a passionately felt aim, the first and foundational habit of the thirteen in this book, and if you desire it with absolute hunger, that itself will summon the retinue of supporting behaviors. I have watched this occur in others and myself.
I am inspired by something that Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) wrote about the nature of habits. In Hill’s 1945 book The Master Key to Riches, written eight years after Think and Grow Rich, he described what he called “Cosmic Habit Force.” I consider it one of the success writer’s best insights. Cosmic Habit Force is the cycle of positive repeat behaviors by which nature maintains itself, such as the rotation of the planets, the ebb and flow of tides, and the cycle of seasons. Humans are the only beings that possess the ability to choose their habits, thereby playing a self-selecting role in creation. If you select habits that build your generative forces, you enter into natural, reproductive alignment with laws that enable nature and all of life. This is not dissimilar to concepts found within Taoism and Transcendentalism.
Once you function within this cosmic flow—toward continual growth and expansion—cycles of generativity appear at your back. Hence, you are never truly without resources. With cultivation of the right habits, which means reproductive behaviors and intentions—and barring some equally powerful counter-intervention—you are delivered to the destination you seek like a twig carried downstream in a river. But unlike the twig, the sentient being possesses the possibility of focus, attention, and selection. Choose intelligently—no easy thing—and you enter into this stream.
Hill identifies failure as a necessary course-correction within the scheme of Cosmic Habit Force, a point explored in the chapter on Opposition. Failure is unquestionably painful. But, if allowed to, failure gainfully breaks up stymied, unsuccessful thought patterns, plans, behaviors, and relationships. What replaces them? The actions to which this book is dedicated.
I realize that any self-help book is, by its nature, general. People face myriad challenges at various points in life, which no single text can encompass. As I write these words the nation is facing the early crisis of coronavirus. The applicability of some of what I recommend may be affected by your health; your status as a parent, spouse, or caregiver; your employment or immediate financial needs; and your geography. I am not untouched by diffuse needs and obligations. I am the divorced parent of two adolescent sons, and grew up without parental financial support. For years I worked in corporate publishing, which later on accommodated my work as a writer, but not always.
You may discover the need to reform or alter what I write to fit your current situation. I try, wherever pos sible, to reflect that consideration. At the same time, I make every step as workable as possible. These habits are radical but more accessible then may first appear. Indeed, part of my wish is to shake up settled thinking about what is possible. I also believe that striving for self-betterment is, in itself, transformative. In that vein, I give the final word of this introduction to poet Ezra Pound from his Canto 81: “But to have done instead of not doing/This is not vanity.”
* Real names and locales appear with permission throughout this book. I discourage stories of “miracles” from untraceable or anonymous sources in some New Thought and inspirational literature. Truth requires transparency.
* If these names are unfamiliar to you, you’ll be learning about them in the chapters ahead.