Picture the world from a distance: the madness, the wars and conflicts, down to the small clever ways earthlings deceive and damage themselves. If you don’t belong in that picture — if what you want instead is a dash of magic, a higher purpose and a network of people who back your biggest dreams — you’re not alone.
Let’s pull the veil back and take a look at something brighter. Because societal norms vibrate at a noisy, low frequency, and more people are noticing. That’s why they end up here, looking for alternative routes to success that they can actually put into daily use.
New here? Start with The Reality Shift Template — my free 3-step framework for filtering the noise and creating on purpose.
What does success look like to you, and how do you define it?
Before the 22 methods, we need to deal with what success actually means to you.
Most people want to be happy, and happiness looks different to everyone. Some find it in small things — waking up to a hot meal. For others it’s making time for a hobby, playing an instrument, painting landscapes. Sometimes it’s attached to bigger goals: a specific experience, a child, a business milestone.
Those are external. But most people are also born with, or develop, traits that set them apart. Those traits determine a great deal of who we are — interests, taste in food and music, behaviour, the skills we carry around in our personal tool belt. Usually without us noticing.
The difficulty, in the current state of the world, is that it’s hard for talented people to nurture those qualities and put them to use along conventional paths.
Everybody has the right to dream. Our innermost desires expand the mind and help us work out which path is ours. I believe everyone can get there. The question is how.
Too many people block the road before they’ve set off. Our present is usually dictated by past events. But your past defines your present only as far as you let it.
Two things worth noting:
- Your past dictates what you believe is real or possible. If it’s blocking you, it can be changed.
- If today’s educational and employment models don’t fit your life, there are better routes to what you want.
Today’s methods for success may not be for you
Being “successful” now tends to mean a specialised education finishing with a degree on the wall where visitors can see it. Once the system has tested and validated you, you’re an accepted member of society. Simple enough as a concept. It isn’t working out.
Success also gets credited to having the right — meaning a lot of — money, or the right clothes. Riding low and slow in an expensive car, mixing with the right people.
That’s a misunderstanding in full bloom. Plenty of people think they’re successful because they have those things, and there’s nothing wrong with having them. The problem starts when they make you believe:
- That because you have money and stuff, THAT is what your success is. You can wear a suit, hold a fistful of dollars and still be an arsehole.
- That you need the title, the money or the status before society will accept you as someone who made it.
To be clear: luxury cars and money in the bank are not bad. Most people would like some of it.
But ask yourself why you want it. What is “success” anyway? If you’re happy, content and fulfilled — have you not already succeeded?
22 uncommon methods to reach success
I’m writing for people like me, who define success and fulfilment differently from the standard issue. The world looks a bit different to us, and so does the way we treat our own bodies, minds and spirits.
The point isn’t to aim at wealth and luxury. It’s to notice that the traditional route there no longer applies to everyone.
What follows is a set of uncommon methods, ways of thinking and practical routines that together will change the shape of your life. Learn them, live by them, and you’ll reach a higher level of self-mastery.
1. Purify your drinking water, and make it a habit
Most people don’t drink enough water. It leaves the mind foggy and the body dehydrated. Purifying your drinking water is a simple job and worth doing if you want to perform properly. Part of how I do it involves putting my hands on the container and holding positive thoughts about the water. Sounds absurd?
Go and look into it and decide for yourself. Nature charges spring water with its own energy, and by the time it reaches us most of that has gone. There’s a documentary about water worth watching, and the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto. I’ll say plainly that Emoto’s experiments are rejected by mainstream science and were never replicated under controlled conditions. I still find the underlying idea worth sitting with. You may not, and you should know where it stands before you decide.
2. Acknowledge and rewrite limiting thoughts and beliefs
Be honest with yourself. If you lie to yourself about your mental blocks, fears and limiting beliefs, the only person you’re hurting is you. All of it has to come out and go on the table in front of you before you can sort through it. There are methods for that, and the payoff is enormous. Have a look at Your Hidden Mind and start the reprogramming.
3. Know that your thoughts affect your reality
You’ll have heard of The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. The book and the film are well-meaning and the message reaches people, but the focus is slightly off. The subject is the law of attraction: what you think, becomes. Your mind works like a broadcast antenna. What are you transmitting?
Here’s a well-known interview with Gregg Braden.
4. Rewire the neurons in your brain
We’re driven by what we’ve already learned, which means we’re carrying a lot of unwanted thoughts, response patterns, fears and limits.
And the useful part: those patterns are physically changeable. Self-reflection brings the limiting beliefs into view, which lets you change how you hold them — and the brain reorganises around the new version. It’s one thing to understand your emotional state. It’s better to understand the machinery underneath it.
Dr. Joe Dispenza is the one to follow on this. Learn more in this talk.
5. Picture the person you want to be, then gradually become them
You may dream of being someone else. Someone who does something worth doing. Put that new version of you in front of you. Then start behaving like them. Dress like them. Feel like them. One day you’ll notice you ARE them.
Too fluffy? No. Look at step 4 and keep going. Start drawing if it helps — put your future on paper first.
6. Get to know the deeper part of yourself
One problem with ordinary schooling is that almost nothing in it teaches you to get in touch with your emotions, your passions or your actual skills. How would you learn to trust your intuition or reach your higher self? There are methods, and using them surfaces abilities you didn’t know you had.
Finding those makes choosing a direction far easier, because you’re finally matching the destination to who you actually are.
7. Use the force of the mind — fantasise about what’s coming
If you already know what you’re working toward, visualise it in as much detail and with as much emotion as you can manage. Hold onto the butterfly feeling. Law of attraction again. Like step five, but instead of a specific character, think in terms of places, circumstances and situations.
8. Rearrange your relationships so they serve you
Re-evaluating your relationships can feel cold. But the friends and network you have now are not necessarily the people who will help you get where you’re going. You’ll have heard that you’re the average of the five people you spend most time with. So who are your five?
Remember the character from step five? Do any of your current friends, family or colleagues share that person’s values? Start connecting with people who sharpen your focus rather than blunt it.
9. Find a form of meditation that suits you
Scientists now know that meditation physically shapes the brain. Making it routine lets you rewire and activate parts of the brain you rarely use. There are many ways to do it and you’ll probably need to try a few. It reduces stress and settles the body. You can also use it to reinforce outcomes and visualise what you’re building. The three main routes are sitting in silence, using music, or following a guided session.
If you’re starting from scratch, here’s how to meditate in silence — three methods, no sound, no guided voice.
10. Filter all input, organic or otherwise
This one matters. Don’t skip it. If you want to lift yourself out of the noise, start filtering what goes in. First, stop making your body and brain fight through the rubbish most people eat. Common eating habits are not necessarily healthy ones. Bad food leaves you sluggish, groggy, unmotivated and moody, and in that state getting through a single day is work — never mind a whole life. Fix the diet and your available energy changes completely.
Food isn’t the only thing to filter. Information matters just as much.
Stop watching the news. It’s hypnotic, it runs on fear, and it has never once helped anyone reach a goal. Everything you feed your mind becomes part of you. All of it carries an energy signature, and you’re packing that signature into your head. Make sure what you’re taking in is worth having.
11. Decide that everything you consume should be energising
Take step 10 further. Decide you want as much nourishing energy in your body and mind as you can get. Eat food with as few toxins in it as possible. Look at what humans are eating now and it’s not hard to see why so many of us are unwell — the connection between industrial diets and chronic disease is one of the better-evidenced things in modern health, even where the details are still argued over. Tell yourself you don’t want chemicals in your food or your system. Eating “organic”, as they call it, immediately lowers your odds of eating rubbish.
As I said before, do the same with people. “Consume” healthy friends, family, colleagues, beautiful places and information worth having. You don’t have to cut old friends off — you can phase them out gradually and kindly if they’re not good for you.
12. Use your horoscope as a karmic vantage point
This is ancient knowledge. At the exact moment and exact place of your birth, the sky had a particular alignment. Reading this week’s magazine horoscope will do nothing for you. I mean a PERSONAL reading from a real astrologer. Even if you don’t accept the mechanics, it’s worth exploring as a lens on what to focus on and what to expect. There’s more on where this material comes from in what the ancients understood.
13. Keep the energy body in motion
I mentioned you can double your available energy. Changing your routine a little makes that achievable. Adding an activity that works the energy body — yoga, stretching, Tai chi, Qigong — produces a genuine jump in capacity. These Eastern methods were designed to activate not just muscle but the chi in the body, and learning to do that is worth the effort.
Qigong is powerful for this, but even light stretching morning and evening will reduce stress, loosen tight muscles and get the blood moving.
14. Keep your strength up with light physical activity
Whether or not you accept that we’re energy beings, we also have a physical body. This animated piece of meat loves movement, and it thrives like a well-watered plant when it gets some. Motion generates energy for body and mind both.
I’ve read a lot of books on personal growth and successful habits. The recurring theme is the writer’s decision to build a morning routine, usually meditation plus something physical.
A morning routine sets the day going. It produces energy and a decent state of mind, and that state of mind pays out across everything else. Make this part more physical than the yoga in step 13 — I’d recommend fast walks in nature, which does its own work on you.
15. Live with the confidence that this life is one of many
You may have a theme guiding this particular incarnation.
The concept may be new to you. But once you accept this isn’t your only life, a lot of the harder questions start answering themselves, and the fear of death moves into the background. Living with the knowledge that this life has a purpose brings real clarity about who you are and what you’re here for.
Here’s the well-known story of Cameron, the five-year-old who remembered a past life, along with two others.
16. Know that you are energy, and part of all of it
The difference between this and the other steps is seeing not only that you’re an energy being, but that the particular concentration of energy that is you is part of everything else.
It’s why intuitive people connect the way they do. Why mothers sense something wrong with their children. Why some dogs know their owner is coming home at an unusual hour. Since you’re connected to everything, be more careful about the thoughts and images you send out — and more open to sensing people, places and situations.
17. Be aware that cosmic influences may affect your body and mind
Expanding your sense of what you are, and understanding your cosmic connection, matters. The sun and moon plausibly have some effect on us.
Two honest caveats, because I’d rather be right than dramatic.
The full-moon effect on mood and behaviour is folklore. Hospitals and police forces believe it, but large studies have repeatedly failed to find it. Solar activity is a more open question, and solar storms do measurably affect the planet’s magnetic field.
And the Schumann resonance has not been rising. I used to write that it was. The fundamental sits at roughly 7.83 Hz and has done since it was first measured in the 1960s. What varies is amplitude, and the higher frequencies people point at are harmonics that were in the original measurements all along. I’ve set out the whole correction in what the Schumann data actually shows. The felt effect is untested rather than disproven — which is not the same as nothing.
You can watch the live data yourself on the HeartMath Institute monitors.
18. Accept that wealth is neither shameful nor bad
Why say this? “Of course it isn’t,” some people will say. Sure. But people say one thing while their subconscious says another, and that builds an invisible block between them and the life they claim to want.
I’m not joking. I had this problem for years, and I know exactly where it came from — a messed-up childhood where at times we barely scraped by. Having too much or too little can both leave you ashamed. If you hold money to be ego-driven or somehow tainted, you’ll struggle to reach the life you say you’re after.
Whatever the rich and famous have made you feel about money has nothing to do with you. Live well and prosper without letting your ego drive.
19. Practise being thankful, daily, to rewire the brain
For a lot of people a daily thank-you ritual sounds like a cutesy new-age thing to do when life is already going well.
It isn’t. There’s more to gratitude than saying the words because you feel you ought to. People who make a genuine effort to recognise what they’ve done, and how, build new pathways doing it. A shift starts.
Gratitude is a feeling as much as a practice. There’s a difference between saying thank you to the universe and actually FEELING grateful. Let yourself feel it, and let it ripple out.
20. Become aware of your surroundings so they can lift you
I’ve talked about being careful what you feed your body and mind, and about who you spend your time with.
Where you physically put yourself matters just as much. You’d feel a different charge reflecting on your goals in a Japanese botanical garden than sitting on a bin in a dark alley, no?
Energy clusters, and it gets stronger in certain places. Like attracts like. If you’re someone who responds to quiet and to landscape, you’ll be drawn to the garden — and while you’re there you’ll attract people who are the same. Put yourself somewhere with a bad atmosphere and you’ll get a different result, and different company. Pay attention to the outer reality you wrap yourself in.
Here’s a film with some epic landscapes from a trip to Iceland, where I talk about exactly this.
21. Give your excellent mind the chance to be mentored
I don’t think this is you — but some people have an ego flying high enough that there’s no room for anyone telling them anything. Nothing wrong with it, except that it keeps them stuck.
A mentor or coach makes a disproportionate difference. Most of the names you’d think of, historical and current, had one at some point.
You can get there by changing your network, as in step 8. You can self-mentor by reading properly — usually the books nobody assigned you at school. And you can go looking for people who already have the qualities and the life you want.
22. Script your own future, in writing or out loud
This is about restating your goals to yourself. Same mechanics as the law of attraction — a way of manifesting the life you’re after.
Writing it out is another way of telling your brain what you’re about to experience. If writing isn’t your thing, keep an audio diary instead and dictate it. Every phone in your pocket already has the app for it.
One last thing, and it isn’t the least important
For everything ahead of you: your dreams and goals are yours to manifest, and nobody else gets a vote.
Keep your dreams to yourself.
You know by now that minds are strong. Our brains broadcast, and not every signal out there is clean or well-meaning. The moment you start talking loudly and proudly about what you’re building, the people around you begin affecting the outcome. On a metaphysical level their energy touches the result — and more practically, their reaction changes how you hear yourself.
That is not always a good thing. One comment from a friend, or from a dream-killer, is enough to let the air out of something you’ve spent months filling.
Some final words for those who don’t fit the system
Not everyone conforms to the limiting norms of society. There will always be people who stand apart and cut their own path, because there will always be souls arriving here with a different configuration.
There’s nothing wrong with those people. They’ve simply declined to join the madness without a fight.
Live by these 22 and you’ll have a far better chance of reaching a state worth being in — a sharp mind, some creativity, and enough pride to keep moving toward the life you actually want.
Ready to stop drifting and start creating on purpose?
The Reality Shift Template is my free 3-step framework — filter the noise, get clear on who you actually are, and consciously create what comes next. Drop your email and I’ll send it over.