The Secret

As usual, Val has said something that got me thinking. She has that way about her. Last week Sam and I made a spontaneous trek across 63rd to share a bottle of wine with our favorite neighbors and we starting talking about the best selling book “The Secret.” Val believes in the power of setting intentions. I do too, but there is a place somewhere in there where I think it feels silly.

If I say I want a red Porsche, will it cause one to miraculously appear in my drive way? I don’t think so. On the other hand, if I say I want a red Porsche, and I really do, and I remind myself everyday that I want it, doesn’t it make sense that I will start organizing my life in a way that will allow me to acquire one? Well, I think it does.

Val told us that a year or so ago she set the intention that she would be earning $40M a year from her rental properties. Now she is. She laughed, “I think I have to set the goal higher!” That makes sense to me. Val & Vern buy houses in the hood, renovate them beautifully, and lease them out to Section 8 and other tenants. They really care about their houses, their tenants, and their neighbors. Slumlords they are not. Val says she can tell a real difference in some of the blocks where they’ve purchased properties in that the neighbors seem to feel a sense of pride at having a truly well maintained property on their block. She says she’s noticed that other neighbors have begun taking better care of their properties. And because Val has never met a stranger, she’s gotten neighbors talking to each other, where before they were not.

But anyway, I digress. Val wanted to make enough to live on from her rental properties. Though I don’t know the details, I imagine that with each house Val and Vern buy, they think through the income and expense potential to decided if it will get them closer to their $40,000 a year goal. If it doesn’t fit the plan, they don’t buy the house. That’s intention in action.

I get that, yet for most of my life I have been loathe to set goals or intentions for myself. That’s not to say I haven’t gone through the motions a hundred or so times. For most of my life, I’ve had employers urging me to set goals around things I didn’t really care about. I did it, but those goals didn’t motivate me, instead they felt like a weight hanging around my shoulders. Ugh.

But there have been other goals I have cared about. When I was younger (in my 20s and early 30s) I used to make long lists of things I wanted to accomplish in my life. I would organize them into categories: trips to take, friends to spend time with, classes to take, languages to learn, weight to attain, money to earn, debts to pay, etc. Each list was several pages long. I still have those lists and they are fun to re-read, but I am not sure they actually caused me to do anything differently.

In more recent years I’ve drafted a narrative that describes the values I hold most dear in my life. I holed away in a hotel room for a day and a half to do it, and put my entire heart and soul into the effort, but I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what I came up with. Sigh.

I guess if I’m really honest with myself, I would have to say that part of the problem with goals is that I hate setting myself up for failure. In order for it to seem a worthy goal, I end up setting the bar very high. Lose 20 pounds before Christmas – and keep it off. Now there’s a new one, and also one I’ve yet to achieve, despite having set it year after year after year. I don’t even bother putting it on my list anymore. I want to weigh less, but I also realize I don’t want it badly enough to make the daily sacrifices needed to make it happen. There is a difference between wanting the end result of a goal and being willing to do the hard work of getting there.

Which brings me back to my problem with “The Secret” which contends that all that is needed is the desire and intent. If you set your heart upon your desire then magically the hard work disappears and what you imagined will appear. If that were true, I would have been a size 4 for the last 20 years.

Well, all this thinking about goals and intentions is really the result of Val’s suggestion that we start a neighborly tradition of meeting on or around July 4th each year and setting our intentions for the year – just to see what happens.

Both Sam and I sat down and wrote out our goals this morning (and I am happy to report that no where on my list is “lose weight”) We will share them with Val & Vern later today and then Val will keep them in a safe place until this time next year when we will do it again.

I have to say that the act of having this “assignment” from Val, who both Sam and I love dearly, makes it more meaningful, and as a result I am taking it more seriously than I have in a long time.

I am not going to share my goals here, but they will be in a safe place at Val’s house, and next year on the 4th of July, I’ll let you know how we did.