Tony Michalski's Master Key Coaching

Grab an opportunity and see where it leads!

Opportunities. They’re all around us. From jobs to friendships to learning opportunities.

What’s stopping you from taking advantage of them?

One thing that might be stopping you, as it’s something I’ve seen within myself at times as well as in some Master Key Coaching clients is this:

Sometimes — too many times! — we fear making that leap of faith.

For whatever reason, instead of jumping into the ”fray,” so to speak, we hang back, almost as if we were awaiting the “perfect shot.”

Unfortunately, perfect shots are few and far between. If ever!

Sometimes, we have to grab an opportunity, even if it’s not exactly the one we want, and run with it.

Sometimes, we have to take the “low paying” job because it MAY LEAD TO the job that we real want!

We may have to do work that we’d rather not do as it may very well BE A STEPPING STONE to the work
we will actually enjoy — and which may make for us our fortune!

We just might have to work with people who rub us the wrong way because those “friends” may CONNECT US WITH the friends that will become our lifetime business partners or employers.

Do you see what I am saying here?

Everyday there are opportunities that you can grab.

Everyday there is something that you can reach for.

It might not be the “ideal.” It may even be the barely wanted.

It’s a start, though.

And it may lead somewhere.

Haanel wrote in The Master Key System that “Life is an unfoldment, not an accretion.”

Sometimes you have to have just enough faith to take a leap, even one that you would normally not take, and allow life to unfold.

Try it. If only for a day or so. See what happens.

I can practically guarantee that you’ll be glad that you did.

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In the first Week of The Master Key System, Haanel describes what he calls the “world within” and the “world without.” What did Haanel mean by these terms?

Of course, we don’t have Haanel here as a reference. We can take the message of the book as a whole as clues to what he meant exactly, though.

The world within is one’s mind. It’s one’s thoughts. It’s one’s feelings. As Haanel wrote, it’s forces are mighty — mightier than we think.

The world without, on the other hand, Haanel described as a “reflection of the world within.”

I would make a slight change to that. I would say that the world without is or can be jaded or slanted or skewed by the world within.

The difference is small, but it is significant as we progress in our studies of this philosophy.

The world within can — and often does — alter the world without. Actually, it happens all the time. It’s part of the interplay that happens betwixt the two. It’s what I like to call the “Dance.”

There are many examples of the Dance all about us. Sociologists have been investigating it for quite some time, an example being Phillip Zimbardo‘s Stanford Prison Experiment.

Investor George Soros used Karl Popper‘s theory of “Reflexivity” to make more than a billion dollars trading currency. Popper’s reflexivity is an example of the Dance — the world within influencing the world without and vice versa.

The influence of the world without and the world within (and vice versa) is possible because, as Haanel wrote, we “live in a fathomless sea of plastic mind substance.”

I want to state here that this “plastic mind substance” is not and is not anything related to quantum theory, subatomic particles, or man’s mental influence on said particles as has been portrayed in various movies and books. Personal Development (the attainment of goals within our society) and quantum physics go together much like fish and bicycles. They don’t.

That being said, everything that we see and have and that moves us and influences us are ideas.

This world of ideas — this world in which we swim and which in turn moves us — is what Haanel meant when he wrote “plastic mind substance.” Think how often the world is changed by an idea — an idea that is brought to fruition by one’s actions and daring.

The car, the light bulb, the indoor toilet, the computer, the cellular phone: All ideas that in turn changed us and changed the world in which we “swim.”

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The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. Find it for free at www.TheFreeMasterKey.com!

Since I’ve been publishing The Master Key System and Charles F. Haanel’s Complete Master Key Course, I’ve received (and answered!) literally thousands of calls and emails about Haanel‘s philosophy of success. From speaking with so many people, I noticed that the vast majority completely miss the point of The Master Key System, thus they’re not getting results.

Most of the observations I make on these calls come from the work I’ve done with my Master Key Coaching clients.

So, what should you really be learning as you read The Master Key System that will actually make a difference in your life?

Since 2000, when I began publishing The Master Key System, I’ve observed how other people, coaches, and publishers advertise or talk about the book. The most common description is that it is the “handbook about the Law of Attraction.”

Surprisingly, I think just the opposite. While the law of attraction is discussed in The Master Key System, it’s not the book’s (or, I dare say, Haanel‘s) main talking point.

From my years of study and coaching, I’ve found five main things you should learn from this philosophy. As you now read and study the book, keep these points in mind — you’ll see the book from a totally different perspective and you’ll reap great rewards from it.

1. You will learn how to focus.
   To be able to focus is the ability to dedicate your mind (your thoughts) to one problem (or goal) for an extended period of time. By mastering this skill, you’ll far outreach most people, who flitter from one thing to the other without result.
2. You will learn how to achieve mental clarity.
   Instead of a brain and thoughts beset with “noise,” you’ll see things clearly — rationally. You will rid yourself of the “shibboleths” of your mind.
3. You will se the things in the world for what they are rather than what they appear to be.
   Instead of seeing symbols and perceptions, you will see things truly — objectively.
4. You will learn the greatest skill of all: how to THINK.
5. You will learn that the Master Key System is really about solving problems.

The Master Key System is not a “magic” book. Merely by reading it will you attain anything. You must put this philosophy into action. You must use it!

If you’re looking to learn how to “manifest,” you will not get that here. Fortunately (or unfortunately), there are plenty of “teachers” that teach that. If you want to learn how to really attain and achieve, then concentrate on discovering the items I listed here. They are the “key” that will unlock you and help you to attain all of your dreams.

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[This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005. Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html]

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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The “wealth consciousness” (or the “money consciousness,” the two will be used interchangeably in this article) is more than merely thinking that you are wealthy or that you have a “right” to be wealthy. It is a way of looking at the world and seeing opportunities, possibilities, and avenues for wealth creation.

Have you ever heard someone described as having a “mind for business”? Or that someone has the “Midas touch“?

To what are they referring?

They’re referring to that person’s ability (talent, skill) to see a way to make an activity or product or service profitable. Let’s use Bill Gates as an example.

The “secret” to Mr. Gates’ wealth is that he saw profit and a business opportunity where NO ONE ELSE saw one. At the time, the entire computer industry was focused on the hardware as the way to make money. When Gates pitched IBM on licensing his software (something which at the time was quite revolutionary) and he stipulated that he could license to other companies, IBM approved, their thinking being that you make money with the hardware and not with the few cents in the licensing fee for the software.

That is the deal that began Mr. Gates’ rise. It made him millions.

THAT is the money consciousness. Looking at a “deal” and making it a better deal.

Get it?

The same with Steve Jobs and Apple: They got many of their ideas from the Xerox PARC facility because Xerox did not see how those technologies could make them money. One (Apple) had the “money consciousness”; the other (Xerox) did not. (Although it must be said that they had and continue to have it it many other areas.)

So, it’s not a matter of gratitude nor of “putting the Law of Attraction into operation,” it’s a matter of looking at the things around you and seeing the economic possibilities with them. Develop a solution to a problem you (and perhaps others) have. See the world with new eyes and ask yourself the question “How can I make it better?” Look at the world around you like you’ve never before seen it and perceive the value in it.

Finally, take what you’ve found and make money.

You will have found the “money consciousness.”

Learn everything about the money consciousness with Charles F. Haanel’s Complete Master Key Course.

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