How Your Thoughts Determine Your Life

He changed the subject in the way some men change trains: not because they’ve arrived, but because they can’t bear the upholstery any longer.

The previous carriage had been crowded with jabbering podcasts and professional outrage, all elbows and opinions, and he had sat there dutifully, watching the numbers climb like ivy on a bombed building.

Popularity, like cholesterol, is rarely a sign of health. So he stood up, brushed the crisps from his trousers, and wandered into a quieter compartment marked, in a slightly smudged hand,

Your thoughts.

This is not, at first glance, a promising destination. “Mindfulness” has been so thoroughly monetised that even the cushions now cost extra. The shelves groan with books promising to rewire your soul in ten easy steps, seminars sell enlightenment by the seat, and everyone you meet has either found themselves or lost interest.

And yet, annoyingly, there is something in it. A burr under the saddle of common sense.

The idea is as old as vanity: your life looks the way your head sounds. Napoleon Hill, poking around the pockets of plutocrats in the 1920s, decided that success had a smell and that it came, chiefly, from thinking about it a great deal.

Earl Nightingale wrapped the same thought in a ribbon and called it The Strangest Secret. The secret, alas, is not strange. It is merely uncomfortable.

You become what you think about most of the time. Which is a bit like saying you become what you eat, obvious, dull, and, when applied honestly, faintly terrifying.

We like to believe that our lives are written by weather, genetics, or a mildly hostile universe with a sense of humour. Karma is a convenient alibi.

So is fate. Both let us off the hook. But there is a vulgar, persistent suspicion that the hook is in our own hand.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got, said Henry Ford, a man who made a fortune out of repetition and then had the good manners to warn us about it.

Einstein is said to have defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This is unfair to the genuinely insane, but accurate about the rest of us.

The mechanism, we are told, is simple. Thoughts become words. Words become actions. Actions become habits. Habits become character. Character becomes destiny. It sounds like the sort of thing that should be embroidered on a cushion, and yet it is stubbornly hard to argue with.

If you spend your days rehearsing disaster, you will become fluent in it. If you practise optimism, you may not get rich, but you will at least be less surprised by being happy.

The mind, we are assured, is the most powerful computer in the world. This is flattering to the mind and deeply insulting to computers. The mind is more like a badly organised attic: full of priceless things, broken furniture, and the faint smell of bats.

Most of what goes on up there happens without us. We are aware of a thin trickle of thought and call it consciousness, while the real river rushes underground, rearranging the furniture when we’re not looking.

So how do you think about thinking? With difficulty. You can keep a journal, read something that doesn’t agree with you, feed your brain something other than headlines, take different routes to familiar places, learn a new skill, or, most radical of all…..

….turn off the television.

Exercise helps. It reminds the body that it has been invited to this party. New movements lay down new neural pathways, like footpaths in a field that eventually become roads.

There is a fashionable insistence on “feeling good now.” This is both wise and faintly ridiculous. You only ever feel anything now; the rest is memory and rehearsal. Still, feelings are a useful barometer. They tell you whether your thoughts are taking you somewhere you actually want to live.

Mantras can help, though shouting “I feel terrific!” when you clearly don’t has the charm of a man insisting he is dry while standing in a lake. “Fake it till you make it” is not advice so much as a description of civilisation.

Are thoughts real? They exist only where you can see them, like dreams or tax returns. No one else can hear them, which is probably for the best. They are electrical whispers, chemical rumours. And yet they run the place. When the conscious and the subconscious agree, things happen with an eerie, unearned ease. When they don’t, you get that familiar sensation of rowing very hard in the wrong direction.

“If you want things in your life to change, you have to change things in your life,” says Kevin Trudeau which is either blindingly obvious or deeply subversive, depending on how attached you are to your excuses. Set goals that are big enough to excite you and small enough to be believed. Don’t put a time limit on them; time has a way of taking that personally.

He changed the subject, then, not because the old one was wrong, but because it was noisy. This one is quieter. It doesn’t promise miracles.

It suggests, merely, that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, which is either a tautology or a small, portable revolution.

The sort you can carry in your head.