Create your own reality.

 That mission has supplied a steady stream of self-help gurus and books—from Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich in 1937, to more recent initiatives like the documentaries The Secret and What the Bleep!?. The experts in these movies eagerly embrace quantum physics to “prove” that we create our own realities. But most people have found a substantial gap between what happens at the level of elementary particles—where energy indeed can turn into matter—and everyday life. In other words: Despite the success of The Secret and What the Bleep!? and the fact that millions of people have read Napoleon Hill (Business Week listed Think and Grow Rich as the sixth-best-selling business book ever, 70 years after publication), surprisingly few people created the reality they wanted.

So why would I write this story about a businessman from England who wrote a book about how to create your own reality?

Because Trevor Blake did it.

Blake grew up in very poor circumstances in Wales and literally and actively thought himself from a young boy with very limited opportunities into a financially independent multi-millionaire. That track record sets him very much apart from the authors of the self-help books and the smooth-talking coaches in the documentaries that surprisingly often are not so successful themselves. It seems Blake has discovered a missing piece in the “create your own reality” theory.

At the basic level, Blake’s story is not special at all. We all create our own realities. Science has proven that our thoughts produce tiny electrical charges in our brain. Our thoughts are energy and as we know from Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, energy and matter are related, interchangeable forms of the same thing. So the energy of a thought has the potential to become its material equivalent, to become an experience in your life. 

But here’s the problem. Our thinking, our messaging, is not very consistent. We dream about the beautiful things we are going to do and then we (sub)consciously sabotage ourselves with other thoughts that we will never be able to succeed or that we don’t deserve to experience our dreams.And in that quagmire—Trevor Blake speaks about “quicksand”—of thoughts, we don’t make much progress at all. That’s why few people—despite all the self-help books—experience themselves as able to make their wishes come true.

Trevor Blake claims that his three small steps—also the title of his book—will make everyone effective in creating the reality he or she wants. He discovered his methodology as a young boy in a library in Wales where he was escaping classmates who were bullying him because he was an “immigrant” from England. While he sat in the reading room hiding from his mates, he started to read biographies. He read about Madam C.J. Walker, the first black woman millionaire in the U.S., about Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie and many others. He discovered the same elements in these successful lives. “After I’d read a dozen or so of those biographies I started to see the same mental behavior. I noticed that they had found a way to protect their mentality,” says Blake over lunch in Seattle on a rainy day in early 2013.

He had a powerful teacher at home, too. When he was 8, his mother was diagnosed with cancer, and she was told she only had six months to live. Audrey told her doctor, “Sorry, that’s not long enough. I’m not dying before my children are grown up.” She fought for 14 years. Says Blake: “My mother taught me that my thoughts and reactions are my own responsibility, and that only I can decide how to feel about ­anything. ‘No one can make you feel sad or angry,’ she would say.”

“My thoughts and reactions are my own responsibility, and only I can decide how I feel about anything.” 

Protect your mentality. That’s Blake’s Step No. 1 and his critical contribution to the “create your own reality” movement. “I don’t think it is possible to change your thinking at all,” he says. “That’s why positive thinking doesn’t work. It is impossible to control your thoughts because they happen at the speed of light. But I would say that the one thing you do have control over is how you then react to the thought you just had. You can create in your mind a better set of outcomes; you can imagine something more positive. You do control your response to a negative thought.”

So, Blake tells me, when Henry Ford wanted to make a car for the common man, but he had already lost two companies and and his investors were telling him that he was not capable of being a business man, Ford went to his farmhouse and sat in his rocking chair. And Madam Walker went into the woods when her life was falling apart; she sat under a tree, and there she got the idea that made her successful. They protected themselves from the negativity around them and developed an unshakeable belief that they could control their lives, says Blake. And that kept their creation alive.

“As a boy, I started copying their behavior and I got an almost immediate benefit from it,” he says. During his walks to school he started practicing affirmations about his schoolwork and about the bullying. “I changed thoughts of expecting to fail to ones anticipating success.” Then at school, he noticed that his schoolwork improved and the bullying stopped. “Was it luck? I have repeated that behavior so many times that I now know. I changed my own life pattern the very moment I changed my own thought process,” says Blake.

“That’s why I wanted to write a book for people who feel trapped in the quicksand. That’s how I felt. And I know this helped me get out. Once you get out, you can do almost anything. It is a recipe for life,” he says.

 “You cannot become self-made if the decisions you make are based on opinions of other people of you. You are not going to get anywhere. When you have a dream it is usually much higher than your current capability. And the people around you ­always see you as you are. You have to go back to the individual you were born to be. You have to find that pioneering spirit again. That has to be the first step. When you have a great idea, and the first person you meet is saying, ‘Are you crazy?’ you have to be able to control your own mentality. Not just protecting yourself from negativity but also building confidence in your intuition, your individualism.” 

Blake argues it is essential to “control” the input you receive. He doesn’t watch any news programs; he doesn’t listen to the news on the radio; he doesn’t read newspapers or magazines—except for The Intelligent Optimist—but he does read autobiographies of self-made men and women. “You are not happy in your job and you get the idea to start your own company. Then you watch television and there is bad news about the economy. The next item is about a billionaire going to jail because of fraud. If you let all that stuff in, your enthusiasm vanishes completely. You have a dream. You must try to give that dream some fuel. And don’t keep putting things in your brain that extinguish that dream. That’s the mistake people keep making: They want to change their lives, but they don’t change their thought processes.”

The waitress brings fish, but there are no chips for the Englishman. Blake did sell an online pharmaceutical company he founded for more than $100 million, yet my lunch companion is still very much an ordinary guy. “Talking about these things is a bit surreal to me. I would have never dared to speak about this in my pub in England because I would never be bought a pint of beer again as long as I live.” That doesn’t mean he lacks confidence in his method to create the reality he desires. Would a beggar in the streets of Calcutta benefit from his simple steps, I ask? He pauses a moment and then responds in his usual fast and self-confident way: “I have never tried it with someone begging in Calcutta. I cannot
say there is a benchmark above which it will work. All I can say is that anyone—­regardless of circumstances—who has listened to me and has implemented these practices has had a transformative life. ­However, you’ve got to do the work and, although they are simple steps, they are not easy.”

It is time for Step No. 2. Blake ­considers this the most difficult step, because this step should provide the launching pad for great ideas. “People will say: ‘I don’t have any good ideas,” he says. But ideas don’t come easily in busy lives with too many distractions. Blake noted that all the celebrities in the autobiographies he read had ways to take themselves away from the madding crowds, and they would put themselves in a place every day where they could have a great idea. He calls it “taking quiet time.” He doesn’t want to call it meditation. 

“I find meditation very difficult. There are all these techniques that need to be taught. Quiet time is purely a system of problem solving,” he says. But it seems a matter of definition. His quiet time means doing nothing, sitting in a chair with eyes closed, 20 minutes, preferable at the beginning of every day. “This practice allows your brain to work undistracted, and when it works undistracted it works at the speed of light. That’s very powerful. Amazing things happen when you allow your brain to work at its full speed. If you don’t do that and get out of bed and turn on the television, your brain has to slow down to interpret what we see as television. That’s where ideas get lost. I get more emails about step two than anything else and they all say, I get these fantastic ideas…where are they coming from? Why didn’t I have those before?” Still, Blake concludes that most people are not able to continue their “quiet time” practice. It is so easy to get out of bed and do this other thing, and then the moment is lost, he says. 

The final step is perhaps the most magical one. Once the great idea has been received, the challenge is to turn it into reality. It is about taking something we have never had or done and creating a sense of knowing about its attainment. That’s no blood, sweat and tears for Trevor Blake. “I never ask how something can be achieved. I set the target, the intention. Then I relax and let life fill in the details.” 

He carefully explains the difference between goals and intentions: “An intention is a goal but with all doubt about its attainment removed. With goals, we push energy toward the object. With intentions we pull or attract the object to us because there’s a sense of knowing.” There is no need for initial small steps, because there’s no doubt about getting what is desired.

Blake spends 10 minutes every day to set new intentions and rewrite old ones. “Words trigger images; images trigger thoughts; thoughts become reality,” he says. We must consider words magic bullets that carry the power to create or to destroy,” he adds. He uses all his senses to strengthen the image. He smells the salt of the ocean in front of his new home; he hears the pelicans above the waves…and then he did live in that house. “It has always worked bigger and better than I anticipated. This is the way I built my businesses,” he says. When the intention is set, things start to happen, he explains. You meet certain people, you receive certain information and step by step, the elements of your dream fall into place.

Intentions should always be in the past tense, as if they already became reality. They should be positive. “You don’t want to lose weight,” says Blake. “Instead you say, ‘People have complimented me on my great figure.’” (He quotes Mother Theresa who said: “I’m not against war; I’m for peace.”) And, finally, intentions are personal. “Intentions cannot be used to interfere with other lives,” he says.

It is still raining in Seattle when we finish our lunch. Rain is also part of a reality that can change. The sun always comes back. How we influence the change remains a mysterious process. But I sense that Trevor Blake’s map of reclaiming your mentality, taking quiet time and setting clear intentions indeed supports success in life. The discipline and the structure of his map already provide something that is missing in most lives: focus. Or as Blake would say: “It is never the wrong time to take control of your life.”