Making a Living From What You Love: The State in Which You Move Without Concentrating

Introduction: People Who Move Toward What They Love Are Not Concentrating On It

The phrase making a living from what you love is received in two ways. One takes it as a sweet fantasy. The other takes it as a goal to be attracted through concentrated wishing. Both miss what matters. People genuinely moving toward what they love are not concentrating on it. They notice they are already moving that way.

Methodologies for monetising what you love have been discussed at length. What this article places is the question one step before them: why a person moves without strain when they are moving toward a genuine wish. It is also a truth that must never be lost sight of in the course of criticising manifestation.

Here is the conclusion first. What you genuinely want moves you without being concentrated upon. Heading toward something you can be absorbed in requires no summoning of resolve. Told to stop, you cannot stop. You lose track of time. That natural forward movement, with the force taken out of it, is the surest mark of a genuine wish. Concentration is needed only where the thing is not genuinely wanted. This article defends that unstrained movement, with the findings of psychology alongside it.

Why a Genuine Wish Proceeds Without Strain

We have examined how concentration spins without traction. Here, though, something must be made explicit. What deserved cutting was the forcing into place, by concentration, of a borrowed wish. A person moving naturally toward a genuine wish is an entirely different thing — not to be denied but defended.

Why does a genuine wish proceed without strain? The self-determination theory of the psychologists Deci and Ryan supplies the answer [Deci & Ryan, 1985]. A genuine wish aligns with your deep values. It therefore requires no fuel of external pressure, because energy from within generates the movement itself. Research shows that goals concordant with the self are sustained more readily and pursued without forcing [Sheldon & Elliot, 1999]. The movement is unstrained because the wish is in harmony with the person.

The decisive difference from manifestation stands out here. Manifestation demanded strain: concentrate strongly, believe with force. It demanded strain because the wishes it handled were borrowed and out of harmony with the person. A wish out of harmony cannot be held in place except by force. Which is to say that the requirement of strain was itself the mark of a wish that was not genuine. A genuine wish has no need to be believed in with force in the first place.

Instead of Concentrating, Head Toward

The spinning stops when a person stops concentrating and starts heading toward. Heading toward means re-seating the object of attention onto a wish of your own and beginning to move, in small and actual ways, toward it.

Since you are acting on reality yourself, the question of whether a mechanism exists by which concentration moves things ceases to matter. Your own action does act on reality. And once you begin heading toward, a healthy engagement with reality returns. While concentrating, a person handled reality only inside their head. Heading toward, they make actual contact: they attempt, and it goes well, or it does not. Reality is no longer an object to be moved by concentration but a counterpart to engage with and be answered by. That living engagement with reality was the most valuable thing concentration had been taking away.

The important point about this shift is that it is the exact opposite of concentrating harder. Stopping the spin requires no increase in the power of concentration. It requires letting go of concentration altogether and turning the force toward a small step in reality. Concentration spins force idly inside; heading toward earths that force in reality. The same energy changes direction, from idling to advancing.

▸ The accumulation of small actions that supports this heading toward is developed in how to become the person you want to be.

Unstrained Is Not the Same as Doing Nothing

A supplement is needed here, so that unstrained is not confused with idle. People moving toward a genuine wish sweat, take pains, and face difficulty. Unstrained does not mean avoiding that real labour.

What is unstrained is this: holding the wish, and convincing yourself of it, takes no force. The wish is already there, so no force is needed to maintain it. All of the person’s force therefore goes into getting over the difficulties of reality. Someone carrying a borrowed wish must, before reaching any difficulty, pour force continually into maintaining the wish itself. The starting positions differ. Because no force is wasted at the entrance, the whole of it can be turned on the difficulty that actually matters. Making a living from what you love does not describe a life without labour. It describes a state in which labour goes, without hesitation, to the place it should go.

This Is Not “It Failed Because of You”

One suspicion deserves a direct answer. Does the test — strain means it was borrowed — amount to a retrospective explanation, telling those whose wishes did not arrive that the wish was never genuinely theirs? If so, it would share its structure with the self-blame loop of manifestation, where belief was insufficient.

The two differ decisively. Genuineness here is not judged retrospectively by the outcome of arrival or non-arrival. It is discerned in advance, by marks that can be confirmed in relation to action before any concentration begins. Would you still want it against opposition? Does your gaze extend past your own share of the gain? Is it bound to your self-image? Does small action produce traction? Where manifestation’s insufficient belief forecloses doubt and routes a person into self-blame, this discernment invites them to confirm in action whether this is genuinely what they want to do. One closes the door to disproof; the other opens it. That difference separates them.

Conclusion: The Wish You Need Not Concentrate On Is the One You Genuinely Want

A genuine wish proceeds without strain because it aligns with your deep values and moves on energy from within. Manifestation demanded strain because the wishes it handled were borrowed and out of harmony. The requirement of strain was itself the mark that the wish was not genuine. Head toward instead of concentrating, and because no force is wasted at the entrance, the whole of it goes to the difficulty that matters.

If you notice yourself concentrating on something with force, that is the signal to stop and ask again: if this were genuinely wanted, surely it would not take this much force. The wish that needs no concentration is the one you genuinely want. Receive, as your next step, the overall design for meeting that wish. How this unstrained movement — the line worth defending — sits within manifestation as a whole is set out in what the law of attraction actually is.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model” (1999) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3)
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation” (2000) American Psychologist, 55(1)