There is an entire industry built around the (false) premise that if your life is in the crapper, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You just aren’t trying hard enough, you don’t have the willpower it takes. You simply aren’t attracting positive energy into your life.

Books on the power of attraction and manifesting your dreams fill the personal development/self-help isle at bookstores and libraries. Self-help gurus have made fortunes telling you how to erase your tapes, design your dreams, and create your destiny.

In a second level iteration, the positive thought programming has filtered into the world of multi-level marketing, an industry weighted toward attracting women (mostly) with the patronizing promise that they can make six figures or more if they just put their mind to it and stay positive.

I once bought into that multi-level, positive power, attract your dream, and live the life pitch, in what seems like another lifetime. It lasted about three months for me, until I heard the motto T.D.T.D, too dumb to doubt. Just do everything your upline associate tells you without question and you too can be driving a new car, wearing a mink coat, and earning six figures a year.

The lie at the core of manifesting your success/dream from nothing but willpower and grit, is that if you fail, you simply didn’t try hard enough. It’s all your fault.

If the single mother, going to school, burning the midnight oil to pass her tests and taking care of her children every day, fails in a multi-level business that requires her to be a sole entrepreneur and keep a team of downline associates motivated in order to increase her income, she just wasn’t trying hard enough.

Or the woman who lives in an urban neighborhood where the median income is below poverty level and she doesn’t know a single soul who can spend one dollar on miracle make-up, miracle diets, magical healing oils or overpriced clothing that WOPs (women of privilege) wear to run errands, she wasn’t aspiring high enough.

Or the woman trapped in an abusive relationship, whose neanderthal husband does everything in his power to see her fail (details not necessary) wan’t owning her own power.

The truth is life is a crap fest, shit happens and chaos abounds. And just because really bad shit happens to you once, doesn’t mean it won’t happen again—and it sure as sugar doesn’t mean you somehow attracted it. I know. I lost a step son and a future son-in-law in two separate car accidents six months apart. Having received that 3 a.m. call every parent dreads once, and then again, that I’m somehow immune to the tragedy repeating itself.

The truth is, we don’t have control over everything. We can direct our lives, we can conduct our behavior, we can work really hard and we can succeed, but if we don’t it’s not necessarily because we weren’t trying hard enough—or that we’re unwittingly asking for it.

The trick in success, I think, is to know what you want, to take action that moves you towards your goal, and avoid behaviors and actions that don’t support your outcome whenever you can. Then hope you catch the right breaks.

There are certainly self-development tools and techniques that help, and accentuating the positive can’t hurt. Changing the way you perceive a challenge can change the way you approach it and improve your chance of success. Self-fulfilled prophesy really does work to an extent, because it seems that the brain doesn’t distinguish between reality and imagination or visualization.

Tell yourself something is true often enough, and you’ll begin acting as though it is. Act as though it is, and chances are it will become true. Of course all this success manifestation is limited by the laws of nature, physics and odds. If you are 5’6″ and well beyond the age of growing, you cannot think yourself into being 6’2″, and odds are a miraculous medical procedure isn’t going to do it either.

But, what about magic? What about witchcraft and spell casting? Is it all a hoax, or maybe a lot of coincidence we just want to believe is magic? Well, think about this: everything that exists in this world outside of nature began as nothing more than a thought.  From the wheel, to the device your are reading this on that allows me to type words and you to read them 100, or 1,000 or 10,000 miles alway in a matter of seconds was once just a thought. And would have once, most definitely, been thought of as magic.

Creating something from nothing more than a thought must mean our thoughts are, or at least can be, incredibly powerful when backed up by intention and action. So think positive, work toward your goals and dreams, recognize any limitations, ask for help when you need it and can get it, and don’t blame yourself for setbacks beyond your control.

In other words, go out and give it your best shot—make magic happen.