Everyone is governed by the same mental laws, which work 100% of the time "like gravity" — whether or not you know, believe, or agree with them. Tracy introduces them throughout the seminar; collected here.
The core laws
- Law of Control — you feel positive about yourself to the degree you feel in control of your life. High achievers have an internal locus of control. Chain: thoughts → feelings → actions → results.
- Law of Accident — the opposite; ~80% of people live by it. "Failing to plan is planning to fail" — drifting "like a ship without a rudder."
- Law of Cause and Effect — the "iron law of the universe." Every effect has a specific cause; duplicate the causes of what you want more of. Thoughts are causes, conditions are effects — and your thoughts are the only thing you fully control.
- Law of Belief — whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality. Beliefs act as filters (scotomas = blind spots). Self-limiting beliefs exist only in the mind; act as if they didn't exist and they disappear. Henry Ford: "If you believe you can do a thing or believe you cannot, you are right."
- Law of Expectations — you get not what you want but what you expect with confidence, even if based on false information. Rosenthal's teacher study: teachers told (by lottery) they were the best with the brightest students → students jumped 25–27 IQ points. Four sources of expectations: your parents', your boss's, yours of others, and — most powerful — yours of yourself.
- Law of Attraction — "you are a living magnet": you attract people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts.
- Law of Correspondence — "As within, so without": the outer world (health, relationships, wealth) mirrors the inner world. Fixing the outside while leaving the inside messy is polishing a car's exterior to make the engine run better.
- Law of Subconscious Activity — whatever you plant in the subconscious, it works to bring into reality, keeping words, actions, and body language consistent with your self-concept.
- Law of Concentration — "whatever you dwell upon grows." Dwell on what you want, not what you fear.
- Law of Substitution — the conscious mind holds only one thought at a time and abhors a vacuum: knock out a negative thought by replacing it with a positive one. The perpetual bout is fear vs. desire.
Later additions
- Law of Expression — "whatever is impressed is expressed": anything impressed into the psyche with emotion becomes part of your personality and reality. "You do not believe what you see, you see what you believe."
- Law of Reversibility — normally achievement creates the feeling; but artificially creating the feeling of already having achieved the goal triggers attraction and correspondence and draws the objective reality to you.
- Law of Practice / Habit — whatever you repeat often enough becomes habit (~21 days for a new one). ~95% of behavior is habit; "the more you do of what you're doing, the more you'll get of what you've got."
- Law of Emotion — we are 100% emotional; every decision is emotional, and the stronger emotion wins. Fear vs. desire is "the world championship bout."
- Law of Accumulation — everything counts; every great achievement is thousands of small ones. The average self-made millionaire took 20+ years — "there's no luck."
- Law of Relaxation — in mental work, effort defeats itself: "the harder you don't try, the better it works."
- Law of Superconscious Activity — see The Superconscious Mind: any thought held continuously in the conscious mind — desired or feared — must be brought into reality.
The master principle
Success begins with purposeful, systematic control of the content of your conscious mind.
Quotes
- "Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects."
- "Change your thinking and you change your life."
- "Keep your mind on what you desire and off of what you fear."