What to do about snapbacks…

There is one part of my earlier writing I wish I could remove or recant. It is what I had to say about snap-backs. So many readers have latched on to the idea of this phenomenon and are now using it to characterise their whole lives, telling a new story of woe.  People often write to tell me of the snap-backs they have been having, listing every unwanted event as an incidence of this phenomenon.

Let me make this clear: a snap-back is not simply a misfortune. It is not ‘things going wrong again’. It is not magic ‘not working’. It is not the ordinary misfortune of something merely turning out differently to the way that was wanted.

A snap-back is a perfect manifestation followed rapidly by the loss or cancelling of that manifestation.

But the way to deal with both snap-backs and ordinary misfortune is the same.

Refuse to acknowledge any event as bad, as disastrous, or as a snap-back. In fact, obliterate the words snap-back, disaster, misfortune, and failure from your vocabulary!

If you can learn to refuse to see any event as truly bad, you’ll become more successful than you can believe.

In Becoming Magic, I talked of things turning bad if you don’t get the preparations right.

I was wrong.

Now I realise there is no such thing. Things cannot go disastrously wrong, not ever.

For example:

Remember when I told you about the time I took an Aston for a test drive and how it left me humiliated?
Well, it was that shameful event that led me to the ‘magic of thinking small’, something so incredibly valuable that I now make it part of my ‘manifesto’.

Remember how much I deemed moving to London a huge mistake?
Well, without London I wouldn’t have met Mike.

Remember that poverty led me to depression and despair?
Well, without that poverty I might never have discovered magic.

I could list dozens of events like this, and if you think about it, you can too. Look back at your life. Notice the way that events follow events. Some are good, some bad, some indifferent. Which actions led to which outcomes? Can you always tell? You can’t, can you? It’s impossible to see the end result of any particular action, event, or situation because the chain of events never stops. We never can see the final outcome of any given action, event, or situation because such a thing doesn’t exist.

For a long time, I stressed about the fact that I could only see the value in an experience after the fact. Why couldn’t I see the good in a ‘bad’ situation at the time. It seemed so unfair.

And then it dawned on me.

They are all good things. There are no bad experiences.

There are only good experiences and stepping stones to something greater.

Something you weren’t thrilled with may have happened today, but something great might happen tomorrow as a direct result. This means you can choose to see almost any event as leading to something good.

Things don’t go ‘wrong’.

Things always, always turn out for the best.

The odds are stacked in your favour.

So don’t ask me what to do about snap-backs. Because there is no such thing.