The Tap on the Shoulder

The eighth fear in the book wears the best disguise of the thirteen. It dresses as prudence: "Once I've raised, once things settle, then I'll really start."

The book calls its habitat the waiting room, and I visit it weekly. It is full of capable people, and not idle ones: productive, careful people, each holding a version of the same sentence. Once the funding lands, they say. Once the big client renews, once the market calms down, once the house move is done, once January. The real start, the committed version, the proper push, is permanently one condition away, and the condition keeps being replaced the moment it is met. What they are waiting for, underneath the specifics, is a tap on the shoulder from circumstances: some configuration of the world that will finally confirm they may begin.

You can tell the fear is in charge because the waiting looks so professional. The heads stay down, the standards stay high, the work is excellent and kept visible, and the bigger commitment is held in reserve. And the belief underneath is installed early, at school, where the next level genuinely is granted, term by term, by someone whose job is to grant it. Most of us carry that belief unexamined into decades where it has quietly stopped being true. When I finally went looking through my own record for the taps, the moments when conditions or committees pronounced me ready, I could not find a single one.

What I found were chains. The early promotion that looked, from outside, like being singled out: traced backwards, it began with unglamorous work done thoroughly when nobody senior was watching, which led to a request, which led to a visibility I had not planned, which led to the move. A CFO seat, years later: traced backwards, it began as an ordinary piece of work done properly for someone, which became a relationship, which, years on and through no design of mine, became the seat. Every link was an action completed from exactly where I stood, in conditions that never once felt ready. And the detail that matters most: the doors were never visible from more than one link away. The seat was not conceivable from the first piece of work. The chain had to be walked to be seen.

This is where the book turns, and Wattles opens the turn with a warning aimed at the reader who enjoyed the first half too much: thought without personal action is dreaming. By thought you set the direction; by action you receive. Then comes the instruction I consider the most practically valuable sentence in his original: act now, where you are, upon the people and things around you, in your present business, whatever it is. He did not mean from where you wish you were, or once conditions improve. He meant here, with this. Each fully completed action changes your position, and the new position contains openings the old one simply did not contain, openings that could not be seen from where you stood before. The person who waits to see the whole staircase waits forever, because staircases of this kind are built by the stepping.

Even my health ran the same mechanism, and it remains my clearest proof. At forty I was handed a diagnosis and a lifetime management plan, in conditions that were, by any standard, not settled. No tap was scheduled. The way out was a chain like the others: one completed action, which made the next possible, which made the next obvious, and three months later I was off medication the plan had assumed was permanent.

So the practice has two halves. First, the audit: take one good thing in your record and trace it backwards, link by link, on paper. You are teaching yourself, from your own evidence, that it was never granted and never waited for settled weather. Second, the present link: name the one action available from exactly where you stand, the one you have filed under after the raise, after the renewal, after January, and complete it fully this week. The tap on the shoulder is not coming. The eighth fear, read correctly, is the best news in the book: nothing about your next level is waiting on anything but the next filled action.

Continue reading: Two Hundred Tabs →

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The book: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It →