The Aspiring Crackpot

How can bending a spoon increase your wealth? As we’ve all heard before, “it’s not the spoon that bends, but yourself.” Strangely enough, in my experience that’s true, and as one of the introductory post to this blog, I’d like to share my experience with bending not only a spoon (and subsequently a whole pile of taiwanese cutlery), but myself as well. Light up a Macanudo and pull up a chair. This is going to get interesting.

A slight drizzle of rain glinted through the white, orange and green neon of the 7-11 sign. It was 3am and one of my buddies was taking a leak against a half-finished Taiwanese construction project. After a long discussion of mind-over-matter with my fellow convenience-store philosophers, I had let them in on my secret fantasy: to become Magneto. In the long watches of the night I dream about wearing a dorky helmet and flying through Taichung crushing cars and motorcycles into thin metal biscuits all with the power of my mind. It all started, I figured, with bending spoons. It had to start with something simple, of course, and bending spoons being the closest thing I could think of to magnetokinesis, that’s where I would focus my efforts.

How does this relate to increasing your wealth (or really, any goal you set your mind to?) The answer to that is just over the next bend.

Psychic abilities, for lack of a better term, I posited, are no more than practiced traits. As an analogy to explain my feelings to the two skeptics with whom I’d spent my evening (and early morning), I explained how I’d taught myself to play guitar. With literally no guidance, my first guitar felt like trying to play a boat anchor. It was uncomfortable, bulky, and tore the skin off my fingers like a runaway cheese grater. Of course, I had my idols to idolize, and I knew that playing guitar was not only possible, but probable, given enough time. As Andy Dufrain in Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption said, “pressure and time.”

So I pressed on, giving the hobby more or less constant pressure, and here I am today, ten years later, lead guitar in a reasonably successful cover band here in Taichung, and making a fair portion of my income from it. It occurred to me that psychic abilities are not much different. Think about it: Once upon a time, millions of years ago, someone came up with the idea of a guitar. Not only did he (or she) gather the unlikely ingredients to build the thing, but *not even knowing it was possible* constructed it, and then spent years teaching him/herself to play it! That was an awesome act of pioneering–having enough faith in what you’re doing to spend a decade or more of your life building and training with something that doesn’t even exist.

In a similar way, I think psychic ability is a practiced art. It took me ten years to get proficient with a guitar, knowing full well that it was possible and likely that I would succeed. It takes most people a few years just to learn how to walk, speak English, and to go to the bathroom. Why would psychic ability be any different? What if someone was to give a full ten years of attention trying to train something like bending spoons? What would it mean if you succeeded?

I immediately went out and bought a three-pack of spoons, one for each of my friends privy to the conversation that spawned this crackpottery, and one for myself. Handing the spoons over, I gave them each the charge: Sit with your spoon every night until you bend it. Then we’ll show reality who’s boss!

In the end, I was the only one who spent every night with the spoon. It was slow going. Night after night, the spoon would not bend. I held it in the tips of my fingers, meditated, flexed a bit (never enough to bend it though), shot cyclopean blasts of imagined psychic energy at it, everything I could think of. Still, nothing. Three months past. I’d had a few dreams of spoons bending like taffy in boiling water, stretching and getting all goopy and relaxed, but the real thing hadn’t bent a millimeter.

Then it happened: I was sitting on my bed in the darkness, spoon between my fingers, and it *gave.* Like, it submitted to my will. At first I stopped, thinking I’d forced it. Then I realized, it was between only my thumb and forefinger of each hand, it was extremely unlikely I’d forced it. I let it bend a bit. It was indeed soft, like the taffy I’d dreamed about. Suddenly I was terrified. I’m destroying something that someone had created, I thought. Take that however you want. Then I remembered my goal, and some part of my mind shouted “Come on you ape, you wanna live forever?” and I let it loop itself around, twisting into a tight curl. Then I sat staring at it in the dark for a good hour. And that was one good hour.

I brought the spoon to my two friends. Needless to say, they were amazed and stupified. Believe me, when you see the spoon in person, you know. It wasn’t forced or tricked, or in any way faked. You feel it.

Before I finish off the story, let me first admit that I did not become Magneto. Once I’d bent a handful of spoons, forks, and other kitchen utensils, I realized the point of my whole experiment. “It’s not the spoon that bends, but yourself.” That’s the truth. Once I had proven to myself that I could accomplish literally anything I put my mind to, I didn’t need to continue bending a kitchen’s worth of cutlery (although crushing traffic with my mind would still be nice.) The important part was simply that it could be done, and I had done it. I’d proven it to myself.

The next day, my two friends had both bent their spoons. How? Aha, here is the point of the story: Once you know it’s possible, it’s damn near done. Now, apply this to wealth building. Your financial freedom: do you really believe in it? In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill writes that the true self-made millionaire not only believes it, but will carry on, failure after failure, until one day he is a success. It took me about three months to bend a spoon, and every night except one, nothing happened. Ninety failures, and suddenly, it was taffy in my fingers, and no one even believed it was possible.

How many millionaires do you know? Personally or not, you certainly know that it’s possible to become a millionaire, even a self-made one. Would you be willing to fail ninety times for one success? Put a spoon by your bed and find out. Financial freedom might be just around the corner.