5 Steps that Let You Visualize Anything into Reality

If you're the kind of hard-nosed, stubborn-headed realist I am, things like visualization usually sound like some kind of hippie-ish New Age flimflam to you the first 10 or 12 times you hear about them. That's how it was for me anyway, and I'd always laugh a little and shake my head dismissively when I'd hear people talking about "the power of visualization."

But the more I studied successful people, the more I kept running into things like visualization, meditation, and taking time out of your day to focus on what you want. Cases in point:

• Henry Ford would take time out of his day to clear his thoughts and imagine the kind of company he wanted to build and the benefits it would provide to people

• Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla - both rivals and peerless inventors, and both professed visualizers who imagined their inventions succeeding

• Tiger Woods visualizes how the golf ball will move and where it will stop before he ever hits it

• Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he spent much time bodybuilding and again once he started, spent time visualizing what it would feel like to win Mr. Universe, and began acting like he'd won it already a few years before he actually did

• Jim Carrey, feeling broken down and beaten by his lack of success in Tinseltown, wrote himself a check for $10 million for "acting services rendered," dated it for 10 years later, Thanksgiving 1995, and stuffed it in his wallet so he'd never forget it. 10 years later, just before Thanksgiving 1995, he was told he'd be paid $10 million for the film Dumb and Dumber, and he buried the check, now falling apart and in pieces, with his father - it had been both of their dreams that he'd find success

Even Albert Einstein first hit upon the theory of relativity while visualizing it, and Steve Jobs talks about blocking out the outside noise to focus on the inner voice in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

I read about Olympic skiers and world class tennis players visualizing the slopes or the game. I read about martial artists visualizing a bout before it began. Business builders visualizing what their business would one day look like, years before it showed any signs of ever getting there back when everyone else thought they were crazy.

And I thought, this isn't just some hippie New Age junk. There's something to this, and I'm not doing it, which means I'm missing out on it.