I bought a book entitled The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.  It's not the sort of book I normally buy but I was intrigued.  I was expecting something similar to Flow by Csikszentmihalyi but instead it was a motivational / life coaching book.

Having bought it, though, I'm reading it.  It has one basic thesis: that the secret to life is the law of attraction.  You attract what you think.  The way to direct your universe is to constantly think, act, and believe in what you want and all of it will come to you.  The same has been said in religion (Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened. Matthew 7:7) and literature/philosophy (...when you want something, the whole universe conspires for you to achieve it. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho).  I've always believed this, mainly because, despite the fact that I am a control-freak or maybe because I am such a control-freak, I've benefitied way too much from serendipity than can be attributed to chance. We get what we ask for, which may or may not be equal to what we deserve.

I have a slightly different take on the law of attraction, though.  I don't absolutely believe that you order things from the universe and the universe delivers them to your doorstep.  I think half the equation is about focus.  I think that the universe is constantly bombarding us with opportunities.  We just fail to notice them because we aren't really sure what it is we want.  Asking for something and believing we have it is a way of focusing our attention so that we notice what has been is right in front of us all this time.  If, by chance, what we want is not yet within our grasp, asking and believing is a way of focusing our energies and our trajectories to go in the desired direction.  Pearl of great price, treasure in the field, freedom in commitment--same banana.