These are my thoughts about Rule 12 from Jordan B. Peterson’s “40 Rules”. You can read them all here. In the case of the rules that made it into his “12 Rules for Life” book, I’m not going to repeat any of his explanations here. These are my own thoughts about each rule from my own life and experience.

12. Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

I try to make my article titles short so that they’re easy to read if someone is browsing a list of them and also as a quick summation of each rule. Some of the rules are short enough to put the whole rule as the title and others, like this one, need to be shortened.

I first put this one as “Imagine who you could be” but that sounded just a little vapid. Really, the second half of the rule is the key to its effectiveness.

Many people subscribe to the law-of-attraction philosophy from the movie “The Secret” and the later book of the same name: put your desires out into the universe and the universe will respond by giving you your desires, often in much greater abundance than you ever dreamed.

Many compare “The Secret” to one of the self-improvement world’s bibles: Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich”.

The difference, however, between Hill’s book and “The Secret” is that Hill’s principles are 80% practical advice and 20% woo-woo (maybe even 90/10) whereas the author of “The Secret” and its celebrity proponents seem to have focused on only the woo-woo.

Of the thirteen principles in Hill’s book, ten can be summed up using this Jordan Peterson rule. In each of those chapters, Hill is either getting you to imagine who you could be or he’s telling you that you have to put aside all of the distractions of life in order to focus single-mindedly on your goals.

In Chapter 7 (Organized Planning: The Crystallization of Desire into Action), Hill lists thirty reasons he has observed as to why people fail to get what they want in life. Of those thirty, four can be categorized as not having the right goals, twelve can be categorized specifically as not aiming single-mindedly at their goals and another thirteen as distracting from or interfering with that single-mindedness.

So, according to the author, 25 out of 30 reasons for failure in life are related to not aiming single-mindedly at specific goals.

In other words, you are NOT supposed to just offer your desires to the universe and then sit back and relax, waiting for the universe to do all the work.

Aiming single-mindedly at a goal means saying NO to almost everything else that could get in the way, prevent, or distract. It means doing something every day that moves you closer to that goal. It means discipline, hard work, and focus.

This is why people have succeeded when they have accurately followed Napoleon Hill’s principles: because they worked their tails off to get there, not because they had a vision board.