Does “The Secret” really work?
If you don’t know what “The Secret” is, it’s
basically the law of attraction. Your thoughts having a power more
potent than you can imagine, your thoughts influence your destiny and
all that. I know what you are thinking “it sounds good
to hear but is it really practical?”
I don’t know.
I read the popular book “The Secret” very recently
and being a daydreamer at heart, it appealed to me. Maybe because I was
brought up to think only good thoughts, never wish bad on anyone and not
even say bad things like death aloud. What I was taught was "What you say comes back to you so always say good things". Although
part of it is the superstitions, I feel there is some logic in what has
been passed around over centuries.
My intent today is not to go into the details of
it, read “The Secret” if you want and decide for yourself which side of
the fence you want to be on. For now, I will just narrate something
funny in my job life that I feel is related to
this.
My job comes with an additional responsibility to
be IT production on-call for a week, every 1 to 2 months. If something
goes wrong in the daily business process (production as we call it) , I
need to be ready to get up in the middle of
night and help fix it. There are 6-7 of us who share this
responsibility and we are especially scared over a month-end, that’s
when things typically go wrong more.
I am fairly new to this, and so far I have got the
responsibility twice, including the dreaded "month-end" week once. But nothing went wrong. The just the other day, I heard
one of my fellow “burden-carriers” complain about “things going horribly
wrong” whenever he has the on-call mobile.
This got me thinking again. I remembered he called me few days back to
say that he cannot login to our system. He wanted me to check if I
could since I was his secondary that week and to make sure the problem was not specific to his login. The funny thing is, nothing had gone wrong till that time. He
just wanted to make sure he was ready IF ANYTHING WENT WRONG.
It really surprised me because I almost tend to forget I have the
mobile with me for the week, forget about “being ready”. I don’t even think
of something going wrong during the night. He does. I don’t know why he
does that. Funnily enough, something went
wrong the same night, 3 times. Once again I heard him saying to someone
how he has a rotten luck with these things. I couldn’t help but
wonder if he was creating a vicious circle for himself by saying this
again and again.
Cut to today. I am in training so cannot check my
email etc. One of the new processes I recently implemented has failed,
someone calls me during the training. It’s a small process, not much can
go wrong with it so I tell the guy who called
me “Its not critical, I will take care of it in my next training
break”. I am not worried since I know the process is not too complex.
Funnily enough, they are not able to resolve it till late in the day.
After my training, I log in to see how it went and
it’s still failed. As I look into it, I realize something is wrong in
server environment, its not specific to my process. It’s a bigger issue.
Right people get involved on time and fix it. The failure, that I was
not much worried about, not only took care of
my process but helped prevent a major catastrophe for tonight’s
production run, which no one would have known, if not for this failure.
Now, this might be coincidence and not the “magic” of my positive thoughts. But I
choose to believe it and since it was
fixed in time I believe everything will just go smoothly
tonight.
Guess I don’t have to tell you I am the primary
on-call for this week ;)
