How it all started

It all started with a very unhappy childhood and teenage years. I don’t want to talk about it, not only because I don’t like to remember it, but because it’s not important to the story I want to tell. But when I look back, I saw that until I enter college, I was unhappy, but still hopeful. I always thought things were going to improve after… something happened. After the Summer was over. After we move to a new home. After school was out. After I enter college.

I know it sounds silly, but even though I was never happy, I still had hope that someday I would be. And that’s what kept me going. Having unrealistic hope is better than no hope at all.

I remember exactly when everything started to change for the worst. I’ve been all my life putting happiness a couple of years ahead, saying the reason I wasn’t happy was because I didn’t have that. After I had that, I’d be happy. And the last that for me was my first job.

We always had huge money problems in my home, and everything (I thought) I always wanted was to have my own money and be independent. I got my first job, just after I enter college, and it was a complete disaster. My boss morally abused me, and the company was almost bankrupt. The Director started a self destructive path to blame all employees for his administrative failure.

I quit after a few months. I actually should have quit earlier. But whatever happened, the experience made me realize there was no something coming. There was no that. That was it. That was life. I was waiting for things to improve since I was five years old. Nothing changed, things were still a mess, I was still unhappy, and honestly, I couldn’t believe anymore that after that was over they’d be better. The hope that kept me alive had completely faded, and only the unhappiness remained.

I kept on dragging myself through life. A few years later, I started a depression treatment. The treatment helped me to feel happier, but didn’t take care of the hope part. I was a moderately happy person who still didn’t have any hope. I learned how to cope with my life disgraces without thinking of them all the time. I learned to see them for their real size and allow myself to enjoy some of the little pleasures life brings us every day. But I saw no room for improvement. I was maybe the most negative person ever. I was a true member of my family, wanting to live, but with no perspective whatsoever.

I made barely 800 bucks a month. In Brazil, the country I was born, that’s the salary of a poor person, not a miserable person. My relationship with my family was destroyed. My marriage was in bad shape. I was gaining weight for apparently no reason. I had a crappy job, no friends, and believed the world was a hazardous place. I saw no way out for my financial catastrophe.

One day, I bought the book “Dilbert the Future” by Scott Adams. I hardly had money to buy anything, but I don’t know why, I decided to give myself that treat. I was still doing my depression treatment, paying half my salary for the psychiatrist, and that’s only because she was doing me a favor. I think I was her charity case.
I really loved Dilbert because I had a disgraceful professional life, so I really related to the character. But I was actually a little disappointed. I didn’t really enjoy the book. It wasn’t funny, at least for my Brazilian humor standards. Nothing personal, I still think Scott Adams is a total genius. But I think I just read it through the end because I paid 20 bucks for the book, and I was really too broke to admit that I threw away money on something I didn’t like.
Then I read the last chapter.

If you are not familiar with the last chapter of Dilbert the Future, Scott Adams shuts down the funny mode and explains his personal experience with affirmations. He talks about how our perceptions of reality can be wrong, if we look at things in a different manner. He throws in a couple of information on physics there that are just wrong, but the overall “perception exercise” was the most mind blowing thing I’ve ever read.

He said affirmations helped him to get a degree, achieve several personal goals and even become a cartoonist. He said affirmations don’t only help you just focus on your objectives, they also make coincidences happen. I remember I though… yeah, right!

The man have guts, I can tell you that. I could almost see fans leaving him ashamed, and critics insanely crying for justice. I think my mental image for his courage was a mountain of books on fire. And I could not believe a famous writer like him would take such a huge risk. '

At first, I didn’t know what to think. The content shook me off. Was he lying? Did it actually happen? Or was he telling the truth?

If Scott Addams was lying, the only explanation I could find was that he was trying to con gullible people to make more money. For some reason, he believed he could turn himself from a cartoonist to a Self Improvement God.

But on the other hand, he already has a lot of money. His comic strips were turned into a TV cartoon, for Christ’s sake. They’re published in more than 100 languages. I believe only one or two Self Improvement gods make as much money as he does. Does it compensate, to risk an extremely successful career to make a couple more bucks?
I thought he was smarter than that. Which made me conclude he wasn’t lying. He was telling the truth, at least from his point of view. He believed that the affirmation crap actually helped him. And he was exposing himself because… he wanted to help? Or maybe create buzz around his name? I couldn’t figure out which one.

One thing that called my attention was that, at the end of the book, he explains how to write affirmations, adding that “they work even if you don’t believe. ” That’s actually cool, because I didn’t believe. He said I could distrust affirmations as much as I wanted. They would work anyway.

I didn’t believe in God back then. I didn’t believe in affirmations, motivations, brain power or whatever crap those so called Self Improvement experts try to sell to gullible people – and usually for a substantial amount of money. I do see them as vampires who try to feed on people’s desperation, and then blamed their own disgrace on the fact that they “were not thinking positive”, or they “didn’t believe hard enough”. I never could and never will stand those blood suckers, and I had no patience for whoever tried to say otherwise. I believed in cause and effect, I believed only what science could prove. I always hated the guts of those mediums who said they could not materialize a spirit when “people who don’t believe are around”. Believe first, the reward will come later, they said. For me, that means pay first, and hope we can deliver your order.

So you see, I did not believe a word he said. I did believe he believed in that. But he wasn’t asking me to believe. It was actually the first person who was offering to show me something amazing without asking me to believe. And I wouldn’t until I could see it for myself.

Even thinking Scott Adams was wrong, I was really impressed by his courage - whatever his motivation was. So I decided to try. My life was miserable, and from my point of view I didn’t have anything better to do. At first I was ashamed I was trying one of those hideous techniques the Self Improvement gods talked about. But the book cost me 20 bucks. When you have nothing to lose, your sense of ridiculousness changes.

I wrote my goals 15 times a day, like he said, and it worked. And it worked again. And again. There was always a reasonable explanation for how that success could have been a coincidence, how that could have been my own talent, but the point is that I was experiencing failure since I was five. When you start having success so many times in a row, and precisely after you start doing affirmations against your own beliefs, you start wondering.

Today I can tell you, Scott Adams was the person who helped me put my life to a start. Amazing how just a little courage can save someone else like that. That’s what motivated me to write this book. I know bookstores will put this under the “Self Improvement” section, along with those people I despise. And the fact that it will be under a Self Improvement session will be execrated by skeptics. It’s ok. All I can say is, if this was a book saying nice things about Christianism or some other religion, no skeptics would comment. Since it’s a book saying nice things about a belief outside religion, it’s automatically highly “execratable”.

As Scott Adams said in his book (and I also didn’t believe him then), I’ll say I’m a skeptic myself. I’m a fan of the scientific method, for more surprising that it may sound. I know you get sick, you go to the doctor. I know praying or affirmations can't save you from any disease. But many of the same skeptics that will flood me with bad comments about this sentence may also believe in God, or practice a religion. They do that because belief is completely apart from science or reason. Human beings can practice science and believe in something unproven. If nature and physics can handle this paradox in a way that tour brains won’t explode, I’m fine with that.

This is a blog about affirmations and how they helped to change my life. Substitute “affirmations” for “prayers”, change “motivation” for your own religion’s names – you’ll still understand, and won’t offend anyone’s beliefs. Or disbeliefs.