He was earning eight thousand a year when his mentor set an impossible target

When Jack Canfield was earning about eight thousand dollars a year, his mentor, W. Clement Stone, gave him an assignment: set a goal so large that hitting it would prove the coaching had worked. Canfield picked a number with no visible path attached to it, a hundred thousand dollars within a year. He had no strategy. What Stone had taught him was to declare the goal, act as though it were already true, and let go of needing to see how it would happen.

Canfield made a fake hundred-thousand-dollar bill and taped it to his ceiling, so it was the first thing he saw each morning, and he spent time visualizing the life that income would support. For about thirty days, nothing happened. Then an idea arrived unprompted: a book he'd already written could be sold at a quarter a copy, and four hundred thousand copies would add up to exactly the figure on his ceiling. He had no plan for reaching that many readers. Weeks later, at a talk to six hundred teachers, a freelance writer approached him wanting an interview and mentioned she sold stories to a national tabloid. The resulting article helped his sales take off. By year's end, Canfield and his colleague had made just over ninety-two thousand dollars, short of the goal but so far beyond anything they had made before that his wife suggested trying the same approach for a million.

Rhonda Byrne frames this as an example of what she calls the Creative Process, a three-step structure she says she drew from a biblical formula: ask, believe, receive. Asking, in this account, is simply the work of getting specific about what you want. Believing means acting, speaking and picturing as though it has already arrived, rather than checking daily on whether it's shown up yet, the way you wouldn't reorder a package you already know is in the mail. Receiving is the practice of feeling, in advance, the way you'll feel once it's here.

The part of Canfield's story worth noticing isn't the ceiling bill or the tabloid writer specifically. It's the thirty days of nothing, which he treated not as evidence of failure but as an ordinary stretch of the process, right up until an idea he hadn't gone looking for simply arrived.

Start by writing out one goal in the present tense, the way Bob Proctor recommends, opening with something like 'I am so happy and grateful now that,' and be as specific as Canfield was with his figure. Once you've asked, treat it as an order already placed rather than something to keep requesting, and put a visible reminder somewhere you'll see it daily, a note, a picture, even a fake bill taped where Canfield taped his. Expect a stretch where nothing visibly happens, and instead of reading that silence as failure, keep picturing the goal as already achieved the way he did through his own quiet thirty days. When an idea or an unplanned opportunity does show up, follow it quickly rather than talking yourself out of it, because that unplanned idea is often exactly how the goal arrives.