The Law of Attraction: Too Simple for a Complex World

The Law of Attraction (LOA) has become a popular idea in personal development. At its heart, it says that what you focus on, you attract. Your thoughts and emotions carry a kind of energy that shapes your experiences. If you cultivate positive states of mind - gratitude, abundance, belief - you invite positive results. If you dwell on fear, doubt, or negativity, you draw more of the same. If you feel something as if it is true - it will become true.

There’s something true, and compelling, about this framework.

Fields like Affective Neuroscience show that emotions are wedded to the information we have at our disposal, how we view situations, and the way we make decisions.

In short: emotions aren't simply triggered after events happen - they anticipate and influence future actions. 

For example, fear can prepare the body for danger before a threat is fully understood, while positive emotions can motivate actions by creating a sense of reward or satisfaction.

 In decision-making, emotions often "lead" by signaling potential outcomes or dangers based on past experiences, nudging individuals toward specific choices even before they consciously reason through all the facts.

The ability to shift between mental and emotional states is a real one.

And a useful one.

That much, LOA gets right.

Shaping Perception

Emotions color the way we see the world. They filter incoming information by making certain aspects of an experience stand out. 

For example, when someone is anxious, they may focus on negative or threatening information more than neutral or positive details.

Likewise, when we feel joy or love, we're more likely to notice and focus on things that reinforce those emotions, influencing how we process and interpret situations.

Anyone who has walked into a room can feel the difference between a person who’s tense and closed off versus someone who’s present, confident, and open.

Performers know their energy ripples outward.

Entrepreneurs know enthusiasm can be contagious. 

And it’s true: learning to shift your state can change how people respond to you and how you focus and respond to opportunities.

Emotions aren't simply triggered after events happen ...

they anticipate and influence future actions.

Might we go as far as to say: Because emotions impact actions, the future we anticipate - & the emotions that picture of the future evokes in us - can  influence our choices and so influence our future?

Maybe.

Remember: Our actions are one small part of a much larger world.

And that’s the problem: LOA takes a partial truth and stretches it too far.

It suggests that being in the “right” state of mind is the key to success—as though everything hinges on how you feel inside.

That’s where the idea runs into reality.

Reality Checks Against the “Right State” Myth

The Law of Attraction suggests that if you hold yourself in the right emotional and mental state, good outcomes will follow.

But history and human performance show something different: people often succeed in spite of their state, not because they maintained a perfect one.

Consider war.

Many of the pivotal battles of World War II were fought under conditions of despair, exhaustion, and fear. Soldiers didn’t win because they stayed upbeat or radiated positivity. They won because they acted effectively while feeling awful.

The same is true in elite military training. In Navy SEAL selection, candidates are pushed to the edge of exhaustion. They’re wet, cold, sleep-deprived, and terrified. The ones who make it don’t do so by staying “in the right state of mind.” 

They succeed because they keep moving, keep reframing, and keep deciding under terrible conditions

This points to a deeper truth:

Success doesn’t depend on always feeling good.

Success depends on the ability to act skillfully while feeling bad.

Why the “Right State” Idea Doesn’t Hold Up

When you look more closely, you see that the “right state” model of success has cracks.

1. Navy SEALs show us an example that cuts through the argument.
If being in the right state were truly the key, then SEAL candidates - already a group of the toughest, most motivated, most physically fit people - would pass without issue. But they don’t. Most wash out. Those who survive don’t do so by staying positive.

The entire goal of their Hell Week is to put them in conditions where they CAN NOT stay positive. To see what they have at zero, not at an optimal state. The ones that succeed use specific mental tools (as the best physical candidates are not necessarily the ones who make it through).

Those tools might be, for example (as reported by Navy SEALs): 1) breaking problems into Duration–Pathway–Outcome, or 2) learning to surf back and forth between panic and calm.

2. Skills, not states, carry you through.
No one can stay in an ideal state forever. Life throws curveballs. Emotions and physiology fluctuate. What matters is the skill to recover, redirect attention, and keep functioning even when your internal weather is stormy. That’s not about holding a state—it’s about building a skillset to surf through different states of mind and circumstance.

Most training that gets people to a different level of skill requires:

• Plan

• Practice

• Adjustment

• Feedback
  

So, just admonishing people about their state - without teaching an underlying skill - is unlikely to help people get to a different level of skill required.

One example: If you want clarity and effective communication you may need to be able to investigate the feelings (not just information) people are experiencing and learn about how they’re seeing in a moment - and why.

3. The categorical error.
The teacher and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky once pointed out the human tenedency to think in categories. And how categorical thinking can lead us away from observing and understanding reality - especially when it comes to human behavior.

When someone insists that “being in the right state” is the baseline for success, they’re mistaking a particular category of occurrence for something universal. It works under some conditions, in some moments, but not always and in all.

They also forget most people will never be able to summon or sustain that kind of state on command. Or even the right kind of strategic thinking. No more than all people are born with the type of tendon insertions that will make them elite bodybuilders or powerlifters.

While most people may not have the mental strategies necessary, they can develop tools and practices to keep working effectively when the state isn’t there - IF it’s taught to them.

Without recognizing these nuances, there is the danger that teaching LOA slips from grounded practice into aspirational dogma.

4. Listening to All Kinds of Emotions

LOA also dismisses the value of negative emotions. But success comes from understanding emotions like the lights on the dashboard of a car. WHAT the emotion is telling you matters.

For example, Stanislav Petrov prevented a nuclear war in the 1980s by trusting his intuition over the data he saw on computers in the Soviet Union that showed the USA had launched a nuclear attack (it was a tech error, not an attack).

However, Petrov used a combination of logic, experience (the computers had known flaws) with his gut feeling (intuition) to arrive at an accurate prediction - no missiles were launched. Petrov wasn’t in some fabled peak state and his success did not come solely from his emotions. Or solely doing what he decided to do based on a certain kind of emotional experience.

5. The billionaire analogy.

Telling people they must be in the right state is like saying, “To be wealthy, just think like a billionaire.” There’s a seed of truth - mindset matters - but it ignores context. Most people don’t have billionaire resources or risk tolerance.

Similarly, most people don’t have the makeup to radiate unshakable positivity.

Pretending otherwise only sets them up to feel like failures when they can’t do it.

A More Balanced View

None of this means mindset is irrelevant.

• Yes, state matters. Leaders, performers, and entrepreneurs do project something outward. Attention and focus shape performance.
  

• Yes, methods for shifting state are useful. Breathing, reframing, visualization—these tools can change how you show up.
  

• But no, state is not the core requirement for success.

The evidence - from SEAL training, to WWII, to the history of business - shows something different: people succeed because they can navigate difficulty, because luck goes their way, and for a lot of other reasons.

Often they have to move forward when conditions are far from ideal. They act when they don’t feel like it. They decide when they’re tired. They keep going when their inner state is the last thing they’d call “positive.”

The Law of Attraction captures a sliver of truth: mindset influences outcomes.

But the fuller truth is this:

Success doesn’t come from always being in the right state.

It comes, in part, from having the skills and systems to keep moving, deciding, and creating in any state.

Add to that that it is well documented that - in many firsts and successes in physical performance - people who took top awards in their field were closely surrounded by others doing just as well - and circumstance played a role in who took home the trophy, or the title - and you can see that success depends on more than internal states.

The truth is that life - and most solutions - are often contextual. And people vary widely - not only in their physical attributes - but in how they’re built mentally and emotionally. That’s why it’s difficult to come up with an algorithm that works for everyone.

For example, in elite military or high-stakes training contexts - like Navy SEALs the ability to act under extreme stress often requires suppressing or compartmentalizing emotional responses. That skill can be life-saving in the field, but, in some cases, it also comes at a cost: it can reduce empathy, because part of acting effectively under threat may be tuning out the feelings of others to focus on the task at hand.