Writing to the 100th power
How and why I bought a house after being fired.
The number 100 is a very powerful number.
It’s associated with the best of anything in the world — the 100 largest companies, the top 100 restaurants, the 100 greatest musical bands, the 100 places you have to visit before you die, and so on.
100 is a virtually limitless number 1. It’s a number bursting with power and potential. Anything multiplied by 100 becomes something immensely more powerful and significant. I would learn this at a critical point in my life several years ago.
Four years ago, I accidentally stumbled upon just how potent the number 100 was when combined with the power of writing and achieving the seemingly impossible.
Permutable goals
The 12-month period from June 2015 to May 2016 was a time of great personal triumph, as well as crushing defeat for me. When I first moved to Sydney after having lived elsewhere in Australia for six years, I set a big goal to again become an Australian lawyer. This was a gargantuan goal, considering that I had neither money nor resources at the time to accomplish it. Yet I was determined to achieve it.
After doing the hard yards for two years, studying full-time and working part-time, I was sworn in as an Australian lawyer in August 2015. Then, amazingly, two months after, another big goal that I had listed down — to work in a Sydney law firm — was also accomplished.
Within a month, however, of starting in the firm, I found myself in the most toxic working environment I had ever been in my professional life. After three months, I was all but ready to quit. But I stuck it out because I didn’t want to be a quitter. And also because my beautiful partner was jobless at the time and was depending on me to earn our living.
Fortunately, my dilemma was resolved for me when I was fired from the law firm after four months.
I was scared and confused. I had taken a personal loan of $40,000 a few weeks before I lost my job, because even as early as then, I knew that I would not last in my job. Now I had no job, no income and had no visible means of paying my loan.
Still the bills kept coming.
With a jobless partner.
No alternative job prospects on my immediate horizon.
I was completely clueless what to do next.
Writing for 100 days and nights
After spending the next several days walking around in a daze and tossing and turning in bed at night, I decided I’d had enough.
I followed my gut instinct to leap out of my comfort zone and do actions out of courage and not fear.
I knew I needed guidance but I didn’t have anyone to ask. So I turned to the only thing I knew how to do and do well — I wrote.
But instead of writing a goal to get a job quickly, I aimed higher. Much higher.
I made it a goal to buy a house within 100 days from the time I was fired.
This was quite a laughable goal to write at the time. No bank would lend me money unless I was in a full-time job and had a strong record of savings. After I got fired, I had neither of these.
While the goal was laughable, it was very significant for me precisely because buying a house required me to have both money and a job. It was virtually impossible to achieve it and this is exactly why I wrote it down.
I had already learned that writing can transform reality, and I had proven this in my life multiple times.
I was going to prove it again and it didn’t matter that there was no visible means for me to achieve this goal.
One amazing thing about writing is that it acts much like a magnifying glass would when used to focus sunlight. As a magnifying glass can channel sunlight to burn on a minute point and set it on fire, so can writing focus our thought, determination and will on a specific objective. Using this principle, I decided to continuously write just this one overriding goal in my journal. I chose to write it for 100 days due to the power and significance of the number 100 discussed earlier.
I bought the house exactly as I wrote I would.
But I did not accomplish this exactly on day 100. The contract was settled and I officially owned the house about six months after the one hundredth day of writing. But I didn’t complain, not at all. This was a successful outcome. I had gotten what I wanted. It didn’t really matter that I didn’t get it on or before my due date. During the entire nine-month period, I learned other additional, valuable lessons on this focused-writing process, lessons that will certainly serve me well the next time I use it.
Time-stamping a goal
How important is it to set a date within which we want to achieve our goal?
It is essential. Setting a date within which to achieve a goal is not so much about setting a deadline for yourself or the world, as it is about making a commitment to yourself that you are serious about getting it.
Once you’ve time-stamped your goal, then you need to write out that goal repeatedly.
The very act of repeatedly and consistently writing one specific goal assures that your goal is kept constantly front of mind.
As it is always before you, you are always thinking about it and as you do so, you will be prompted or inspired to take certain actions. These will most likely be small steps at first, but which will later become bigger and bigger.
In my case, I took small steps — I isolated the areas where I could afford to buy and calculated my maximum budget. I called a good mortgage broker who had been referred to me from a property investing group I had joined. In terms of bigger steps, I took on part-time jobs, which eventually led to an offer for a full-time job. I accepted this offer because I knew that I would be more attractive to banks when it came time for me to borrow money to buy that first property.
I learned that during the 100 days of writing about your goal, when you are inspired to do a certain act or take a certain step, no matter how small or random it seems at the time, you must follow through the action or take the step.
Writing to the 100th power
This technique will work just as well for a longer list of goals as it does with a single goal. But it will be even more powerful if you focus on a single important goal. As explained above, your writing will act as a magnifying lens that will concentrate all your mental energy like sunlight and bring it to bear on the accomplishment of a single, overriding objective.
Psychologically as well, this technique works because your brain more than anything else likes to be stimulated with pleasurable sensations; once it experiences a pleasurable sensation, it will keep seeking out its source so that it can experience it again and again. Seeing that important goal coming closer to you is one of the most pleasurable experiences you’ll ever have.
During the 100-day stretch, mind your inner state.
When doubt, disbelief, discouragement or impatience start to creep in, write about what you’re going through. It’s not unusual to experience doubt and disbelief during this long stretch; it is normal to feel discouraged and impatient, especially when you’re thinking that all you’ve been doing is writing and you do not perceive anything happening to indicate that your goal is inching closer.
You should acknowledge these “negative” feelings for what they are — confirmations that you are human, subject to all the foibles and frailties that human nature is inevitably subjected to. So yes, it’s ok to feel negative and down once in a while as you write your way closer to Day 1. What’s not ok is to allow these feelings to shake your definite purpose in getting that goal or quash your faith that you will get it to such an extent that you stop writing. This will be detrimental to the achievement of your goal.
Remember, just because nothing seems to be happening on the physical plane or you don’t see anything developing does not mean that this is the case.
Don’t stop writing just because nothing seems to be happening with your goal.
Minding your inner state is especially critical when you reach the last 10 days of writing. This is the crucial home stretch. Feeling a sincere, deep sense of gratitude and giving thanks that what you want will now surely come to pass and writing this is one good way to spend the homestretch.
After the one hundredth day, you must now take the last and most important step of all.
At this point, whether or not your goal has been achieved or what you desire has come to pass, release it.
Let it go.
Don’t refer to or write about it the next day or in the following days. Know that you’ve done everything there is to do from your end, and there are no more steps to take. Allow those feelings of positive expectation and delicious anticipation to linger in the coming days. Be easy about this process, knowing that what you want is on its way to you.
* * * * * *
Jonathan Temporal is an author, lawyer, university lecturer and occasional Aikido teacher. The preceding blog was excerpted from his new book WriteTech: How to harness the power of writing to achieve audacious goals, solve any problem, and radically re-engineer your life, which was ranked in the Amazon Kindle store’s top 50 best-sellers in the Motivational Self-Help category for the the third week of December 2020.
facebook and messenger: @jonathantemporal
web: writetech.co
