Time Travel to Success

Fantasy Enfolds Reality

In the tales of time travel a charming fantasy enfolds a world-changing reality.

Do you want to find love, or to save the person you love? Look at just about any time travel movie to see how.

Do you want wealth? With a time machine and a minimal knowledge of the stock market’s past winners and losers, it’s easy. The time traveler uses the Will Rogers strategy:

Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock

and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.

Will Rogers

Do you want to save humanity? As a time traveler you can apply the knowledge of the past, or the knowledge of the future, and take the key step at the key moment.

The Fantasy

So what is the charming fantasy of the time travel tales?

It is that, knowing exactly what to do and when to do it, you can take a small step that will be a turning point. Whatever you want is then yours, even things you normally could not have no matter how hard you tried.

These stories take the idea that “knowledge is power” to the extreme. The key step at the key time, not decades of grinding effort, makes all the difference.

The Reality

The reality is that there actually are key steps and turning points that can make all the difference. The world changes; things are not as they would have been. Small steps taken or not taken can change your world so much that the rest of your life is like living in an alternate dimension.

Your World Can Turn On A Dime

I was single for many years. I often felt that I would be single forever. Even now, over a decade after marrying and with a growing daughter, there are still moments when it seems odd, almost unreal, to be living this life.

Looking back it was one small step that was the turning point.

Surprisingly often in life it is the small steps that count. The problem is, not being time travelers how can we know to take those small steps?

What To Do?

Adopt the time traveler perspective.

The time traveler knows the potential power of small steps. So do not wait until you can take a big step; get started right away taking small steps that could help.

Ask yourself, “What can I do now that I might later see was a turning point?”

To find the small steps you start with intuition. But also study the 80/20 principle, which teaches us that a small minority of the causes and efforts gives most of the results. It also helps us to find those vital small steps.

You could also look at the Theory of Constraints, which goes further.

But above all keep trying. The next small step could be your great turning point to success.

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Albert Frank is a lawyer, speaker, writer, and a partner with the downtown Toronto law firm of Rosenbaum & Frank LLP. For more information about him and his ideas, see his web site at www.FrankLaw.ca and his blog at Albert Frank On Law & Life. He can also be reached by e-mail at afrank@Franklaw.ca and by phone at 416-929-7202.