I have spent most of the last couple years in depression of one kind or another. Disgust towards my job, my rickety old home, growing older (33), financial stress and the loss of time to spend with friends and family due to the recent birth of our first child.

I continually focused on the things I didn’t like about my job and my job got worse. I stressed about getting older and I started to get sick. I focused on the lack of money we had, and available funds got smaller and smaller.

My loving wife has spent a great deal of time trying to bring me out of whatever rut I was in at the time. She would commonly state “Your life is completely what you make it” and the words would roll past me without making a dent. I felt trapped.

One day, I was going about my errands and ran into a friend I had not seen in sometime and who I often looked to for inspiration on how to improve my life. When the work at hand was completed he asked if I had ever heard of the movie “The Secret”. I hadn’t heard of it. He simply stated that I would really like it and should make an effort to watch it. Not really knowing what it was about or anything, I said I would keep an eye for it the next time I went to the video store.

That very night, when I arrived at my house, I went in my bedroom and opened my DVD player to put in a movie… and the movie “The Secret” was in the player already.

I called my wife to ask where this movie had come from and she told me her mother had loaned it to her to watch and she was watching it just last night. She said that she had wanted me to watch it so badly, but wasn’t sure I would be open to what it had to say.

I watched it as soon as the time allowed and immediately felt better than I have in YEARS. I could see clearly how the way I focus on the bad things in my life was only snowballing the amount of bad things in my life.

In reality I have many things to be grateful for. I have a good job with good pay and great benefits. I’m already on my way to retiring comfortably. I have a roof over my head and food to eat. I have a wonderful wife and a healthy child.

Further, I was able to see where the only 2 places in my past where I was applying positive thinking, had already manifested. I have only had 2 passionate goals in my life, buying a house by 30 and getting the Harley of my dreams. I have both now and when I think back, they both kind of fell into my lap, even though I really shouldn’t have been able to get them in the situation I was in.

What occurred to me after watching the movie, was that it was very likely that my wife’s passionate desire to have me see it, had attracted the movie itself to me. What are the odds that my friend whom I trust deeply would mention that I need to see it, the very day that I would come home and find it already in my DVD player.

I am now actively trying to apply these principles to my life and I have great hope for living in happiness and gratitude for the things I have in my life, while focus on acheiving even greater things in my life.