The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life - Hardcover

Assaraf, John; Smith, Murray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416561994 ISBN 13: 9781416561996

Publisher: Atria Books, 2008

Synopsis

A key team member behind The Secret and his business partner offer the specific tools and mental strategies to help readers leap ahead in any career or business venture and achieve major financial success.

In this visionary work, New York Times bestselling author John Assaraf and business guru Murray Smith reinvent the business book for the twenty-first century. Two of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, they combine forces to bring their special insights and techniques together in a revolutionary guide for success in the modern business environment.

Assaraf and Smith know how to minimize risk and maximize success, and The Answer provides a framework for sharing their wisdom, experience, and skills with the millions of people who want to accomplish their own dreams in life. Using cutting-edge research into brain science and quantum physics, they show how readers can actually rewire their brains for success and create the kind of extraordinary lives they want. By teaching readers how to attract and use newly discovered "uncommon" senses to achieve business success, the authors demonstrate the beliefs, habits, thoughts, and actions that they have used to build eighteen multimillion-dollar companies.

Any reader who follows this step-by-step process to build his or her career will experience an enormous life transformation and reach an exceptional level of living.

About this title

About the Author

John Assaraf is one of the experts featured in the film and book The Secret, which he helped launch into a worldwide phenomenon. He has shared his expertise on achieving financial freedom and living an extraordinary life with millions of viewers on Larry King Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and dozens of other media venues worldwide. Visit John online at www.johnassaraf.com.

Murray Smith is a business growth expert who has built thirteen businesses, including Indian Motorcycle which he bought just the name from bankruptcy and built it into the second largest U.S. motorcycle company. He has helped thousands of small business owners in thirty countries and has been featured in national and international media, including Forbes, Entrepreneur, CBC, CNN, and NBC. Murray currently owns three companies that help business owners discover new and untapped revenues by focusing on strategies to help increase revenues from their existing clients and attract new clients. Learn more at www.gettheanswer.com and www.accessmainstreet.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

2

THE SEARCH FOR HOW THE WORLD WORKS

In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Galileo's crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In fact, said Galileo, it is the other way around: The sun sits at the center, and the earth is simply one of a handful of planets that revolve around it.

This idea was judged as being diametrically opposed to the position taken by Holy Scripture. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views, and his book containing the offending idea, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned. The old man's sentence was later commuted to house arrest, and he lived out the rest of his days confined to his villa outside Florence, where he eventually went blind.

Still, Galileo's views persisted, and the meticulous experiments and mathematical models he used in his search to understand nature set the stage for all the developments of modern science that followed. Three centuries later, a German physicist named Albert Einstein called him "the father of modern science."

For more than a thousand years leading up to the time of Galileo, science had been more interested in creating intellectually satisfying descriptions of reality than in trying to see if those descriptions could be supported by proof. But with the age of Copernicus and Galileo, European scientists began the vigorous pursuit of empirical evidence. Thought experiments gave way to actual physical experiments, such as the famous moment when Galileo dropped two objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to test out Aristotle's assertion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. (They don't.)

From Galileo's time onward, scientists' precise observations contributed to a picture of the world that looked very much like a massive piece of mechanical clockwork; they had little practical use for such ideas as soul, spirit, or consciousness. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, a contemporary of Galileo's who is today regarded as "the father of modern philosophy," declared that the best way to understand how the world works would be to divide existence into two parts: the objective or material world, governed by the principles of science, and the subjective world of the mind and the soul, which would be the province of the church.

Descartes is especially famous for the statement I think, therefore I am. But the truth is, the think part of that declaration puzzled Descartes, much as it has puzzled scientists for centuries since. Just how is it that we think? Where do our thoughts come from? How do the bits of physical matter that constitute our brains generate consciousness? As contemporary physicist John Hagelin has said, "There is a deep philosophical problem surrounding how you get consciousness out of a hunk of meat."

Despite Descartes' neat division of reality, common sense suggested that our thoughts must be connected to the rest of existence somehow. But how, exactly? The answers to those questions open up a tremendous new world of possibility for what we can achieve in our lives, and they form a central part of The Answer.

A WORLD INSIDE THE ATOM

In the generations following Galileo and Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton took the idea of nature-as-machine much further, detailing the precise laws that govern how that machine operates. All of classical physics, and in fact, all of modern science, has been built upon the foundation created by Newton, who described a universe of empty, three-dimensional space, through which physical objects move according to immutable laws. These laws of motion made possible the advance of modern technology, from simple steam engines to the space probes that have analyzed soil samples on Mars.

What we have been able to accomplish by applying Newton's laws has been truly astonishing. But scientists eventually reached the limits of the Newtonian worldview. As their tools grew more sophisticated, their explorations of the physical world took them deep into the heart of the atom, where the nature of reality proved to be something quite different from anything Descartes or Newton ever imagined.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the tidy, objective, mechanistic view of the world began to fall apart. With the discovery of radioactivity in the late 1890s, scientists began looking into the world within the atomic nucleus, and they were shocked to discover that on the subatomic level, the physical world did not behave at all the way Newton said it should. In fact, the "atom" itself turned out to be a sort of illusion: The closer scientists looked, the less it really appeared to be there.

Coined in ancient Greece, the term atom means "indivisible unit," and through the nineteenth century, scientists believed that our entire physical universe was composed of these elementary particles. But radioactivity showed us that the atom was divisible after all -- in fact, there was a whole new world of phenomena inside the atom, waiting to be explored, measured, and described. And when our vision of the atom fractured, the foundation of classical physics fractured along with it. Our view of how the world works was in for a radical transformation.

EVERYTHING IS ENERGY

When we say the name Albert Einstein, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of his wild mane of white hair, or that famous picture of the distinguished physicist sticking out his tongue. Or maybe you think simply, "Genius." But whatever picture you have, you will also probably come up with "E=MC2." Why on earth would a mathematical equation for a sophisticated theory be so famous that even nonscientists recognize it immediately? Because with that simple equation, "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared," Einstein shattered centuries of thinking and radically altered our view of how the world works.

In his effort to explain the puzzling behavior of light, Einstein found the only viable solution was to stop looking within the neat framework of Newtonian physics. Instead, he introduced his own picture of how the world works: the theory of relativity. One reason Einstein's idea was so transformative was that for the first time ever, it described how energy and matter are not only related, but can be transformed back and forth into each other. A chink had been found in the wall separating the worlds of matter and energy. Now the elegant, clear-cut world of classical, Newtonian physics would be forced to move over and make room for the fuzzy, strange, nearly unimaginable world of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is the study of how the world works on the smallest scale, at a level far smaller than the atom. And as scientists studied the nature of reality on a smaller and smaller scale, something strange began to happen: The deeper we went into reality, the more it seemed to dissolve from view. The search for the smallest known particle of matter had instead turned up distinct yet elusive little packets of energy, which physicists called quanta.

The Einstein breakthrough comes down to this: Everything is energy. A rock, a planet, a glass of water, your hand, everything you can touch, taste, or smell -- it's all made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of protons and electrons and neutrons, which are made of nothing but vibrating packets of energy.

This is where quantum physics intersects with what I found inside that cardboard box. What physicists found has everything to do with how you are going to create the life of your dreams by building your dream business. For once we know that everything is energy -- that there is no absolute distinction between matter and energy -- then the boundaries between the physical world and the world of our thoughts start to disappear as well.

READING THE MIND OF GOD

In the decades that followed Einstein's theory of relativity, the new quantum physics began to reveal some very strange things. The tiny packets of energy known as quanta exhibited some very peculiar behaviors, including an unexplainable ability to influence one another, a property called entanglement.

In his book Science and the Akashic Field, physicist Ervin Laszlo describes a series of experiments conducted by lie detector expert Cleve Backster. Backster took some white blood cells from the mouths of his subjects and cultured them in a test tube. He then moved the cultures to distant locations, more than seven miles away. He attached lie detectors to the cultures and then performed a series of experiments on his subjects.

In one of his tests, he showed his subject a television program depicting the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This man was a former navy gunner who had actually been present at Pearl Harbor during the attack. When the face of a navy gunner appeared on the screen, the man's face betrayed an emotional reaction -- and at that precise moment, the lie detector's needle seven and a half miles away jumped, exactly as it would have had it been attached to the man himself, and not just to a test tube of his cultured white blood cells miles away.

Subsequent experiments varied the circumstances and increased the distances involved to dozens and even hundreds of miles, with the same astonishing results.

How is such a thing possible? In the language of quantum physics, the particles of the gunner's body are still connected or "entangled" with one another, and no matter how far apart they are separated in space, they will continue to influence one another. In fact, this effect appears to occur at speeds faster than the speed of light, which violates one of Einstein's basic rules.

Scientists dubbed this mind-boggling capacity for inst...

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416561994
• ISBN 13: 9781416561996
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320