Lately, my life has been going very, very well. 

I got engaged to the love of my life.
We bought our first home together.
I got a promotion in the new company I began working with.

I share these big life successes with you because I often write about my struggles.
I usually use this blog to deliberate on difficult life lessons.

But lately, the struggles I have been through have led me to a sense of abundance and success. 

What I have been experiencing lately is a feeling of prosperity.

While I am always willing to learn from mistakes, very often, I don’t seem to learn much from my successes.

And this is what I want to explore in this blog post today.

What can good fortune, positive experiences, and thinking in a prosperous way do for a person? 

The short answer is that it can bring more good fortune, positive experiences, and greater prosperity. 

But we have to be open to receiving prosperity and becoming prosperous. 

What Is Prosperity?

Prosperity sounds like something woo-woo or esoteric. 

It seems like an old-world, spiritual concept that is outside the realms of the ‘real world’ we live in each day.  

The word prosperity originates from the Latin word ‘prosperus,’ which translates to ‘doing well.’ In old French, the meaning is “agreeable to one’s wishes” or “according to one’s hope.”

The modern definition of prosperity is “flourishing or thriving condition, good fortune, wealth, success in anything good or desirable.”

Prosperity Is The Norm

Life is prosperous, but we neglect to notice, or we aren’t aware that prosperity exists all around us. 

Nature is always growing and finding ways to thrive. There is an abundance of air, water, and sunlight. 

Prosperity is like health or peace. It already exists. It is the norm, the baseline of the world we live in. For most of us, living our everyday life, we are surrounded by prosperity.

It’s only when we experience a lack of health or a lack of peace in our lives that we notice it. It’s the same with prosperity. We have it, but we cause ourselves to lose it or start to minimize it. 

Very often, when people live a life without a sense of prosperity, it is because they have learned it from people around them. If people learn that struggle is normal (through their family, friends, or culture), or they are surrounded by people who don’t think in a prosperous way, they will find ways to make their life match it.

Searching For The Source

After three decades of reading modern self-help books, I started to seek the source of the lessons and ideas I had been absorbing.

This search for the origins of self-help led me back to the New Thought movement and books written in the early 1900s. Most of the earliest self-help books were centered around the law of attraction, abundance, and prosperity.

I’ll admit when I first came across the writings on the concept of prosperity, it made me feel resistant. I rolled my eyes and thought it was all a little far-fetched. The way most of these books are written makes it seem like prosperity and the law of attraction are mystical and don’t have any grounding in reality. 

Especially in modern times, where we depend on science for most of our explanations, the early concepts of prosperity, abundance, and attracting what you want seem almost ridiculous.

However, the more I study these old ideas, it seems I can’t deny there is something to it.

The natural state of prosperity, I believe, is linked to the core reasons we want to achieve. We want to be in sync with the prosperity of the world and nature and thrive in our own ways.

Ironically, despite my desire to grow, achieve, and actualize in life, the concept of prosperity is one that I had never really thought much about. 

I always centered my focus on success, achievement, accomplishment, and actualization.

What I am realizing now is that perhaps prosperity is at the core of all of them.

Prosperity Vs. Success

Prosperity is not the same thing as success. This is an important distinction it took me a long time to understand.

Success is about results. Prosperity is the feeling we get from the results.

We often think of people who are successful as being prosperous, but success is not required to be prosperous. 

Bob Marley was once asked if he was a ‘rich man.’ To which he replied, “My richness is life, forever.”
This is the attitude of a prosperous person.

Prosperity is the feeling of experiencing the good in life. It’s similar to a sense of gratitude and enjoyment. 

The feeling underneath any success, achievement, or possession is prosperity.

Enjoying and valuing what you have. Seeing your life as full of blessings. This way of thinking is at the core of what it means to be prosperous.

Seeking Success, Missing Prosperity

Many people (me included) spend a lot of their time trying to become ‘successful.’ 

The idea in our society seems to be at a certain point, you have ‘made it’ or you ‘become successful.’ 

The reality is that for most of us, we already have more than enough to be prosperous. We have the basic building blocks of life in place, such as safety, food, water, shelter, family, friends, etc. 

Very often, the pursuit of a specific goal towards success makes people forget how much they have. 

When we are obsessed with achieving success, we miss out on experiencing prosperity.

Letting Go of Lack

One of the biggest barriers to feeling prosperous is the tendency to focus on what we lack.

Ironically, it’s not lacking something that is the problem. It’s the fear of lack.

Fear of lack is what stops us from flourishing, growing, and enhancing our lives. We view losing money, possessions, status, or security as too risky rather than seeing what we might gain from pushing forward.

Imagine a man who sits in the bar wishing to talk to a woman across the room. He fears the risk of rejection. So he never walks over to talk to her. And so, by attempting to avoid rejection, he creates rejection.  

This is the exact same behavior of most people when it comes to prosperity. 

Instead of seeing opportunities and wealth (the good) as infinite, we fear the lack of something that might come in the short term. 

We see taking action as potentially risking what we have or that we might lose something.

So we don’t act for fear of lack. And by not acting, not pushing for growth, we create the lack. 

While we are busy trying to keep ourselves at a level of ‘less lack,’ we miss out on attracting the greater rewards of life. 

We Have What We Need

The irony is that most of what we fear losing, we could live without. The ‘lack’ we think might come wouldn’t affect us anywhere near as badly as we thought. 

Human beings are remarkably good at surviving and don’t actually need much at all to be fulfilled.

In fact, about 98% of what we think we need is not needed at all. It’s only a very small part of our lives and our well-being that is affected by money and financial results.

Most of our prosperity is in our relationships, our self-esteem, our experiences, and our ability to grow, learn, and develop. 

Prosperity Dissolves Fear

By thinking in a prosperous way, we begin to dissolve the fear of lack in life.

When the fear of lack is removed, it’s similar to removing the fear of rejection. With this fear removed, all that is left is prosperity, which is the true order of nature and life itself. 

Prosperity opens up doors, builds connections, and makes life flow smoother. 

You are actually restricted by the self-protection that limits most of what the world offers. 

This is why prosperous people can lose almost everything and rebuild within a short period of time. Even though they lose money, they keep the ability to generate and attract success, abundance, and prosperity more quickly.

Perhaps more importantly, they aren’t beaten down by or disheartened by a temporary setback or lack. They don’t fear that this current circumstance is permanent. They just find another way to get closer to what they want and know they can have.  

Finding The Flow of Prosperity

What I am learning is that when we live life from a place of prosperity first, we seem to attract more of the success we think we want. 

It seems that prosperity thinking is in sync with achievements, recognition, and fulfillment. Rather than try to force it to happen, we need to let it flow to us.

Instead of torturing ourselves for a result – which we may or may not achieve – it’s more effective to think of our prosperity and receive more.

The concept of becoming prosperous is simple, but it’s also one that requires withholding cynicism. 

In the world we live in today, it’s easy to find empirical or scientific reasons why you can’t achieve what you want.

However, on the other hand, there are millions of people using the simple laws of prosperity and attraction unconsciously every single day.

The people who gain the most rewards and fulfillment in life are completely in-tune with a mindset of prosperity. They are using the power of prosperity thinking to their advantage.

“I Am Prosperity”

While I am still new to this concept of prosperity, I am already seeing and experiencing the benefits of thinking in a prosperous way.

In the book ‘You, Too, Can Be Prosperous’ the writer Robert A. Russell shares the affirmation, “I am prosperity.”

By thinking of yourself as part of the prosperity, you put yourself in a position to create, give, and experience the joys of life.

Over the past few weeks, I have been using the affirmation each day and can attest to the fact that it works to change your focus.

I am sharing this concept with you in the hope that it helps you tune into your personal prosperity. 

There is so much beauty, harmony, abundance, and goodness in the world. 

But it’s up to us to choose to see it and to be prosperous.