Tim & Phil,
I actually thought the third video was the most interesting in many ways. Of the three in the series, it shows Nick at his most confident and assertive. I liked that a lot. If you listen to it without the picture/video, for large parts of it you might not even pick up the fact that he was disabled in any way.
It’s interesting that the word “teach” comes up in your post Tim. It highlights the very different ways different people view the same things. To me, the terms teaching and educating mean two very different things. I believe teaching is very much about instilling into whilst education is about drawing out of. I raise this point because I don’t believe Nick is trying to teach anyone anything. Rather, in (as he terms it) offering people hope, he is trying to “draw out” the potential in people, encouraging them to move beyond conditioned responses to given situations.
With regard to him voicing his dreams/aspirations, I’m inclined to agree with Phil, i.e. the bigger the better. Not necessarily because of the complexities of the conscious versus the subconscious mind but simply because he doesn’t seem to be fearful of realising them or indeed of not realising them. This total confidence and absence of fearfulness would seem to suggest that his motives for vocalising them are “pure”, i.e. simply to please and inspire himself and not to impress others in any way.
In your own example, if you’d announced on T2W that you were going to make $1,000,000 a week trading futures then yes, I could make some derogatory remark. Equally I might ask you why you felt the need to limit your aspirations to that number.
If your motive for making such a statement was anything other than to inspire yourself and derive pleasure from simply putting your dreams and aspirations out there, i.e. it was for the purpose of receiving some kind of adoration/adulation, then of course you are going to care about my response, even though in practical terms you cannot control the way that anyone reacts to that statement.
I guess in terms of analysing the “practicality” of his vocalised aspirations you only have to look at your other example, i.e. Morris Goodman. On the face of it, which is potentially more damaging and destructive? Telling us that they we can suffer a fracture of the 1st and 2nd vertebrae and subsequently repair the damage simply by thought power or that any of us can aspire to be in a Hollywood blockbuster. I would suggest neither.
Regarding the practicalities of realising such aspirations, particularly referred to by Phil, I would guess that few (if any) of man’s greatest achievements have been accomplished without the setting of hugely ambitious objectives initially. But it’s not as though they were accomplished through only having one big idea and then waiting for it to happen. Following on from the big idea is always a series of baby steps (to use Nick’s term again.
PS. . . . then there's the little matter of trading options! I wonder if he knows about T2W, he might need our help . . .
Gotta love your sense of humour mate.
