Wealth and Abundance

I ran a money working for two months and nothing happened, and I am writing this down because the failure was more instructive than any of the successful months either side of it. The aim was badly specified, the target was a quantity rather than a process, and I was measuring the wrong thing with total confidence. What I had in mind, written on paper, was a monthly figure with no named source. That is a wish with a number attached, and a number is much better than nothing because it is checkable, and much worse than nothing because being checkable makes the absence of a result look like a verdict rather than a gap. I want to be careful about the conclusion here, because the field has a strong interest in the reading where a flat two months proves the mechanism false, and that reading is not available either. What is available is a set of specific errors, each of which I can name, and a third month in which I fixed the aim and the measurement and got a result I still cannot account for. Here is the account.

The working, and the aim I started with

The aim, as written, was a monthly figure. No source, no activity, no deadline attached to anything I would do. It was the standard shape for this kind of work and it is what most of the material in circulation recommends, partly because a number is concrete and partly because a number can be checked without anybody having to know anything about your life.

The trouble is that a number with no source has no mechanism attached to it, and a target with no mechanism can only be pursued by hoping. So the aim was not a working, it was a wish, and the sigil built on top of it encoded a sentence with no behaviour in it. I could not have told you what I was committing to, which is the diagnostic that should have stopped me on day one. When you cannot state the action, the sigil is not a commitment device. It is a decoration on an intention.

The ledger, opened on the same day

The one part I did right. The ledger opened the same day as the charge, before anything had happened, with a fixed layout: opening figure, weekly entries, a closing figure, and a third column recording what I would have done in any case. That last column is the reason the two flat months produced information rather than despair, because it separates the results that the working produced from the results that my ordinary behaviour would have produced anyway.

Opening the ledger on day one also does something that sounds trivial and is not. It fixes the starting figure before the intention has had time to influence the reading. If you open it in week three, when the working has already failed twice, the starting figure is a number you have been looking at for a fortnight, and you will set it accordingly. This is the whole mechanism of a self-fulfilling measurement and it costs nothing to avoid.

The first fortnight, which was ordinary

Nothing happened, and nothing unusual happened either, which is the part worth recording. I expected some sign. The field contains a lot of language about small signs, and I had a standing instruction to look for one, which is a way of guaranteeing that I found one. I found a customer who paid an invoice three days early and I wrote it in the third column, because I would have chased the invoice anyway.

Nothing happened is a normal result for two weeks. The base rate for a change in income in a two-week window is dominated by ordinary variation, and any practice with no effect produces exactly this record. The reason this felt like a failure is that the sign-recording instruction converts a neutral fortnight into a search, and a search over fourteen days over a small number of events will produce something that looks like a signal. The rule I would now write down before starting: decide in advance what counts, and put it in the third column.

Month two, and the number that had not moved

At the end of the second month the closing figure was within noise of the opening figure, and the third column had filled in considerably more than the working column. That is a specific and slightly humiliating result, because it is not merely that the practice did nothing. It is that a good part of the movement in the month was movement I would have generated without the practice, and the fraction attributable to the practice was not identifiable from the record.

There is a version of this that people find encouraging, which is that the flat figure is proof it is not working and therefore not a fraud. There is also a version that finds it discouraging, which is that nothing happened. Both are readings of a two-month window, and the sample is far too small for either. What the two months do establish is that the aim was not specific enough to attribute anything to, and that is a fact about the aim rather than about the working.

Three explanations for a flat two months

The first is the boring one: the aim was a wish, so there was nothing for the practice to do. This is the explanation I would put money on, and the evidence for it is that the third column filled faster than the working column, which is what you would expect from a practice with no behavioural content.

The second is that the target was a quantity, and quantities are downstream of several things that a sigil has no purchase on. The third is that two months is a short window and I should have said so at the start rather than at the end. All three can be true at once and none of them can be distinguished from the record I kept, which is the honest summary of a great deal of the practice material in this area: the errors are identifiable after the fact and unidentifiable during.

Where I looked for the mechanism and found arithmetic

I spent part of the second month trying to work out what was doing the work. The sigil reduces a sentence to a glyph, which is a real operation with a real history, and holding a sentence in an unresolved form is a plausible thing to affect how often you act on it. The number I kept coming back to, the one with the arithmetic in it, is not a mechanism. It is a number chosen because the digits add to a figure that turns up elsewhere, and the practice borrows it rather than claiming it does anything.

That distinction is the one I had blurred and it took me most of the second month to see. There is a version of the abundance material that is honest about this: a number chosen for its internal consistency, a sentence written in the imperative, a glyph made and charged, and a ledger kept on the chance that the combination is doing something. The same material can be read as claiming a causal route from the arithmetic to your bank balance, and nobody in the practice has any evidence either way. Pick the reading deliberately. The reading is what determines whether the sigil is an instruction or an explanation.

The sigil, and what it was doing that month

Almost certainly nothing that I could detect, and the honest account of what it was doing is that it was a compact form of a sentence I had already written down and did not need. The sentence was the operative part. The glyph was a way of not reading the sentence, and not reading the sentence has a plausible value if the sentence would otherwise be renegotiated, and no value at all if the sentence has nothing in it to renegotiate.

In month two the sentence had nothing in it. That is what the flat two months were measuring. The sigil is a good instrument for holding a commitment you have already decided to make, and a poor instrument for deciding whether to make it. If you use it in the first way it does something worth doing. If you use it in the second, you have outsourced the decision to a mark on paper and then waited.

The change I made in month three

Two edits, and the second is the one that mattered. First, the aim moved from a figure to a process: a named activity, a countable number, a named period. I picked the activity because it was the thing I actually controlled and because the number was small enough to hit on a bad week. That is all. The second edit was to the measurement, and it is the one I would do first if I were starting again.

I stopped looking at the total and started looking at the activity. The total is downstream of too many things, it is dominated by ordinary variation over the length of a month, and it is the number most likely to be quoted in a story about a working that succeeded. The activity count has the opposite properties: it is entirely within my control, it is not subject to a favourable month or an unfavourable one, and it cannot flatter me. The result in month three was positive on the activity and ambiguous on the total, which is the shape of a result that should make you suspicious rather than pleased, and it did.

What the record establishes

Four things, in order of how much I trust them. The aim specified a figure with no source, which is a wish, and the third column confirmed that most of the month's movement was not attributable to the practice. A quantity is a poor target for a commitment mechanism because it is downstream of everything. The instrument that worked in month three was the activity count rather than the total, for the reasons above. And the sigil did whatever it does to a sentence, which was nothing when the sentence had no content and which I cannot say more about than that.

None of this shows that the method is void. It shows that it is a method for holding a decision, not for producing an outcome, and that I had the two confused for two months. A great deal of the material in this field could be summarised the same way, and the confusion is not dishonest so much as natural: the tradition is practical in tone, it works on real targets, and the person using it wants a mechanism badly enough that the reading assembles itself without being asked.

A month where nothing changed and the practice stayed

I kept going for a fourth month with the corrected aim, and the total did not move, and the practice stayed. That is the outcome I would most like to report as a success and cannot, and the reason it is interesting is that the two things are independent. The practice was worth doing because it made me do the activity reliably, and it was not worth doing because the figure went up. Nothing in that sentence requires a mechanism for the sigil.

If your practice is only worth continuing when the number moves, you have built a practice that will end the first time the number does not, and the number will not move for reasons that have nothing to do with you. If your practice is worth continuing when the activity happens and the number is watched from a distance, then the practice can survive a bad year, which is a much longer time horizon than most people plan for. Decide which of those two you are in before you start, because you cannot switch later without the switch looking like a failure.

What the practice is for, when it is not earning

I do not know, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. The activity count is the part with a mechanism, in the small and uninteresting sense that a written commitment increases the rate of the behaviour it names. Everything past that is a commitment of faith, and the strength of that faith is not something these two months can calibrate.

The useful thing I took from the failure is narrower and more portable. The aim has to name something you do. The measurement has to be inside your control. And the month in which nothing happens is not a verdict on the practice, it is the most ordinary outcome available, and if you have designed the practice to be abandoned in that month then you have designed it to be abandoned. That much is worth having, and it cost me two months to learn, which is roughly the standard price.

What I would write the first time again

A source, not a figure. The activity I will actually do, named, with a number small enough to survive a bad week, and a period long enough to be worth reading. The ledger opened before the charge, with a third column for what I would have done anyway, and a line in that column for anything I noticed and could not attribute. A sigil built from the sentence after those decisions rather than before them.

And a rule in advance about what would count. Not what would be encouraging, which is a different thing, but what result would be interesting if it went the other way. I did not do this, and it is the reason a neutral fortnight produced a search instead of a measurement. Write the falsifying condition first, then the aim, then the glyph. The order is the whole of what I got wrong.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long before you can tell whether a money working worked?

Longer than most people will wait, and the honest answer is that you cannot tell from one attempt. A month is dominated by ordinary variation and a total is downstream of too many things to attribute. The workable compromise is to measure something inside your control such as a named activity with a count attached, and to watch the total without treating it as the verdict. What you can tell within a month is whether you did the thing you committed to, which is the only part you were ever in charge of.

Why does the third column matter so much?

Because it separates what the practice produced from what your ordinary behaviour produced anyway, and without it every positive result is ambiguous. A favourable movement with a full third column tells you very little. An unfavourable movement with an empty third column tells you something worth knowing. The column is also what stops a random event from being claimed after the fact, since a coincidence you would have generated regardless is now visible as a coincidence.

Is a sigil supposed to do anything on its own?

On the reading I ended up with, its value is in holding a sentence you have already decided to act on, in a form you do not read fluently and therefore do not renegotiate. That is a real and small mechanism, and it attaches to behaviour rather than to outcomes. Read as a way of causing an outcome directly, it is making a claim I could not test in two months of keeping records and would not defend to somebody who asked how I knew.

What should the aim actually say?

Name the action, the number, and the period. A specific activity, a count small enough to meet in a bad week, and a dated window. If you cannot state the action you are committing to, the aim is a wish with a decoration on it and the sigil has nothing to hold. That single test would have saved me the first two months of this account, and it is the test I would put at the top of any advice in this area.

Is it worth keeping the practice when nothing happens?

It is worth keeping if the practice is the activity happening reliably and you are watching the total from a distance. It is not worth keeping if the practice is only legitimate when the number moves, because the number will not move for reasons that have nothing to do with you and you will abandon it at the first flat period. Decide which of those two you are in before you start, because you cannot change later without the change looking like a failure.