One of the people I enjoy listening to the most is Zig Ziglar. Inspiring, funny, down-to-earth speaking that’s almost guaranteed to get you to sit up and take notice.

One of his best-known stories is about the flea trainer.

You see, if you were so inclined, you can train fleas. Really. You can hold up a glass filled full of fleas and not a single one of them will go over the edge of the glass.

If you were to fill up an ordinary mason jar full of fleas, keeping them all in there would be about as easy as herding cats. Jumping this way and that, soon your glass would be emptied of fleas, and your hair would be full (fleas can jump quite a long way).

You cover the top of the jar with a piece of clear plastic (don’t worry, there’s enough air in there for the fleas, in case a suffocating flea would bother you). You leave the covered jar on the counter for a while, show your friends how many hundreds of fleas you’ve caught when they come over for the weekly poker game. The fleas are jumping all around, hitting the plastic, trying to get out. They’re hitting that plastic so hard, you think they may just knock the plastic right off of the jar. But it’s ok, you’re safe.

So, after several hours of friendly (!) poker, one of your buddies has lost in a major way, and he’s feeling a little vindictive. To get his revenge, he’s decided to take the lid off your flea jar and unleash the fleas of a thousand camels in your house before he leaves. On his way out the door, when no one is looking, he slips the plastic off, slips it under his coat, and slinks out the door.

After clearing the house out, and cleaning the mess up, you spot the flea jar, now sans cover.

It’s the funniest thing. Every single flea (you just KNOW this) is still in the jar! They’re still jumping up, falling down, jumping again. But they’re only jumping as high as the edge of the jar. Even though a flea can jump a foot or more in the air, these jar-bound fleas are only jumping a few inches.

They’ve been trained. They jumped against that plastic ceiling, whacked their head. Tried it again. Maybe 20 times they tried. Maybe 200, who knows. But what got drilled into the skulls of every little flea was the fact that even though they couldn’t see it, there was a ceiling over their environment. They really love to jump, but their heads hurt. So what do they do?

The fleas are now jumping only as high as they think they can without hitting their head on that cover. But the cover’s not there! Do the fleas know that? No, they’re not that smart. They’ve whacked their heads against the ceiling so many times that there’s no way they’re going to try it again, even to test their belief that they can’t get out, can’t get away, can’t break free.

Even when one or two or three of their fellow fleas misjudge their jumps and go over the lip, the rest of the fleas are thinking, “oh, he just found a hole in the cover” or, “gadzooks, he’s lucky!” Then they keep on jumping only so high as to not hit their heads on that celing again. Never! They’re just not going to do it. Even though the rewards for getting out of the jar may be numerous and fulfilling, most of the fleas are not even going to try to get out of the jar any longer.

Now I have a question for you: Are YOU acting in your life like a trained flea?

If you want to shatter your self-image and confidence, judge yourself against someone with different talents or experiences than you.

Really, you don’t need to be comparing yourself to anyone else anyway, at least in a judgemental fashion. But if you do, make sure you do it in a way that’s going to empower you, inspire you. If you’re 5′-8″ and weigh 155lbs., is it really fair to compare yourself to a professional NFL player? We’d all agree that’s a pretty stupid standard to try and hold yourself up to, yet we do just that every day.

You look at someone who’s wildly successful and you think, “I could never be like that. They’re so smart, so well-spoken, so talented.” Is that a helpful comparison? Hardly. All it serves to do is to make you feel worse.

On the other hand, what if you look at this other person and say to yourself, “Wow. They’re really no different than me. They haven’t done anything that I can’t do. All I have to do is do the same things they did! I’m going to find a way to get the knowledge they have and apply it to me!”

Use comparisons to help you drive yourself to the next level, instead of to knock yourself back down to where you used to be.

I watched an amazing, fantastic, profound, awesome,…video program last night. It filled a void in my heart, in my knowledge. It tells the ‘why’ of why things happen — the reason that things happen the way they do. It is the secret to everything you want to be, to have.

Truthfully, the show didn’t add a great deal to my knowledge. But — the way the knowledge was presented made a great impact, and hearing the viewpoints in a different form brought some of the concepts back to the front of consciousness.

What is The Secret?

The secret is this: thoughts become things.

We create our world by our thoughts. Good or bad, abundant or sparse, joyous or angry. We draw to us that which we think about. What is this secret? It is called the law of attraction. We attract what we think about all the time, what we focus on.

Agree or not with some of the explanations put forth in the film, it doesn’t matter. The end result, the manifestation of this law into reality, is undeniable. Explain it by calling it ‘the abundance that God intends for you’, or ‘the abundance and joy that is the natural state of the Universe’, or ‘joy and abundance is the result of the projection of electrical energy of positive power’. It doesn’t matter how you explain it, because it’s there. Think of it how you will.

There is power within you that is greater than the world.

Learn more at thesecret.tv. It will, if you embrace it, change your life.