The IDEA™
excerpted from ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True,
Part 2, Chapter 12, by Elena Greco
Image by Bee Felten-Leidel on Unsplash
Typical reading time: 2 minutes
August 26, 2024
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The virtues, like the Muses, are always seen in groups.
~ Jane Porter
Now we get to the heart of manifesting, the secret sauce that makes you an artist of manifesting: the IDEA™. That acronym reminds us of the four crucial elements we need to enlist in order to manifest our dreams.
In the last chapters, we began to flesh out a simple strategy for manifesting our Intention. Now that we have a working Plan, and we know how to challenge obstacles that arise, let’s add a touch of magic!
The magic, of course, is you! When you bring your best self, the highest version of you that you can be, to your Intention, there can be no stopping you from manifesting it! While taking action is a necessary part of accomplishing anything, an equally important, sometimes-overlooked element in manifesting is the actor—that is, who you are in the world.
We want to em-power ourselves in every way we can if we want to make magic powerfully. And that means that we bring our best self to every step we take toward being power-ful and manifesting our Intention. Most of us seldom utilize our full potential except in extraordinary circumstances. We call someone who pulls another person from a burning building a hero. They might not previously have thought of themselves as someone who could pull another person from a burning building, but that quality resided in them all along, didn’t it? It didn’t come from nowhere. The emergency called forth something in them that was always there, something that they didn’t see in themselves until circumstances so urgently required that they access it, that they stepped over their usual self-limiting thoughts and accessed their inherent ability. In that moment, they embodied the greatness that already existed in them.
Let’s not require a burning building in order to manifest our potential, all right? Instead, let’s look at the possibility that we can rise to our current circumstances in a way that we haven’t previously seen ourselves as capable of doing, and that we can do that regularly, so that living heroically becomes a habit.
An important means of living heroically so that we can manifest our dreams is to embrace four virtues. I call this means to heroic living the IDEA™, an easy way to remember these essential ingredients of making magic: integrity, depth, excellence and authenticity. Each of these ingredients is intertwined with the others; these four ingredients comprise the “special sauce” that makes magic!
Next, we’ll learn how each of these virtues works and how we can develop and embrace them in our work.
* To learn more about the full strategy referenced above and how to implement it,
read ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True.
