When you imagine something – a project, a relationship, a home – you don’t make it real by simply wishing for it. You make it real by creating channels that allow it to flow into your life.
This is the core of The Certain Way, my modern take on Wallace D. Wattles’ 1910 classic The Science of Getting Rich. Wattles taught that we can either live competitively – fighting for scraps – or creatively – offering value and allowing good things to come to us.
Putting channels in place can be as simple as picking up the phone to arrange coffee with a friend or as complex as years of study, networking, and preparation for a world-changing project. The principle is the same:
You can’t receive rain if you don’t have a bucket under the downpipe.
This isn’t about passively waiting for luck, and it’s not about aggressive acquisition. It’s about holding a clear vision, taking deliberate steps, and making space for what you want to arrive.
We keep calling it burnout, but I think we need to tell the truth.
What many creators are feeling right now isn’t just exhaustion – it’s grief.
Grief for the promise we bought into. For the dream that content creation would be fulfilling, sustainable, and meaningful. Grief for the parts of ourselves we gave away in return for metrics, likes, and a whisper of success.
I’ve lived through it. I know what it feels like to wake up hollow, to not recognise yourself in the mirror, and to wonder if there’s anything left to say.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
You’re not done. You’re not broken.
You’re just grieving.
And like the soil the farmer leaves left fallow for a season, you will recover and create again.
Building a personal brand, chasing followers, or playing algorithm games is not creativity, it’s performance.
Real creativity starts with an idea, not one you invent, but one you encounter. Ideas come looking for you, because you’ve done the work, lived the life and because you’ve tuned your mind to the right frequency.
You don’t own the idea.
You collaborate with it.
You bring it into form as best you can.
You may never finish your masterpiece, but you might be the one who plants the seed that one day inspires a Mozart, a Turing, a Picasso or someone no one’s heard of yet – someone who changes everything.
That’s legacy, and legacy doesn’t need attention.
It needs truth, commitment, and presence.
Create to reach into Nature, into mind, into meaning, into something real.
And teach others to do the same.
The more you walk, the more you make a path for others to follow.
This is the Certain Way.
Legacy, not influence.
Faith in form.
Gratitude for the gift.
And the quiet, disciplined work of bringing ideas into the world with integrity, and without apology.
Absolute certainty invites Hubris and inevitably, Nemesis.
In Greek mythology Hubris was the worst kind of pride or self-congratulatory pomposity, that would call to Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance and retribution, to come and sort things out. in short – Pride comes before a fall.
Certainty, however, keeps us on a chosen path, heading in a chosen direction, doing what we want knowing that there will be a preferred outcome.
The trouble starts when doubt or uncertainty enters the room.
There is an everyday kind of certainty that allows us to run our lives. The Sun comes up in the morning. The TV works when you switch it on. Trump will be grabbing the headlines. Coffee keeps you awake at night.
The smallest thing can upset your certain daily routine. The milk has gone off. Someone ate the last slice of bread The coffee machine broke. It spirals out from there into a day of chaos.
It doesn’t need to, but that’s how it happens. Can you, in that moment, think, “I’m so grateful that there is clean water in the tap, that cornflakes taste really interesting with orange juice or that crisp bread is a great and handy alternative to toast in the morning.”
The bigger the disruption, the harder to stay grateful and grounded.
In our life, at the moment, we are moving house and downsizing. How is a roomy family home going to fit into where we are going? Will we make friends? Will old friends come to see us? Will there be problems in the new neighbourhood? Are we doing the right thing? What if, what if what if…?
To try and calm my brain down, I go to read The Certain Way, my own book based of Wallace Wattles’ book, The Science of Getting Rich. Surely I have some advice in there for myself?
As I read, I feel uneasy. Who am I to put this book and idea out there into the world if I can’t be certain of what lies ahead in the next few months?
My advice to someone in the same situation sounds a bit glib. Be grateful for the fantastic opportunities that are opening up for you. For this lovely new house that you have found, and that has found you. A house that is calling you to this new neighbourhood, a surprise area that was not on the list of choice places to move to.
It’s not just about the person moving, it’s also about the place making room for you to enter, it had to be ready for you as much as you were ready to move.
Be thankful for all the new opportunities and experiences that will open up. the closeness to family, new friends, new ideas.
Be thankful for the opportunity to go through all the stuff that fills our life and house at the moment. To choose the things we love and say goodbye to the things we have no need for anymore. To thank our old things for their service and send them on their way to a new home, if possible, or back into the system of creative recycling of the world.
That is not an easy message to hear when problems are pouring your way, and it really does sound glib to just say, “Don’t worry about stuff that hasn’t happened yet and work your way though the stuff that needs attending to in a timely fashion.”
But that is the way to handle it – he says, as his wife comes in the room and talks about how we might keep some curtains we hate because they will cover that new window until we get new blinds instead.
In all the maelstrom of chaos and uncertainty, try to keep a tiny part of the brain ticking over, reminding you that there is a certain way, to not fall into the stream of doubt and be swept away in the flood. To find a tiny piece of higher ground and wait.
One of those everyday certainties is that the flood will recede, the sun will come out again and the ground will dry up, ready for you to carry on in a sure and certain way.
The ideas in The Certain Way have been developed through observation, which is the basic tool of science. We look and observe and ask questions. Then we form a hypothesis, test it and observe again. Refining all the time until we come up with an answer that holds and predicts certain outcomes.
Science is a recent invention. Before Aristotle wrote his book Physics in 350BCE, science was called philosophy – (Physics means Nature in Greek.)
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others called themselves Natural Philosophers – then in 1834, the term scientist was coined by William Whewell, and natural philosophy gradually gave way to modern scientific disciplines – physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
Throughout all these ages, wisdom has also come about through observation, hypothesis and testing. If it works keep it and let everyone know – or keep it as secret knowledge to gain power over others!
Things that work continue to be taught and get passed down, they don’t fade away.
Religions have books and tablets of stone that force an unchangeable hypothesis on their followers – often with the threat of death for non-believers. Religions are intractable and get stuck in power loops of hidden and secret knowledge, like businesses that hide their trade secrets.
Laws are only laws until they are broken, proved to be wrong or shown to be questionable.
But laws are useful while they last, they give us a structure to work with at a moment in time. New ideas and revised laws allow change and progress.
Laws carved in stone allow for power to some over the misery of others.
Some ideas have remained strong and have been passed down, successfully and repeatedly, through the millennia. They provide structures that allow us to live together and progress, adding to the world as co-creators with Nature. For instance:
The Golden Rule – do unto others as they would do unto you – is probably the simplest and most long lasting of all these philosophical ideas.
Working with the grain of Nature – going with the flow, is another.
Setting sail on the tide of opportunity.
Doing a good job and giving value.
The ten commandments are a pretty good basic law for getting along with one another and surviving in a pre-modern world.
And then, from somewhere, comes Gratitude.
Gratitude has most likely grown out of reciprocal behaviour – “thanks for helping out with my harvest, I’ll help you with yours.” That becomes, “thanks for the harvest because it’s a good one this year… after that awful famine last year.”
That becomes thanks to Nature for the harvest, and then thanks to a father-like god – a humanisation of Nature – an old guy in a flowing white beard, sitting on a cloud.
Gratitude proves to be an effective force, so it gets taught and passed down.
In the UK, where I was brought up, gratitude was taught as a habit of manners – “Say, please and thank you.” It was ingrained into us as ritual.
Gratitude can brim over as a felt emotion, when something wonderful happens.
Here in the UK, we were not taught about Gratitude as a constant force in a constant field – a force that binds thoughts and ideas and brings them into reality.
At school, we said grace before and after meals. “For what we are about to receive/have just received, may the Lord make us truly thankful.”
Waiting for the Lord to make us truly thankful, is like waiting outside the head teacher’s study. It feels like we’ve done something wrong. The Lord is going to MAKE us truly thankful whether we like it or not!
It is the first part of the grace that says: “For what we are about to receive,” that is the key.
Gratitude that comes before receiving is Deep Gratitude. It is the faith or certainty that the meal will come, that tomorrow will be a good day, the new car is being built, the architect is right now drawing up the plans of the house you will one day live in.
Deep gratitude works in a scientific way as a field, like a kind of magnetic glue that mixes up the elements that come together to realise imagined thoughts. Sustained gratitude allows the glue to set, and so to turn thought into reality.
So gratitude, with a small g, is about giving thanks for what you have, it keeps you feeling positive and happy with what you have already received.
Gratitude, with a capital G, is about receiving. It’s an emotional commitment to the future, to the realisation of thought. It is about doing things that allow the thought to move towards you as a realisation. It’s about creating ways to receive what you have imagined or asked for when it comes. Opening channels along which things may come to you.
In a way, it could be described as a sort of work ethic.
Gratitude can be seen in the wisdom that has been passed down – wisdom that has proved its worth through observation, wisdom that has found a place in the pantheon of knowledge, that you can choose to make a part of your daily life.
It’s your choice – “The Lord” is not going to make you choose.
This old wisdom lives in phrases like, “Ask and it shall be given. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door will be opened unto you.”
And if you find this whole process a bit unclear, a bit nebulous, then the ancients had an answer to that too, in statements such as, “God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.” (If the word, God, makes you nervous – just change it to Nature.)
Modern science confirms what ancient humans intuited:
Practising gratitude rewires the brain for optimism, resilience, and trust.
It reduces cortisol, boosts dopamine, and strengthens social bonds.
It’s not just about being nice – it’s a creative force.
Like everything that changes your daily practice or rituals, it’s not easy to be Grateful all the time or even to remember to be Grateful all the time. It needs to become a habit and habits are created through repetition.
Deep Gratitude needs to be a lived thing, a daily being in the world – in Nature – grateful for the opportunity that has been given to us, to be co-creators with Nature.
It is the daily practicing of Gratitude as a force in the field of creativity that makes our thoughts become things. And it is the daily work of making ways to receive that brings things into our lives.
The Certain Way is a way of looking at and understanding the world we live in that you may not have considered before but might find helpful in this crazy time we are living through with all the noise and burnout of internet platforms, algorithm fed gloop and pings and notifications that drown our attention – It’s leading a lot of people to burn-out. I know. I’ve been there and I’m on a mission to find another way.
The Certain Way is inspired by a powerful book I came across about 20 years ago. It was written over a hundred years ago and it’s called The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles. He was looking for answers in a time of massive change that was not unlike today. The Science of getting rich was a clever clickbait title, but it’s not actually about chasing money, it’s about clarity, creating value, taking action, and working with the grain of Nature.
Wattles taught that the way you think and act has real consequences — that thought, sustained with clarity and certainty, sets reality in motion.
Because when you act with purpose, Nature responds.
Not instantly. Not magically. But reliably — like a tiny seed becomes a tree.
The Certain Way is not about belief systems, positive thinking, or waiting for the universe to deliver from a catalogue of goodies.
It’s a practical method for living and creating that feels grounded and real. The science in Wattles book is about the certainty of following a scientific formula. Wattles was fascinated by science, which was in a creative turmoil in his time. He grasped the basic ideas of quantum physics that was then in its infancy. It’s all about the way that form – that is things you can touch – are all made from one creative substance that responds to thought to create the thing that is imagined.
Think about it… everything that is man-made began as a simple idea. Even the things you can’t touch, like love and truth and justice and the sound of music that moves you. They all started with an idea.
The Universe is nature’s idea. We humans have been gifted the power of thought by Nature that wants to work with us to create something spectacular as co-creators with Nature. When you grasp that idea, anything becomes possible.
The Certain Way is not about greed or a flamboyant lifestyle, it’s about becoming rich in all the things you need to fulfil your potential – to live your life to the full so you can learn and play and create and look after your family and make something of yourself and leave a lasting legacy to nature, humanity and the world.
We’ve been trained to compete, to scramble, to chase attention.
But that’s the fast road to burnout.
The Certain Way is about coming back to the roots — reclaiming your time, your attention, and your voice.
It’s about making things that matter, on your own terms, in collaboration with Nature — not working against it.
It’s not a rulebook. It’s more of a toolkit.
A way of thinking and acting in the world that helps you move forward with clarity and certainty — one real step at a time.
I’m not teaching from a pulpit or a mountaintop. I’m building this idea in public — with a book, with videos, and with real-world action.
If it resonates, you’re not alone.
You don’t have to play the algorithmic game.
You can choose a different way.
The Certain Way.
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You can get the pdf ebook here, right away: The Certain Way.
Fallow Ground began as a place to pause — a quiet corner to reflect after decades of creative work. I thought it would be the foundation for something new. But the deeper truth is, I’d already done the hard thinking. I wasn’t resting. I was germinating.
This book – and the philosophy behind it – grew slowly over several years. It’s a modern rewrite of Wallace Wattles’ 1910 classic The Science of Getting Rich, stripped of its mysticism and reframed through the lens of science, experience, and practice. I’m not here to sell courses or preach a system. I’m simply sharing something that has worked for me – and might work for you.
Oh, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last few years.
That thinking became more focused when I finally accepted that I’d burned myself out – and started trying to understand why.
I wasn’t partying or drifting. I was burning the candle at both ends – and in the middle too – chasing ideas, jumping on trends, trying this and that in a breathless, scattergun way. Always working. Always reacting.
As you’ll discover, The Certain Way is rooted in a book that’s helped me again and again: Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich, first published in 1910.
That book has pulled me back on course more times than I care to admit. I’d get fired up, start doing the work, feel things improving… and then I’d slip back, thinking I’d outgrown it. But every time, it returned – and every time, it set me straight.
Eventually, I stopped treating it like a first-aid kit and started seeing it for what it really is – a philosophy.
That’s when things deepened. I began to look into the science behind Wattles’ thinking and realised how prescient he was. In his day, physics was on the cusp of reimagining reality. And in some ways, Wattles was already there.
Today, quantum physics is turning to philosophy for its next breakthroughs – not for answers, but for better questions. As the equations get stranger, it’s no longer just about data. It’s about meaning, interpretation, and how we define reality itself.
That’s when I knew I had to rewrite Wattles’ book for our time – and start talking about it.
At first, I thought the project would grow out of a period of creative rest. I created Fallow Ground – a website and a concept – to explore burnout and recovery. The idea was to offer The Certain Way as something quietly emerging from that space.
But at some point, I realised I was already moving. The fallow period had done its job. The ground wasn’t resting anymore – it was growing.
Fallow Ground was a great idea. But I didn’t want to get stuck in it. I’d already moved on.
You’ll find some of the earliest blog posts here came from Fallow Ground. They still matter – and if you want to dig deeper, they’re here. I may return to the fallow metaphor again in the future.
But for now, I want everything focused.
I have a vision for where this is going. It’s big. It’s daunting. But there’s only one direction that makes sense now.
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