Create Your Future by Visualizing It
In 1985, I founded the publishing company that would eventually launch iPhone Life. Soon after its inception, my late wife, Rita, pasted photos of a pond, trees, and a large, unusual-looking home on a piece of white cardboard. She added symbols of prosperity and business success. A year later, amid rural Iowa cornfields, we found ourselves nestled in the woods by a pond in a newly purchased house built by an eccentric fantasy writer. Rita repeatedly used these vision boards to help us focus on goals and create our future.
The visualization process is not unique. Many athletes and others who excel habitually picture their desired outcomes. People create and view their vision boards to maintain focus and enthusiasm for their intentions. Many believe that repeated attention on a clear, uncompromising vision helps create it.
Today’s vision boards often reside on a phone. The iPhone App Store contains a variety of free, paid, and subscriptionbased vision board apps. But none are as full-featured as the web-based app I finally settled on, called Mind Movies ($97), available exclusively at MindMovies.com.
Instead of the static graphic or slideshow most provide, Mind Movies allows you to create a multimedia video including photos, graphics, short videos, slide shows, audio tracks, subliminal messaging, affirmations, quotations, and music.
About a year ago, I self-published my book, Meditating Entrepreneurs – Creating Success from the Stillness Within. Because Rita passed away around the time of publication, I never marketed it. Recently, I decided to create a vision board to envision the book becoming a best-seller. I gathered my book cover graphics, photos of meditating entrepreneurs, clips from my audiobook, and a built-in Mind Movies fireworks video. I then used the iPhone’s built-in Voice Memos app to record affirmations like “Meditating Entrepreneurs, a perennial best-seller, sells itself” and “Readers create lives of inner peace and outer abundance” while Beethoven’s Ode to Joy played in the background. I uploaded those to Mind Movies and created a slide show. On some of the slides, I wrote affirmations in bold color and large type. I then used the app’s tools to sync the audio clips. Finally, I added app-supplied white noise with subliminal messaging about success. The result was a three-minute reel with special effects that I enjoy regularly watching on my iPhone.
I was able to use Mind Movies on my iPhone and iPad with Chrome (Safari proved buggy), but it was much easier on a PC. Mind Movies also works on a Mac. Unlike the less expensive vision board apps found in the App Store, I could not access my iPhone photo or music libraries directly in Mind Movies—I had to download the files first. Still, the ability to make multimedia movies made Mind Movies worth the purchase. Mind Movies also has a free iPhone app that contains some premade movies, motivational tools, and options to share with a community of users. Unfortunately, it is not integrated with the online app.
After a week of watching my movie, with little effort or resistance, I found myself restarting my Twitter feed and updating my website, something I have not done since 2019.
Easy to use and reasonably intuitive, Mind Movies comes with plenty of short video tutorials. At times, I found the app cumbersome, but overall it does a nice job of giving nontechnical users the ability to create short multimedia movies. Beware that Mind Movies founders and “Law of Attraction” proponents Natalie and Glen Ledwell aggressively market their products.
You can email me at hal@iphonelife.com for a copy of my vision board movies and a free copy of the audio and ebook chapter where I chronicle this publishing company’s unusual origins.
Hal Goldstein founded iPhone Life’s original publishing company, Thaddeus Computing, in 1985. You can contact him by email at hal@thaddeus.com or @halgoldstein on Twitter. You can find the print, digital, and audio versions of his book Meditating Entrepreneurs- Creating Success from the Stillness Within at Amazon.