Sen Yeter ki İste

The author begins with childhood. At six, a wish letter written to a guardian angel and hidden away brings the longed-for bicycle, in exactly the right colour and with a bell. At nine comes the urge to test something «impossible»: a leading role in a film, so that «everyone will notice me». That same year the role arrives in the film «Lausbubengeschichten», but the director has the voice dubbed by someone else. The lesson the author draws: «Everyone saw me, nobody heard me» — the wish was not stated precisely. This is the book's best and most honest page, showing with humour why it matters to phrase a wish carefully.

Having turned into a «realistic sceptic» as a teenager, the author years later stumbles on Stuart Wilde's book «Miracles» and remembers the childhood «wish factory». Here the book's central thesis appears: «Wishes come true every day, every second. Ours too, all of them. So do our doubts and our thoughts that we are worthless.» The universe is «a giant mail-order store»: it does not distinguish good from bad, it simply delivers. The metaphor is readable, but for a reader who takes it seriously the consequence is grim: every bad thing that happens to you is your own «order».

Rule I is practical: start with small wishes before big ones, because the mind does not resist small things. The famous example is the parking space: as you leave home you send the universe the command «My parking space is on such-and-such street», and when you arrive there is either a free spot or someone is just pulling out. The author and Michaela say they have had no parking problems for decades; when they forget, they tell each other «you ordered too late». Confirmation bias is plain here: spaces found are «miracles», spaces not found are «forgetfulness». The story of buying cheap palm trees from a bankrupt company is explained by the same logic.

The most valuable part concerns emotions. Drawing on the work of the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, the author suggests a simple exercise: look around and ask «what do I like here?», then ask «what don't I like here?», and notice how your mood shifts between the two questions. It is a genuinely useful attention exercise. But it is immediately followed by an unsourced figure: «in a positive mood our perceptual filter opens up by as much as thirty per cent».

The weakest part is «A Little Physics». The reasoning «everything is energy, thoughts are pure energy, therefore thought turns into matter» is a meaningless mixture of scientific concepts; the law of conservation of energy, a «law of resonance» and piano strings are offered as «proof» that wishes come true. Worse, the author writes that «Marie and Pierre Curie observed in 1933 how matter can arise from nothing». Pierre Curie died in 1906; those who observed pair production in 1933 were Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, and the particles came not from «nothing» but from energy.

The most troubling sentence is in the same section: «If we live in a world ruled by scarcity, that want exists because we ordered it. Our neighbour lives in abundance because he chases nothing but wealth, while we are left to experience poverty.» This idea presents illness, poverty and unemployment as the result of personal «wrong thinking» and loads readers in hard circumstances with extra guilt. The Turkish translation reads smoothly, though the editing is uneven in places. In the end the pages on gratitude and clear goals may help; the rest should be read with caution.

• Light, humorous language full of personal stories
• Short, simple exercises at the end of each rule
• Memorable examples of why a wish must be stated precisely