Advertising billboards have become part of the landscape in city life and for good reason. Billboards impact buying behavior and they distract you from thinking of other things. A beneficial billboard (aka vision board or treasure map) can accomplish the same end goal only you decide what you're remembering, what you're forgetting and what you're buying. I have lived in the city for most of my life. Billboards are a part of my daily scenery. Thanks to billboards I know at a glance all about new TV shows, new movies and new products. I am reminded every day, sometimes many times a day about what the advertisers want me to remember. In the process of all the distraction, its easy to forget what's truly important to me. Billboards sometimes remind me that I don't have flat abs but they also make me forget that most people don't have flat abs and flat abs are not the key to happiness. Billboards remind me of how cool the latest electronic gadget is and how it does things my gadgets don't do. They also help me to forget that I don't really care about those new features and actually I'm really more interested in simplifying my life and saving money for more important goals. In the 1990's I was simultaneously learning about New Thought philosophies and attending college as a journalism major. I read Catherine Ponder books and I loved her concept of treasure maps, where you paste pictures and words that represent your sought-after goals on a poster board and then look at it each day as a way to make your goals come true. From my vantage point, it seemed that a treasure map was nothing more than a personal billboard. So, when I wrote From Sabotage to Success in the late nineties, I decided to call this idea the Beneficial Billboard partly because it made sense to me and partly because I wasn't sure if Treasure Map was a phrase that Catherine Ponder coined and whether or not I was allowed to use it. Of course lately there is a lot of talk about vision boards (same as a treasure map or beneficial billboard), especially after the movie The Secret and the story of how John Assaraf literally bought his dream home after visualizing it on a collage five years prior. While some conservative types might call all this visualization stuff "the Devil's work" or trying to "play God", the bottom line to me in all this talk about visualization is this: we already know that the concept of billboards works, that's why advertisers pay millions and billions of dollars for billboard advertising. Why not take that multi-million dollar idea that's been time-tested for effectiveness and use it to your favor? All you need is a 99 cent poster board and some magazines. Or, you could just go to google.com and search for images that match what you want to manifest. Print 'em on your color printer, cut and paste (with scissors and glue...the old-fashioned way) and viola, you have a personalized multi-million dollar campaign. Once you've completed your billboard, do what an advertiser would do...put it in a high traffic area, someplace where you're forced to look at it numerous times each day. Watch how your behavior changes over time and how gradually, as you begin to buy in to the images you're focusing on your environment, beliefs and choices change right along with it. Sometimes, you get exactly what you want. What's so evil about that? P.S. I outline the concept of Beneficial Billboards and other visualization techniques in greater detail in my book From Sabotage to Success. If you want to know how to use the concept specifically for weight loss and healthy eating, check out www.donateyourweight.com