The Vacuum Law of Prosperity: Why I'm Clearing Space Before July
The garage-cleaning metaphor that explains why your prosperity hasn't shown up yet
We’re closing out June, and every year around this time I feel the same pull, not toward doing more, but toward letting go of what’s no longer serving me. Summer has a way of doing that. The pace slows down just enough for you to notice what you’ve been dragging around all year.
I want to talk to you today about something I learned almost thirty years ago, in a hotel ballroom in Acapulco, from a man who changed the trajectory of my entire career.
The man who coined it
In October of 1998, I gave my very first paid speaking engagement. I shared the stage that week with Bob Proctor, a legend in personal development, a man I’d go on to share platforms with three more times over the years. After my talk, I walked up to his table and he signed his book for me. You Were Born Rich. I still have it. 1998, his signature, right there on the page.
Bob is the one who first used the phrase that’s stayed with me ever since: the vacuum law of prosperity.
It’s a simple idea, but most people get it backwards. They think prosperity is something you chase, something you add. Bob taught me the opposite. Prosperity is something you make room for. You don’t fill a space that’s already full. You create the vacuum first, you clear out the old, and then, and only then, does the new have anywhere to land.
I was so moved by that idea that the following year, in 1999, I recorded my very first audio program built around it. I called it Principles for Prosperity. It started as a cassette program, then became one of the first CD sets I ever produced, back in 2000. Some of you reading this still have that content sitting in your back office today. Twenty-six years later, I’m still teaching the same core principle, because it’s never stopped being true.
Prosperity is not a number, it’s a flow
The word itself comes from the Latin prospero, to be in the flow. Not to force, not to grind, not to white-knuckle your way to a result. To flow.
And here’s the part most people skip past: you cannot be in the flow while you’re in resistance. If you’re carrying anxiety, fear, doubt, unresolved grief, a traumatic relationship, or a mountain of debt you’ve stopped looking at directly, you are not in the vacuum. You’re full. You’re full of old material, and there’s no room for the new to arrive, no matter how much you ask the universe for it.
I’ve watched this play out in thousands of people over the years I’ve been coaching. The pattern is always the same. We recreate the same situations, over and over, to fulfill the same set of feelings we’re used to carrying. Not because we’re broken, but because the body and the subconscious don’t know the difference between a feeling we chose and a feeling we’re simply more familiar with. Familiar feels safe, even when familiar is the thing keeping us stuck.
Sabotage is not a character flaw
If you’ve worked with me for any length of time, you’ve heard me talk about sabotage. It’s not a personality defect. It’s a strategy, an old, outdated one, that your nervous system built a long time ago to keep you average, because average doesn’t get noticed, and not getting noticed used to feel like safety.
The problem is, averageness has a shelf life. Eventually the bills catch up to it. The relationship catches up to it. The body catches up to it. And what feels like “staying safe” slowly becomes its own form of suffering.
I think about it like a garage you haven’t cleaned out in years. You can’t get your car in there anymore, but instead of clearing space, you keep buying more boxes. The vacuum law says: stop adding boxes. Throw out what no longer serves you. Some of it goes to the thrift store, some of it just goes in the trash, but it goes. You cannot create the allow-space for what you actually want while you’re still standing in the clutter of what you used to need.
Focus is not hocus pocus
One of the things I come back to constantly, especially this time of year, when distraction is everywhere, is that focus is simply the discipline of separating yourself from the outside noise. It’s quieting the inner critic. It’s refusing to rehearse a future that hasn’t happened, and refusing to relitigate a past that’s already over.
David Hawkins, whose work I keep coming back to in Power vs. Force, talks about consciousness as something measurable, a frequency you either rise into or stay beneath. You don’t need to take that literally to feel the truth of it. When you tell yourself the same limiting story long enough, your body starts to believe it’s fact. And when you finally release that story, not analyze it, not intellectualize it, but actually release it, something in your physiology changes too.
That’s the whole practice. Breathe. Release. Let go.
What this means for you, right now
If you’re heading into July carrying the same debt, the same draining relationship, the same self-talk that’s kept you “barely getting by” instead of excelling, this is your signal. Not to do more. To clear more.
Look at who you’re surrounding yourself with. Look at what you’re consuming, the people you let mentor you, even informally, through what you read, watch, and listen to. Change your circle of influence before you try to change your circumstances, because the circumstances usually follow the circle, not the other way around.
I’ll be bringing this exact philosophy, vacuum law, prosperity consciousness, and the letting-go work that makes room for it, into the Master Connector Program this season, and I’m finalizing the roster for the next Millionaire Blueprint event this July. If you’ve been on the fence about joining either, consider this your nudge. Some doors only stay open while you’re still standing in front of them.
Breathe. Release. Let go.
— Jeffery Combs is the founder and president of Golden Mastermind Centers Inc. and has coached over 12,000 clients over a 28-year career. He offers one-on-one coaching and a limited lifetime coaching program. Visit goldenmastermind.com or call 209-649-1562 to learn more.