Acting Inside and Outside

Teachers of The Secret seem a little ambiguous regarding the question of whether we should act to fulfill our aspirations or wait for the universe to respond. I found this useful explanation on http://humanscience.wikia.com/wiki/The_Secret_Project:
The ego is an organization of consciousness that enables the individual to gather personal experience and organize knowledge from it. It creates a center of concentration with sufficient intensity for the universe to evolve through it. That which is greater than the ego sense is referred to by ‘‘The Secret’’ as the universe. In the measure the individual suspends the action of his ego, the universe is able to act. When the individual takes external initiative to accomplish, the response of the universal is minimal. When the individual refuses to take initiative and invokes the universal consciousness to act, the response is maximum.
A Dutch entrepreneur on a spiritual quest realized the value of education and took a degree at the age of 40. Many years later he went on to take an M.B.A. Out of idealism, he offered voluntary service to a distinguished international academic organization. After about ten years of such service, he was made an Associate Fellow, an honor he had never imagined possible. He was devoid of ambition and only wanted to give. His mentor proposed that he take a Ph.D. so that he might eventually qualify to become a full Fellow in the organization. As a person who does not know his own inner potential, he found the proposal intimidating. After hesitating for years, he finally consented to register for Ph.D. and spent over a year preparing his proposal. Before he even submitted the proposal, he was unexpectedly elected as a Fellow of the organization. His emotional willingness brought the result even before he began to act. When the results we seek are far beyond our present capacities and resources, but the intensity of our aspiration is sufficiently great, life waits for us to give up striving for the result and then suddenly presents us with all the necessary conditions for accomplishment. This process is dramatically illustrated by events in Twenty Years After, a sequel to Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers. After the execution of the English king Charles I by Cromwell, Charles’ son escaped to Holland where he lived in exile, impoverished and without a following. Ten years later Cromwell died and there was a fight for succession. Young Charles II saw his last hope of regaining the throne. He traveled to France incognito to seek money or troops from young Louis XIV with which he could attempt to regain power. When Louis refused him, he fell into despair and abandoned any hope of restoring the monarchy in England. Within a few hours of his meeting with Louis, he had a chance encounter with a French courtier from whom he learned that the exact sum of money he sought to launch a campaign was hidden by Charles I before his death and is now available for his son. Within a month of these events, Charles II regained the throne of England without even having to expend that money. When the last hope is lost, one exhausts his efforts and forgets it. Forgetting the goal is to withdraw one’s own mental influence, allowing the universe to accomplish in one’s life as it chooses without the limitations of our egoistic understanding