[Acting Like Godot]

My current answer is -

you can use the LOA to influence other specific people, but only if they don't hold inconsistent thoughts.

1st Example - You would like John Smith to do X. But John Smith strongly wants to do Y instead. You cannot "LOA" him into choosing to do X.

2nd Example - You would like John Smith to do X. John Smith is ambivalent about doing X or Y, and doesn't mind doing either of them. In such a case, it is possible for you to "LOA" him into doing X (or Y, if that is what you intend).

The difficulty of using LOA on other people is that each person is at the centre of his own reality. He is the person who is most present in his own reality; who interacts the most with his own reality; and supplies the most thought concerning his own reality; and who has been forming beliefs and thoughts about his own reality, since the day he was born.

Whereas you are, at most, someone who talks to him a few hours a day, and thinks about him a few hours a day. Thus you have a very low probability of offering enough thought to make a specific change in his reality, where his current thought patterns are already set against such a change.

3rd example - Consider the often-discussed situation where a LOA practitioner wants to use LOA to attract a partner. As all the more-experienced LOA people here already know, the best way to do this is to focus on attracting a generic person with the characteristics you desire (eg "tall, handsome, generous, with a sense of humour and plays golf"), rather than a specific person (say, John Smith) even though John Smith may happen to be tall, handsome, generous, with a sense of humour and a keen golfer).

The simple reason is that it is much more probable that there is someone in the universe who meets your criteria AND whose own thoughts are compatible (or at least not inconsistent) with having a relationship with someone like you;

than it is probable that John Smith, who meets these criteria, happens to have thoughts which are compatible (or at least not inconsistent) with having a relationship with someone like you.

The above discussion can actually be seen as an offshoot from the broader LOA principle of focusing on the outcome, not the "how". For example, if you want money, focus on money, and leave the "how" to the universe. If you start dictating specifically how the money is to come, you're choking off a range of other possibilities by which the universe could have orchestrated the money to come to you