![[Pasted image 20250815224454.png]] ## The ✨ manifesting ✨ girls are right Manifesting gets written off as the hobby of chronically-online lifestyle influencers. Endless share of tiktoks, some people you follow that posture as witches, etsy shops with bones and crystals, affirmations. You might be tempted to see it as the downstream effects of the tumblrization of some places of the internet but I argue you'd be wrong, the core idea is universal. Strip it down: you picture a desire, hold it in your mind, and if conditions line up, the universe *delivers*. That framing is magical thinking, but there is a useful truth underneath, somewhere. Humans **need** more than spreadsheets and milestones to pull off difficult goals. Without some story, ritual or sense of significance, most people cannot stick with the grind long enough to get anywhere. The manifesting girls have that part right. If you are in the right demographic and open YouTube, the algorithm will shove you toward the latest iteration of dream-seller: the alpha male guru. Through trial and error they have now clearly evolved into two different species with the same genus: Andrew Tate that flashes supercars and expensive watches and Jordan Peterson that quotes Jung and lobster hierarchies. The aggressive and the intellectual as the two sides a young man can choose. ![[Pasted image 20250816111830.png]] Distilled: male identity has to be rebuilt because modern society has lost its way. Visualize yourself as successful, ambitious, develop personal discipline and you will become the alpha male you always were supposed to be, you will get a high value woman (or no woman at all if you're a based *sigma male*). It's just manifesting stripped of the gendered connotations, repackaged and sold to a different market. Structured visualization of a desired outcome, deliberate adoption of a winning mindset, and the belief that mental rehearsal shapes real-world results. Whenever you find a practice shared widely, even by groups with very little intellectual overlap, chances are that you stumbled on something deeper than culture-war aesthetics maybe something fundamental to the human experience. ### The case for manifesting Visualization fills a gap that pure rational planning cannot. The recipe for productivity is pretty intuitive: Break goals into steps, track metrics, optimize systems and repeat. But if that were true and it worked for most people, management would be a far less profitable skill to have. The truth is that this only works on paper. Without a story to carry you through plateaus or setbacks it's extremely hard to keep focused and not lose sight of the next step. You are not a machine, and rationalizing failure is extremely simple if you're not emotionally attached to success. That is where visualization comes in. Athletes, doctors, therapists use it, the kanban board your scrum master forces you to look at is visualization. Brain scans show that vivid mental rehearsal lights up patterns close to real experience[^1]. You can practice by thinking and it works often enough that serious people, with an incentive to be as productive as possible, take it seriously[^2]. Here is the research-backed version of manifesting: 1. **Clear goal visualization** sharpens planning and decision-making. 2. **Positive expectations** increase motivation and persistence. 3. **Acting "as if"** changes how others respond to you. 4. **Focused attention** makes you spot relevant opportunities. 5. **Confidence** lowers self-sabotage and paralysis. Behavior shapes emotion as much as emotion shapes behavior. The classic demonstration is the _facial feedback effect_; In controlled studies, people forced to smile by holding a pen between their teeth, activating smile muscles, report feeling happier, while those forced to frown by holding a pen with their lips, activating frown muscles, feel sadder[^3]. The effect is modest but consistent across dozens of replications. **Your brain interprets your own behavior as evidence of your internal state** - [[Made in a Lab/Articles/The demon you eat|The demon you eat]] gives you its powers ![[Attachments/1000010287 2.png|1000010287 2.png]] Smile, and part of your brain goes "*we must be happy*." Act confident to be confident. Walk with purpose to find it[^7]. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT from now on) is in part based on this feedback loop. Instead of waiting for motivation to arrive, which might never happen, CBT teaches people to act as motivated people act. Take the actions first, let the feelings follow. The technique works because your brain observes your behavior and updates its self-model accordingly. "*I'm doing the things that successful people do, therefore I must be someone who can succeed*." It's deliberate behavior modification that exploits how your brain forms beliefs about yourself. You can bootstrap confidence by acting confident, even when you don't feel it[^4]. This however, has limits that we cannot overlook. Trouble starts when "this helps" turns into "this controls the universe". Brandon Sanderson, in _Wind and Truth_ — _can you tell I just finished it?_ — explains the issue with the idea neatly: if reality were able to be bent like that to willpower, starving kids must not be wishing hard enough for food. That logic, you will agree with me, is absurd. I can assure you that the drowning man is wishing for air with more willpower than you're wishing for that promotion. So we need to split this cleanly to see what can be used and what needs to be discarded - **Manifesting-as-psychology**: visualization boosts performance via known mechanisms. **VS** - **Manifesting-as-magic**: thoughts directly reshape reality via supernatural forces. Pure magic with no feedback loop produces overconfidence, risky bets, and spectacular failures. Think of the thousands of wannabe actors that move to a different city without a concrete plan, get a small acting gig but then just end up doing something else because that path did not workout. You will have to be careful because the universe will always feel responsive when you're riding a lucky streak. Pure rationality with no magic also produces failure, just a different kind, more likely to be some combination of burnout and apathy that tears people inside. Everything becomes mechanical optimization. ~~INTERLINKED~~. You track metrics ~~CELL~~, hit milestones ~~CELL~~, and feel nothing. ~~DO THEY KEEP YOU IN A LITTLE BOX~~.The spreadsheet says you're winning, but your candle has burned and you don't have the energy to light it up again.  We need stories, meaning, and emotional investment to sustain effort over time. Pure rationality assumes you can brute-force motivation through discipline alone but discipline is a finite resource. When it runs out, and eventually it will, you're left with nothing to carry you forward. *The fix is to engineer a system that lets them work together without canceling each other out.* You need the emotional system that gets excited about possibilities and the analytical system that spots problems before they kill you. Most people accidentally optimize for one and starve the other. You need to find the synthesis between these two ideas. The key insight is that these don't have to be consistent with each other. Your emotional mind can believe in cosmic significance while the rational part of you deals with the realities of life. The magic keeps you energized through the inevitable plateaus and setbacks. The grounding keeps you from betting everything on a single roll of the dice. ### The management mindset The highest-paid jobs in the world are often management roles, not because managers are mystical beings but because coordination, resource allocation, and accountability are really valuable and _rarer-than-you-think_ skills. Try to treat your goal like a project: - Define the end state - Break it into concrete tasks - Assign deadlines to yourself - Track progress - Hold yourself accountable Your capabilities, your energy, and your learning curve are all finite and **personal**. The entrepreneur who just hustled 18-hour days that Andrew Tate sells you might have been naturally wired for low sleep needs, or had family money for living expenses, or thrived on chaos in ways that would destroy someone else. The creative who "just followed their passion" has had years of technical training you did not get to see and a personality that now handles rejection better than yours does. Copying someone else's exact path often fails because their "easy" might be your "impossible", and vice versa. What looks like effortless natural talent is usually the intersection of hidden advantages, specific circumstances, and skills developed over time. There is no exact recipe to life, just heuristics, and even those need to be adapted to your particular combination of strengths, weaknesses, and constraints. This is why most success advice is simultaneously true and useless. The advice is just not calibrated to your specific stats. There is no way to quickly gauge yours or someone else's stats. You have to infer them from revealed preferences, what you actually do consistently, *not what you think you should do*. If you consistently procrastinate on that essay but easily spend hours looking at sources, that tells you something about your natural inclinations. You might not be so much a writer as a researcher. If you burn out after three months of intense effort but can sustain moderate effort indefinitely, that's valuable data about your sustainable pace and you have to integrate that back into your system and predictions. The people who seem like good manifesters are often just good at unconscious project management, reverse-engineering requirements, finding next steps, creating feedback loops, and adjusting based on results. ### The most important step you can take Most of the work is getting within striking distance of the goal. That part requires always knowing what your next step is. This is hard. An abstract goal like "become a writer" is not actionable and you will find that you will find every excuse to start writing tomorrow. [[Made in a Lab/Articles/L’integrale dei tuoi giorni|L’integrale dei tuoi giorni]] Your next step cannot be "jump four stories high". It has to be small, achievable, and lead somewhere. If it fails, you have to have an alternate route in mind. The important part is to keep moving, not waiting indefinitely for perfect conditions. This is why successful people often seem like they're constantly in motion while unsuccessful ones seem stuck in planning mode. The successful ones have mastered the art of finding the smallest possible next action that still moves them forward. "I can't write a novel" becomes "I can write 200 words." The most important step you can take is the next one. ### The value in rituals ![[Pasted image 20250816132246.png]] A Daruma wish lasts a year. The promotion you want next year feels abstract. The business you want to build feels theoretical. The fit, confident version of yourself feels like someone else entirely. Rituals solve a fundamental problem with long-term goals, they create tangible, present-moment connections to future outcomes. When you think of your goal and paint the first Daruma's eye, when you place it somewhere you'll see it daily, when you know you'll paint the second eye only when you succeed, the abstract suddenly becomes concrete. Your brain has something to attach to. This works because humans are ritual-making animals. We create meaning through repeated actions, symbols, and ceremonies. The ritual doesn't magically cause success but keeps the goal alive in your mind when motivation fades and distractions multiply[^8]. It creates "*implementation intentions*", specific "if-then" plans that automatically trigger goal-directed behavior. Instead of relying on willpower alone, you create environmental cues that prompt action without conscious decision-making. "I will exercise" is a goal intention. "When I see my gym bag by the door each morning, I will put on my workout clothes" is an implementation intention. The ritual creates the trigger (seeing the gym bag), which activates the behavior (putting on workout clothes) lessening the amount of motivation required. Research shows implementation intentions are remarkably effective because they bypass the conscious deliberation that often leads to procrastination. Your brain processes the "if" condition automatically and executes the "then" behavior without engaging the part of your mind that might make excuses[^6]. Another way I can convince you if this was not enough is to do as conspiracy theorists try to do, follow the money. Agile, the most used framework for managing projects, is literally built on rituals and ceremonies. You have sprints, epics, ceremonies and rituals just to help you visualize your goals (epics), break it down into manageable chunks (tasks and stories), execute with a defined timeframe (sprints) and then ritually close the sprint and restart during the sprint closure ceremony. You are performing the ritual[^9]. A Daruma's wish lasts a year, long enough that you can accomplish something substantial, short enough that you can maintain emotional investment. Most people overestimate what they can do in a month and underestimate what they can do in a year. The Daruma is just a ritual to get you to think in terms of sustained effort rather than unsustainable sprints. ### So that the bell might ring again Magic without grounding leads to horrible outcomes, research finds that people primed for positive fantasies took riskier bets, made worse financial decisions, and **hit lower achievement rates**[^5]. Grounding without magic leads to lifeless execution and eventual collapse in motivation. The synthesis is simple. Be a little delusional about the big picture. Be ruthlessly practical about the next move. It's about hunger and foolishness. ![[Pasted image 20250816122317.png]] --- [^1]: Gippert, A., et al. (2025). Motor imagery enhances performance beyond the imagined action. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*. [PMC12107166](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12107166/) [^2]: Liu, Y., et al. (2025). The Effects of Imagery Practice on Athletes' Performance: A Multilevel Meta-Analysis with Systematic Review. *Behavioral Sciences (Basel)*. [PMC12109254](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12109254/) [^3]: Coles, N. A., Larsen, J. T., & Lench, H. C. (2019). A Meta-Analysis of the Facial Feedback Literature: Effects of Facial Feedback on Emotional Experience Are Small and Variable. *Psychological Bulletin*, 145(6), 610–651. [^4]: Ekers, D., et al. (2014). Behavioural Activation for Depression; An Update of Meta-Analysis of Effectiveness and Sub Group Analysis. *PLoS ONE*. [PMC4061095](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4061095/) [^5]: Oettingen, G., & Mayer, D. (2002). The motivating function of thinking about the future: Expectations versus fantasies. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 83(5), 1198–1212. [^6]: Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. *Advances in Experimental Social Psychology*, 38, 69–119. [PMC4500900](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4500900/) [^7]: Hackford, J., et al. (2019). The effects of walking posture on affective and physiological states during stress. *Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry*, 62, 80-87. [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30261357/) [^8]: Hobson, N. M., et al. (2018). The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework. *Personality and Social Psychology Review*, 22(3), 260-284. [Berkeley Faculty](https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/jschroeder/Publications/Hobson%20et%20al%20Psychology%20of%20Rituals.pdf) [^9]: Tian, A. D., et al. (2018). Enacting rituals to improve self-control. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 114(6), 851-876. [Harvard Business School](https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Enacting%20Rituals%20to%20Improve%20Self-Control_a1680de9-d84b-44c6-8db0-01d05f77c2c3.pdf)