How to ACTUALLY Achieve Your Goals (Backed by Science)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Codie Sanchez** (0:30)
The Secret sold more than 30 million copies by promising that if you visualize wealth hard enough, the universe will give it to you. But here's what two decades of research actually shows. The more vividly you fantasize about success, the worse you perform. Isn't that insane? Today, I'm actually going to show you what the best builders on earth do instead. You'll learn about this 2,000-year-old Buddhist practice, and then our version of the three Contrarian anti-manifestation moves to make your goals actually reality. I'm Codie Sanchez, and I've bought and built enough companies to know that hope is not a plan.
Quick favor, before we start. If this show has ever made you money or saved you from a bad decision, can you do me one solid? Hit subscribe. It costs you nothing. It tells us exactly what to make more of for you. All right, I wanna jump into the science of why manifesting backfires. So, manifestation makes basically this one core claim, right? If you see it, and then you feel it, and then the universe will bring it towards you.
But the research says your brain does something else entirely when you visualize success. It actually, it relaxes. So, there's this study we found in 2002 by NYU psychologists, tracking college graduates entering the job market, and they basically found that the students who spent the most time in quote unquote, I love this line, positive fantasies about landing their dream job sent out what? Fewer applications. Got what? Fewer job offers. And two years later, we're doing what? Earning lower salaries than their peers. Like, the best visualizers did worst. This is the opposite of the secret. What a sham. What also is fascinating is in that same study, the researchers laid out kind of this crucial distinction between expectations and fantasies.
So, students with high expectations of success, meaning like grounded judgment built on their actual track record, aka what we would call reality, did better. Students who have crazy fantasies, meaning pleasant visualizations unhooked from any evidence did worse.
So, what's the takeaway?
Confidence built on evidence, you're winning. Dreams defying evidence will cost you. Also, super big rant on this right now. Have you guys seen all these AI bitches on Instagram and they're like in fake podcasts? Spoiler alert, there's nobody on the other side of this podcast sitting in a chair talking to you about a bunch of stuff they've never actually accomplished and using all these buzzwords and AI written scripts. They go super viral. I saw one the other day and it was like, it actually makes me laugh out loud. One girl says to another fake AI girl or AI enhanced girl and says, hey, who is the one type of person that will always be a millionaire? Then the other person responds, the people with ADHD.
They will always find a way. Their distraction is their focus. Their unwillingness to complete is the reason they will win. I was like, this is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of in my life. With respect, my mom's a 30 year special education teacher.
It's harder to learn when you have ADHD, especially if it's undiagnosed. Also, there is zero correlation between having ADHD and being a millionaire, like zero. This just sounds nice because all of us self-identify as having ADHD when in reality we're just so distracted by these fucking things that we think that we have something when in fact we just have a lot of distractions. And what's so interesting is you have to be really careful what you fill your brain with. It wasn't just the NYU researchers. At University of Penn, they found the same pattern of weight loss, actually. Like the women who fantasized most positively about their future selves, they lost 24 pounds less in one year than the women who pictured the process going badly. So like, I don't know. This isn't gonna go viral on the internet, but you guys will actually probably lose more weight, make more money and have better lives listening to it, so you choose. There's this amazing experiment where the same researchers who measured blood pressure while people indulged in like positive fantasies, what happened is their blood pressure dropped, which is a physiological signature of the body powering down. So your brain books the fantasy as like a partial payment on the real thing, and it actually gives you the reward before you've done the work. So the drive to do the actual work drains out of you. Fascinating. So in other words, manifestation is actually anesthesia, not fuel. It's like, take it if you want to chill the fuck out and not achieve what you want to do. Go ahead and do that, but you'll feel good about it. Because here's the question that actually matters if you want to win, which I know you do because you're here. If visualizing success makes you weaker, what happens when you deliberately visualize failure?