Every thought that you have has an expected value Most people go through their entire lives thinking that their outcomes determine the contents of their thoughts - when it’s the exact opposite. The content of your thoughts determines your life’s outcomes This has nothing to do with “manifesting”, the “occult” or any other woo woo stuff you see online Persistent negative thoughts spike cortisol levels which lower energy levels and make you incapable of effective planning. All thoughts are zero sum. So if you spend time obsessing with how you made a fool of yourself at a party that’s time you can’t spend thinking about how to improve your code base The book “Breaking the Age Code” (Yale) found that expectations around age related damage shaped actual aging damage at a scale similar to diet / exercise. It even managed to fully offset genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s. Similarly long ranging studies of cognitive behavioral therapy which operates directly on negative thoughts have shown similarly powerful effects to antidepressants with no drug intervention Part of my frustration with online discourse is the whole “manifesting girly” phenomenon where hot girls on only fans pretend that positive thinking brought them wealth. This isn’t that at all. It’s just a mechanical almost obvious observations that inputs = outputs. And if you don’t control your inputs you won’t control your outputs It’s worth tweeting about because it’s so incredibly easy to forget this - bc our society by nature encourages disassociation from our thoughts. And the marketing machine works full time force feeding you that “buying things or being a certain way results in happiness” (or other positive “thought states”) One interesting exercise is asking the question “what would somebody who accomplished what I wanted think about all day, from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to bed?” Then ask, “yesterday, what did I think about roughly hour by hour and how is it different from the ideal I just spelled out” I think explorations like this are positive expected value