How to ACTUALLY Achieve Your Goals (Backed by Science)

The sequence 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. It's not insane. So 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 Cody 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 want to jump into the science of why manifesting backfires. So manifestation makes basically this one core clam, 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 isn't the opposite of the secret. What a shame. 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, your winning. Dreams, defined 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 and hands girl and says, um, hey, who is the one type of person that will always be a millionaire than 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 were they were when 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 like you have to be really careful what you fill your brain with. Like it wasn't just the NYU researchers at university, a pen. They found the same pattern and weight loss actually. Like the women who fantasized most positively about their future selves. They lost 24 pounds less. In one year, then the women who pictured the process going badly. I don't know. This isn't going to 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 like 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? So interesting. I thought I was a little genius thinking about this. Well, it turns out humanity had already ran this experiment a couple times. I call this rehearse the funeral. So for most of recorded history, the clearest thinkers alive practiced the opposite of a manifestation. And they did it on purpose. I became friends with some Buddhist monks, you know, as one does. And they have a practice called Mara Nassati. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but my friend Arthur Brooks told me about it. And it's called mindfulness of death, where you literally sit with the fact that you will die possibly soon. Unhinged the sect of Buddhist monks that Arthur sat with, actually will sit with a decaying body over the seven stages of decay from like right when it died all the way until it turns into skeletons. And they will sit and stare at the dead body and continuously repeat to themselves, this is me, this is me, this is me. Like, full on just what would it be like if I was this dead person in front of me? And the Stoics were actually the same. Seneca told his students to rehearse your worst fears in advance. Exile poverty. Back in that day, shipwreck probably not as common now. Okay, and I don't know how to speak Latin, but it's it's called something like premeditatial malorum, something like that, which basically means premeditation of evils. And Seneca's logic was super simple. When you've rehearsed the blow, it will lose its power to knock you down when it hits you. And so before you file this under ancient philosophy, actually there's a ton of modern applications. So, wasn't just the Stoics or the Buddhist, there's a 2011 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology that randomly assigned people to vividly manage their own death in like specific personal detail versus a control group that didn't do anything. Obviously, and what happened? Well, the death group came out the other side with way more gratitude for the life they actually had. And the effect was large. So, like staring at those worst case scenarios in the eye made people value what was in front of them. This is like the opposite of what all the gurus, the positive mental health people and the like, "Oh, I just cut people out of my life if they don't tell you." And so, I want to apply this to like business in your life. The practice for you in business I call it the anti-manifestation is five steps. And I go through this actually in the first chapter of my book, owner-be-owned. By the way, we have an event on September 18th, launch live, million dollars, and cash and prizes. We're going to give away plus we'll teach you to do this. Okay, so, anti-manifestation, step one, right? No butchewary for your business. So, my company dies on this date. Get specific. Like, we run out of money. The email you have to send your team. The conversation at your kitchen table. How you feel about it, write it out. Step two, name what caused the death. Like, not something generic like the economy. Like, you already probably have something that scares you and keeps you up at night about your business. Like, "Oh, this client sued us." You know, the prices, they never bought. You know, we should have raised these prices. The employee, you know you had to fire, but you just didn't do it. Step three, run the survival check. So, then you ask yourself, "All right, the day after the business funeral, and I still alive." Like, "Can I still work? Can I still feel my family start again?" For almost everybody listening, you know, to this, the honest answer is yes. And the point of the exercise is this, I think fear shrinks the moment you name it. And once failure becomes this thing you can survive, then it's not a ghost that can haunt your problems. Because you can engineer against it. And you have agency. Then step four, extract the system. So, every cause of death, you wrote down is basically an instruction for you. What to do next? Client concentration kills you? All right. Well, don't have any client be more than 20% of the revenue. Pricing kills you? Hold that thought. That's part three. And then write the rule that makes the obituary impossible. Like, how can you have enough cash on hand? How can you, you know, have an align of credit? What can you do to make it impossible for you to die? Then step five, put it on the calendar, once a quarter. I think businesses drift towards death quietly. They never run right into a wall on them. You always are kind of like moving your way towards it, but ignoring all the signs. And this checkpoint actually catches it early. It's not just a Cody thought, by the way, although we've helped thousands of business owners, and that's why we wrote this book on it. This is all backed by science. So, in like 1989, researchers found that perspective hindsight, assuming an event has already happened, and explaining why makes people feel about 30% better at correctly identifying the reasons for future outcomes. Which is crazy. It's like, if you think about what could go wrong, and then you, you know, pontificate that on a little bit, you're like more likely to predict the future. Kind of makes sense if you think about it. There's also this psychologist by the name of Gary Klein. And he realized that finding out like this pre-mortem and an exercise elite teams now run before, you know, big launches. So why, if the project was to fail, what would have happened? If this was to not work, why? And everybody writes down why. Suddenly the risks, nobody would say out loud or sitting at the table. And then it's helpful 'cause you can figure out how to not die by them. This is the same idea. Imagine your death will change how you live your life or run your business. And there's a great story that illustrates this. I don't know, do you guys know Admiral James Stockdale, my husband went to the military. So he's kind of obsessed with this guy. But he spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. And he was tortured nonstop repeatedly. There's an incredible management consultant by the name of Jim Collins, and he interviewed him. Collins asked, who didn't make it out of the camps? Stockdale's answer was amazing. He said, oh, that's easy, the optimists. He's like, they were the ones who said, we'll be out by Christmas. Then Christmas came and went. We'll be out by Easter, then things give in. And in Stockdale's words, they died of a broken heart, which is so, it's really tragic, but true. You know, Stockdale has this quote that I love, and he basically says, don't ever confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they are. And the principle is like, yes, I am going to win no matter what, total faith in your destination, but brutal expectations about what it's gonna take to get there. Like you don't win getting to Everest. It's not gonna be that hard. It'll probably just like, walk up, everything's gonna be fine. I'm gonna figure it out. No, you're like, no, it'll be terrible. It will be awful. I will want to quit. I might die. It will be freezing. And I'm gonna do it anyways, 'cause it's supposed to be hard. And you're supposed to do it anyway. And that's like all this episode is based on. Is this one sentence? And I think, if you're a founder, you already admire this, and you probably already run this. Like when Jeff Bezos raised Amazon's first million bucks in 95-ish, he took 60 meetings, he got 40 rejections, and he told every investor the same thing. He figured there was a 70% chance they would lose their entire investment. I can't believe he said that. He gave his own parents the same odds before they wired in a big chunk. And he told them he wanted them to know the risk because he still wanted to come over things, give me different failed. And this is the man who had already attended the funeral, right? He had priced in failure, he had confirmed everyone may or may not survive it, but that the freedom is exactly what let him bet everything. So that's the mind side. You've rehearsed the death and pulled the systems out of the obituary. But for most struggling businesses, the cause of death was written on the certificate as the word math. And so always remember, visualize the failure instead of the win and then get to the reality, which I think of as the map. And these are like the more contrarian moves I would use to flip everything that manifestation teaches right side up. Okay, swap one. Swat the movie. So manifestation tells you to picture the outcome. So that's the man chair nor the fancy car. But UCLA psychologist tested exactly that on students the week before a midterm. One group visualized the outcome. So getting that A, right? The other visualized the process when they would study where they would sit, which chapters, and then a control group basically tracked their study in. So the first group, the outcome group, there was no improvement, nothing, nothing better than the control. The process group studied more hours, panics less, and scored higher on the exam. And when researchers dug into why it came down to two things, not shocking, but better planning, the second one kind of surprised me though, lower anxiety. And so they basically had the same scenario, but very different results. So I kind of think about it like, you don't wanna actually screen what the game's gonna be. You actually wanna start screening in your head, the workout that you're gonna do. You wanna start thinking about the action you're gonna have to take to get to the podium eventually. The second swap is the audience. So manifestation culture says, speak it into existence. Have you ever heard that? I've lost it, I hear it a lot. Post your goals, tell everyone, say it out loud. Okay, fine, but the science actually says the opposite. Science says, shut the fuck up. Isn't that crazy? Look at this study. And why you psychologists ran four experiments on what happens when people announce identity goals? Like, I'm becoming a founder type of goal, and they do it out loud. And the lab, people got 45 minutes to work toward a goal they cared about. The ones who kept the goal private works nearly the whole session. The ones whose goal got acknowledged by others, they quit it about 33 minutes. And so here's the kind of twisted part. The quitters walked out feeling closer to the goal. Which I think about that for a second. Talking about the goal made them slower, and it made them feel faster. Why? The researcher has called it a premature sense of completeness. You know, remember part one, your brain books, the fantasy as a partial payment on the real thing, will applause as a payment too. So every like on your big things coming up post is a tiny paycheck your brain cash is before the work exists. And I know this kind of can make you a miserable person, for instance. I just launched my book. I walk in on the day of book launch to our big conference room. There's posters all over the wall with quotes from the book. There's all these balloons. There's like big pictures of the book up. And the team is like, yeah, like this. And I'm like, no, and I'm such a buzzkill, you guys. I was literally like, I don't like to celebrate things until we finish. Like, once we hit our goal, I'll celebrate. I celebrated when I finished writing the book. I had a nice dinner with my husband. That was amazing. But I'm not going to celebrate having a big book launch. On the day I do the book launch, when we haven't finished the book launch, like flip it around to the goals, stay private. The results go public when you have them. And do this in your life over and over again. I swear you'll be more successful. It will be a little less fun in the beginning, but it is fun to win. So let's do that. Swap three, the Oracle. So manifestation asks the universe for a sign. Builders ask the market, okay? And in 1999, a guy named Nick Swinmern spent an afternoon driving between stores, hunting one pair of air walk boots. So I don't know if you guys remember those. Do you like right size, wrong color, wrong size, right color, whatever? He would help him empty handed with this crazy idea. One of people bought shoes online, which actually is a great idea because I have very large feet if you don't know this or already about me. And I used to have to go into the shoe stores and I stopped wanting to go in there because one time I told the guy my shoe size and he says, oh, we going downhill skiing with those and that was last time I have ever been into a, God, what was the name of that running store where you went and got running shoes and it was only for running shoes? Anyway, the store sucks. So did that sales guy, didn't buy the shoes from him. But every investor back in his day said the same thing like nobody buys shoes they can't try on. Now the manifestation move here is obvious. Vision board with the shoe empire on it, right? Affirmations in the mirror. But this dude Swinmern, he did the opposite. He walked into a local shoe store and cut a deal. He's like, let me take picks of your shoes, put them online and when somebody orders, I'll buy the pair from you at full retail price. He lost some money on every sale, but he didn't care because he wasn't selling shoes yet. He was basically buying evidence. Then the orders came in. The assumption sort of held. The scrappy little test became Zappos. And 10 years later, Amazon bought it for $1.2 billion. Like he didn't ask the universe for a shoe empire. He asked the customer for an order. Shocking, I know. So like your version this week, take the single assumption your dream depends on. Usually some version of like people will pay for this. Design the cheapest possible way to get a real yes or no from a real customer like one offer email, one weekend of doing the thing manually. Run it inside seven days, like that's all you get. The universe might give you vibes, fuck the vibes, I want the receipts. You know what I'm talking about? And speak universities. If you're listening to this show, odds are you already have some. Like a real business with real revenue. You're probably already in the top third that survives. But here's the thing about winners. You don't just survive. You compound. The founders you admire, the ones that actually win long term, they run the same playbook, documented systems, reporting a machine that closes sales and prints money, whether they're in the room or not. That is the goal of every great business. But the people who have that playbook, they never share it. So on September 18th, I'm sharing that playbook in my new book, Own or Be Owned. It is anti manifestation in physical form. You'll get the real systems that I use to scale multiple businesses past $100 million in revenue. You'll be able to score your business across what I call the 12 P's. You'll discover exactly where you are still the bottleneck. And you'll get the moves I would do that day to fix it. So the thing you built out zeros to your net worth instead of hours to your day. Own or Be Owned is dropping with the greatest book launch event of all time on September 18th. Tickets are actually free. $0 just for you guys. You built something great. Now go build it so it runs without you. You can grab your free ticket in the link below. All right, quick recap. Swap the movie, swap the audience, swap the Oracle. The funeral gave you the systems, the playbook. Well, that's going to actually just give you your week back, my friends. Like the last piece, though, is the identity that ties it all together. Because everything we've covered today splits people into really like, I kind of think about it as two camps, wishful thinkers and fucking killers, right? The wishful thinkers, they want the outcome without changing any of their inputs. They want the seven figure exit at their current prices with their current systems. And so they manifest in vision board, you know? And they let their dreams be dreams. Killers, and I mean that in like the highest compliment in business. this, do something almost boring by comparison. You decide what has to be true. You build the plan that makes it true, and then you let your results do the talking. Here's what should give every wishful thinker hope. I believe deeply killers are made not born, and the conversion tool takes about five minutes. Remember that while you researchers whose data torched manifestation, that was in part one we were talking about, they didn't stop at the diagnosis, they built the cure and tested it. It's called whoop. I call this wish outcome obstacle plan. Okay, so you're going to name the wish, feel the outcome for a second. That part's fine. You're allowed, but then comes the step manifestation skips. Name the single biggest reason why you will not hit it. Then write an if then plan for the exact moment that obstacle shows up. So if the client pushes back on the new price, then I pause for 10 seconds before I respond. That's what you want to do. Whoop. In one trial, adults trained in this method were twice as physically active over the following four months as a group that got information alone. The measured gap between fantasy and plan is roughly the gap between wishing and doing. So one last thing, because I can hear the objection now. Cody, this is dark. We're talking about funerals, obituaries. Why build anything if like this is the angle. I want you to flip that for a second. Like you and your stated mission in life should be strong enough to survive contact with the facts, especially when those facts differ from what you want. Like life's hard, man, staccato needed unshakable faith precisely because he refused to lie to himself in prison. Maybe that sounded bad in the moment, but it worked. And so if you're lucky enough to run a business, you're going to spend years and maybe decades solving little mini prison problems, right? And so you have to build the discipline to look the reality in the eyes and overcome it. And so writing the obituary, then reading it back, well, you're still standing at the end. And every builder you admire has already died like this a hundred times on paper. And that is why you see the calm in the whites with their eyes. Because once the worst case is survivable, what do you got to be scared of anymore? You know, the future doesn't belong to the dreamers. It belongs to the people who face the funeral and built something worth surviving for. And if you want more on the tactical side of building businesses so good they run without you, then I got you. We'll see you on September 18th. It's free. Then it's only four builders. You are going to want to be their life.