Daniel Kahneman reminds us that these affirmations don’t even need to be true: ‘A message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability . . . Whether the story is true, or believable, matters little, if at all.’ By setting even the most unrealistic self-expectation, ‘the aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger (even) than the desire to reach it.’ It seems that, even in Nobel Prize-winning economics, the clichés are true: ° If you can conceive, and believe, you can achieve. ° Visualize
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