Manifest Destiny

My cofounder and I have worked with the same therapist for years. Her name is Alysha. She's helped us navigate more crises than I can count, lowered the temperature during our worst blowups, and occasionally talked us off a ledge.

Almost any serious relationship, cofounder or otherwise, benefits from a calm third party with no stake in who's right.

Alysha is wonderful. She is also, and I say this with love, a little woo woo. Example: her DSM volumes are stacked between her energy crystals.

Last year, Alysha suggested I read Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza.

Hard not to take that title personally.

I picked it up the way you'd pick up a suspicious package on your doorstep: at arm's length, cautiously. The book's core claim: your thoughts and emotions create habitual neural patterns, and through meditation and focused intention, you can rewire those patterns to manifest a different reality.

For my Oprah fans, you've seen this genre before. The Secret, the early 2000s viral sensation detailing the “law of attraction” sold 30 million copies on essentially the same premise. Think good thoughts, good things follow. A generation of vision boards and affirmation journals was born, and then they sat very still waiting for the universe to reciprocate.

The manifestation genre commits a specific kind of fraud: it identifies a genuine neurological mechanism, then explains it with the intellectual rigor of a horoscope. The frustrating part is how close it gets to something real before turning away from it. Sort of like a doctor who correctly identifies your diagnosis and then prescribes leeches.

Our minds shape our reality. I really do believe that. This week I’ve been thinking about how the mechanism is more interesting, and more demanding, than the woo woo crowd would have you believe.

Pure positive visualization, the centerpiece of the manifestation ethos, has been studied extensively. The finding is damning: when people engage in unconstrained fantasy about a desired outcome, motivation to pursue it actually decreases. Your brain partially encodes the imagined reward as already received. The wanting goes quiet. You feel the satisfaction without doing the work that earns it.

Psychologists Pham and Taylor split students into two groups before a midterm. One group visualized getting a high grade. The other visualized the process of studying for one. The outcome group showed no improvement over controls. The process group started studying earlier, logged more hours, and scored 8 points higher on the exam. Same visualization practice, different results.

Worse, when manifesting fails, it rarely lands as bad luck. The ideology has a built-in escape hatch: if you didn't get the job, you didn't believe hard enough. If the relationship ended, you attracted the wrong energy. It sells agency, then turns outcomes into moral criticism.

But strip away the pseudoscience and the self-flagellation and what remains is something worth taking seriously.

Science has yet to find anything in the known universe that rivals the complexity of the human brain. And that organ (86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections) spends most of its energy doing something simple: guessing what comes next.

(Sort of like an LLM… but that’s a different newsletter.)

Our brains constantly generate models of what will happen in the future, compares them against incoming data, and updates when there's a mismatch. What you experience as "perception" is largely your brain's best guess, occasionally corrected by reality. This is also the real story behind neuroplasticity, the legitimate science that the manifesting genre borrows and then butchers. The brain physically rewires based on repeated patterns of thought and behavior. The meditating brain looks structurally different from the non-meditating brain.

When you understand the brain this way, manifesting stops being mystical and starts being mechanical.

Every stage of that pipeline has real evidence behind it.

I. Rehearsal

When you articulate a clear goal, the brain's reticular activating system begins filtering your environment for data relevant to that target. You decide to buy a specific car and suddenly see it everywhere; the cars were always there, it’s your filter that changed.

Harvard neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone ran an experiment in the 1990s. One group physically practiced a five-finger piano sequence two hours a day for five days. A second group sat at the same piano and only imagined playing it, hands completely still, no sound produced. Brain scans at week's end showed the same cortical reorganization in both groups. The motor cortex had expanded identically in people who played and in people who only thought about playing.

Your brain cannot fully distinguish between a vivid, emotionally engaged mental rehearsal and the real thing. When you repeatedly imagine a future in enough detail, you're not just daydreaming. You're running a practice simulation through actual neural circuitry. This is why the direction of the mental movie matters so much, why those students who visualized studying outperformed. Rehearsing the work built the neural infrastructure for doing it, while rehearsing the reward built nothing.

II. Anticipation

Something most people don't know about dopamine: it doesn't primarily fire when you receive a reward. It fires when you predict one.

When a clearly imagined, emotionally real future sits in your mind with regularity, your reward circuitry activates around it now, before a single external thing has changed. The brain begins motivating toward its own predictions. The anticipation generates real neurochemical fuel.

In short, emotional specificity of a goal actually matters. Vague intentions produce weak predictions, and weak predictions produce weak dopamine signals. A clearly held future is neurochemically different from a fuzzy one.

III. Expectation

This one will really rattle you.

Researchers studying drug efficacy discovered something startling when they began comparing what they called "open" versus "hidden" administration. Patients received a real, effective anti-anxiety drug either overtly (meaning they knew they were receiving it) or covertly, delivered through an IV without their knowledge.

Patients who received it openly showed clear, measurable anxiety reduction. Patients who received the exact same drug, at the exact same dose, without knowing, showed a dramatically reduced effect.

Same drug and same body, but decreased benefit without the expectation.

The finding has been replicated across pain, Parkinson's, depression, and hormonal function. Knowing you're receiving treatment produces measurably different neurochemistry than receiving it covertly.

Strip away the mysticism the ring-light manifestation gurus would have you believe and what remains is a documented neurobiological mechanism: the brain that expects a particular future physiologically prepares for it.

Many of you have asked why I end every newsletter the same way.

"Up and to the right" started years ago as a joke, mostly with myself, about the positive trajectory of things.

It was a response given when someone asks how things are going with the startup. Usually paired alongside "Never better!" It is equal parts aspirational and self-deprecating, especially during the quarters when our actual metrics looked more like a cardiac event than a hockey stick.

It is, if I'm being precise about it, a mantra. And mantras work not because the universe is listening, but because repetition encodes identity. Social psychologist Daryl Bem's most counterintuitive finding: we don't just act according to our beliefs. We form our beliefs by observing our own behavior. And that arrow runs both ways. When you repeatedly assert a direction, you start making thousands of small decisions consistent with that self-description, mostly without noticing. You don't just say it until it's true, you say it until you become the kind of person for whom it's true.

Up and to the right is my own form of manifestation.

In the book Alysha gave me, underneath the woo woo meditation stuff, was confirmation of something I'd already been doing, just dressed up in language that outsources to the universe what the mind is perfectly capable of on its own.

Clarity of intention, concentrated visualization, repetition: these genuinely rewire the brain. There is real science behind what happens at a cellular level when you train your mind toward something specific.

The mechanism isn't vibrations from the universe. It's a practice. Rehearse the work, not the reward. Hold the future with enough specificity that your brain treats it as a forecast.

Your neurons are listening.

Up and to the right.