These sleep hacks work like a charm—without medication or supplements.

A few years ago, I started waking up at three o’clock every morning. Over the years, I’d read many articles about the importance of rest, so I knew the research was unequivocal: Quality sleep supports cognitive performance and lowers the risk of diseases and health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, and dementia.

Knowing that, I’d toss and turn in bed, disappointed that I wasn’t following through on my plan to get seven to eight hours of shut-eye. It was on my schedule, so why wasn’t I asleep?

Sleeplessness among adults is common: The CDC reports that in 2020, 14.5 percent of U.S. adults struggled to fall asleep, and 17.8 percent couldn’t stay asleep. Naturally, a wave of sleep “cures” has hit the market—everything from teas and sleep concoctions to supplements and hormones.

In our quest for a good night’s sleep, many of us are quick to turn to quick fixes that are really just distractions. But the root cause of insomnia is rarely biological, even for people diagnosed with chronic insomnia.

When I was experiencing sleeplessness, I couldn’t help that my body chose to wake me up. But I could control what I did in response. Thankfully, I found a sleep hack more effective than magnesium, lavender, or the Sleepy Girl Mocktail (though I’m tempted to try it).

Rather than reaching for pills and potions, I found a better way.

Why You Can’t Sleep

I’m sure you’ve heard all the sleep advice: Don’t drink caffeine within 10 hours of bedtime. Exercise. Get a blood test to check whether you have a vitamin D or B12 deficiency, and take vitamins or adjust your diet if you do. No screens within an hour of bedtime. Cut alcohol, etcetera, etcetera.

But chances are, you likely suffer from the most common cause of sleeplessness: worry.

When I first started waking up at 3 a.m., I did what many of us do when things don’t go as planned: I freaked out.

I’d lie in bed, thinking about how bad it was that I wasn’t sleeping and how groggy I was going to feel in the morning. Then, I’d start thinking of all the things I had to do the next day. I’d mull over these thoughts until I could think of nothing else. Ironically, I wasn’t falling asleep because I was worried about not falling back asleep.

Rumination is a common cause of insomnia. That’s why the standard treatment for insomnia is cognitive behavioral therapy, as it teaches people to lower their anxiety over not sleeping.

When your mind is constantly racing, falling asleep becomes impossible. Instead of trying to force sleep, focus on breaking the cycle of rumination. That starts with simply accepting the sleep you get.

Think Differently to Sleep Differently

People who don’t think they get the prescribed seven to nine hours of sleep a night tend to jump to the conclusion that they have serious insomnia or some underlying health issue.

Yet new research might make you feel better about the sleep you get.

New studies—which applied more electrodes to measure participants’ brain activity than general sleep studies do—have discovered that insomnia is a “spectrum.” You may just sleep differently than the traditional perception of what’s “good” sleep.

Slow brain waves are typically associated with deep sleep. Yet one study showed that some sleepers experience high brain activity that makes them feel as if they’re awake even though they’re not. In the study, 20 “good sleepers” and 10 people with sleep misperception underwent high-density electroencephalogram sleep recordings, and researchers woke them up after every 10 minutes of consolidated NREM or REM sleep to ask them about their subjective sleep depth—aka their perception of how well they slept. Researchers found that the subjective sleep depth of people with sleep misperception was “abnormally low” during REM sleep.

Another study similarly showed that patients with insomnia underestimate how much sleep they get because, unlike “good sleepers,” they feel awake after the first sleep cycle and even during REM sleep, and “their mental activity during sleep is also more thought-like.”

The takeaway from these studies is that your perception of how well you sleep may not be a good measure, so your rumination over your lack of sleep may be unfounded. Knowing that your different sleep is okay might be enough to make you feel more relaxed and less anxious about it, which, in turn, should help you relax.

As sleep researcher Geoffroy Solelhac of the Center for Investigation and Research in Sleep in Switzerland said, “Just understanding that their sleep is objectively different is reassuring to patients. They feel a sort of relief.”

Still, there are a few other tricks for calming down when you are awake at night.

Sleep Hacks to Beat Sleeplessness

A Boring Book

The best sleep aid I’ve ever used isn’t melatonin or chamomile tea, it is a boring e-book. The key is to choose a slightly interesting yet mostly snooze-worthy topic. Pretty much any subject works for me as long as it’s not a thriller or horror. Philosophy tends to do the trick particularly well, but you may want to find your own genre of choice.

A boring book redirects your focus away from your worries and repetitive thoughts. It’s cognitively demanding enough to keep your mind off your own ideas while trying to follow the author’s reasoning. This disrupts the cycle of rumination, allowing you to drift off gently—assuming your Kindle doesn’t hit you in the face when you start dozing. (Hint: I’ve learned to read on my side to avoid this rude awakening.)

In the past, I would pick up my smartphone and find myself checking email or scrolling social media. This was a big mistake! Smartphones have the opposite effect and tend to keep you checking and pecking at your screen late into the night.

Now when I wake up or can’t sleep due to my racing mind, I pick up my Kindle, which, with its backlit non-blue light screen, doesn’t disturb my wife like reading a paper book would. Also, I think of waking up in the middle of the night as a pleasant opportunity to catch up on some reading, and I’ve stopped worrying about when I’ll fall back asleep. I assure myself that if I’m not tired enough to fall asleep right at that moment, it’s because my body has already gotten enough rest. I let my mind relax without worry and typically fall asleep in minutes.

A Mantra for When You Wake Up

The more you stress about achieving perfect sleep, the harder it becomes to attain it. To significantly reduce anxiety, accept that occasional wakefulness during the night is normal. Typically, if you don’t get good sleep one night, your body will naturally compensate the next night.

If I wake up, I repeat the simple mantra, “The body gets what the body needs if you let it,” and inhale a few deep breaths, which usually lull me back asleep in minutes. That subtle mindset shift relieves the pressure by no longer making sleep a requirement. My job is to provide my body with the proper time and place to rest, which means sticking to a consistent device-free bedtime.

Consistency

Establishing a consistent, relatively early bedtime is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your sleep. You might even timebox your sleep and allow the calendar reminder to alert you to wind down an hour before bed.

Sticking to the same early bedtime regulates your body’s internal clock, gives you enough time to sleep, and promotes better sleep quality. This is often the most effective way to get the rest you need. Just go to bed already! Don’t stay up and doom-scroll or watch one YouTube video after another.

Track Your Sleep

As the studies above show, your perception isn’t a great judge of your sleep quality. Most of us have no idea how well we’re sleeping. For obvious reasons, we’re only aware of the times we wake up rather than the time we’re asleep.

I thought I was getting a bad night’s sleep, which caused me to worry more, night after night. When I finally started wearing a sleep tracker, I learned that my sleep score wasn’t that bad, and that reassurance helped me to sleep soundly.

We are highly affected by our belief in how we sleep. A 2014 study found that our belief in how well we sleep affects our cognitive functioning more than how well we actually sleep.

In the study, researchers had 164 people rate their quality of sleep the night before. Next, the researchers told the participants they would use a new, as yet unproven technique to measure their REM sleep retroactively the night before.

This “technique” was fake, unbeknownst to the participants. In fact, researchers randomly assigned good or bad sleep quality to the participants, who were then asked to complete attention and memory tests.

The results showed that participants who were told they had slept poorly, even if they’d rated their sleep quality as high, exhibited impaired cognitive performance on tests. The reverse also occurred: People who reported poor sleep but were told they slept well performed better.

Using a sleep tracker might help build your belief that you’re sleeping just fine, which will end your rumination over the “bad sleep” you’re getting.

Experiencing insomnia can feel overwhelming and unending, but here’s a reason not to lose hope: According to a two-year study of 1,435 adults, while about 25 percent of Americans experience acute insomnia each year, about 75 percent of them recover from it.

Once my rumination over sleep stopped, so did my sleepless nights.

There’s an important lesson here that goes well beyond how to get enough sleep. The takeaway is that we should stop worrying about the outcomes we can’t control and instead focus on the inputs we can.

Before popping pills or messing with your hormones, get to bed at the same time each night. If you do wake up, repeat the mantra, “The body gets what the body needs if you let it,” and have a boring e-book ready. Finally, track your sleep to see if you’re really sleeping poorly or just remembering the times you woke up. Try these sleep hacks for a few months, and you’ll start seeing a difference. Night, night!

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Practical tips for business people who need luck on their side

Something as vague and indiscernible as “luck” has no place in the business world, right? Yet studies show luck can make all the difference between business success and failure. So, can you learn how to be lucky?

Joël Le Bon, professor of marketing and sales at Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, has found that luck is a significant factor in sales professionals’ performance. He even says companies can manage their luck to get a competitive edge.

Turns out, it’s not a matter of being born lucky. You can, quite literally, make your own luck in business and in life.

Here’s how entrepreneurs and other business people can build their belief in luck to achieve more.

Luck Can Be Made and Managed

Psychologist Richard Wiseman, a professor at England’s University of Hertfordshire, has conducted several studies on luck. His most prominent was a long-term study that became the foundation for his book The Luck Factor: Over the course of 10 years, he interviewed 400 volunteers who self-identified as lucky or unlucky, had them participate in experiments, and asked them to keep diaries and take personality questionnaires and intelligence tests.

Based on that study, Wiseman concluded that lucky people generate their good fortune by following four principles:

1. Create and notice chance opportunities
2. Make lucky decisions by listening to one’s intuition
3. Form “self-fulfilling prophecies” through positive expectations
4. Adopt a resilient attitude to turn bad luck into good

For example, Wiseman describes that many of his lucky participants intentionally pursued variety and change in their lives.: One would regularly take a different route to work, while another would choose a color before going to a party and make an effort to talk to people wearing that color to diversify the type of people he tended to talk to

Le Bon calls that kind of self-made luck “provoked luck.” Experienced salespeople, he found, “tend to say that an important factor in their jobs is provoked luck: unexpected events that come about because their strategic behavior has maximized the opportunities.”

In one of Le Bon’s studies of sales students, they reported that two-thirds of the revenue they made through sales was due to provoked luck. Le Bon found that luck was a huge motivator: The more a salesperson believed in luck, the more sales activities they pursued, such as making phone calls, taking meetings, and qualifying prospects, which led to more opportunities and better performance.

Entrepreneurs, salespeople, and other business people can take purposeful steps to grow their luck and success.

How to Be Lucky: Enroll in “Luck School”

As Wiseman and Le Bon found, people are not born lucky or unlucky. Luck and fortune are primarily molded by people’s thoughts and behaviors—which can be modified.

To test that, Wiseman held a “luck school” in which he conducted experiments to improve people’s luck by getting them to act lucky. He asked participants to complete standard questionnaires measuring their luck and satisfaction with six life areas. Next, he explained to participants how “lucky” people use the four principles of luck; he shared techniques for how they could think and behave like a lucky person. The techniques would help them create chance opportunities, vary their daily routines, and deal more effectively with lousy luck by imagining how things could have been worse.

After practicing those techniques for a month, the participants shared their findings with Wiseman. He reported that 80 percent of participants said they were happier with their lives and felt luckier.

You can put yourself through “luck school.” Here’s how:

1. Maximize Chance Opportunities

Change your habits and routines to create chance opportunities. Maintain a flexible mindset rather than committing to one way of doing things. Step out of your comfort zone. Make time to meet new people—and, like Wiseman’s lucky participant, try using a hack that forces you to talk to a range of people.

Chat with someone in line at the grocery store or stop to play a spontaneous chess game with a stranger in a park. That will not only spark connections, conversations, and ideas but also feed your brain’s need for novelty.

“Salespeople should be encouraged to disrupt their habits, get out of their routines and comfort zones, and meet new people,” Le Bon wrote. “They should do new things, expand their networks by going to unusual places, and build new alliances. In sales, opportunities lie not among the people you know but among those you don’t.”

2. Listen to Your Lucky Hunches

Our intuition is often thought of as irrational and unreliable. But, Wiseman argues, by ignoring gut instincts, “you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you’ve built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That’s what our brains are set up to do.”

Ditch the inner critic and self-limiting beliefs holding you back to build your self-trust and confidence. Consider listing out past successes you enjoyed because of an intuitive move you made. You’ll likely recall that many of your best decisions were made because they “felt right.”

3. Expect Good Fortune

Belief in luck increases the likelihood of taking risks, which, in turn, increases the probability of success. While it’s not wise to set unachievable goals that set you up for failure, you should set high goals and carry a positive outlook as you work toward them.

Le Bon says there are benefits to setting challenging goals: “Salespeople should be encouraged to adopt such goals because they drive forward-looking behaviors. Ambitious goals make salespeople more creative and strategic.”

4. Turn Bad Luck into Good

Sometimes, bad things happen that make you feel inherently “unlucky.” In those moments, it’s crucial to maintain traction—actions that move you toward what you want.

When something bad happens, be kind to yourself. Self-compassion makes people more resilient to letdowns by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure.

Try Wiseman’s positive-reframing technique and imagine how the situation could have been worse. Or use Le Bon’s technique to be more comfortable with failure: He encourages companies with sales teams to have their employees set failure goals, like a number of monthly pitches that fall flat.

Luck is nothing but a mindset. Even if you’ve been having a streak of bad luck, you can turn it around by learning how to change your fortune.

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Our thoughts influence our health more than we know.

As a clinically obese teen, my parents were desperate to get me to a healthy weight. My mom coaxed me on a walk through our boring, middle-class Central Florida suburb every Sunday.

The road we walked was paved with good intentions, but for me, it was hell: the heat and humidity, the painful chafing between my thighs, the inevitable embarrassment of applying Vaseline to said chafing. … If I was going to suffer, I would need a reward, and it had better be a good one!

The walks were never more than 30 minutes, but the finish line always ended at the Friendly’s Ice Cream shop. “Double scoop of chocolate with Reese’s Pieces, please!”

Needless to say, the walks didn’t help me lose weight. But here’s what did: On a family trip to New York City, I glimpsed in-line skates for the first time. This was the early 1990s, and they were still “a thing.” Stop snickering.

With all my extra pounds, I’d never won a race, ever. Whether on a bike, swimming or, of course, on foot, I was always dead last. But with Rollerblades, I’d glimpsed a hope of smoking my skinny friends.

They were way too expensive to buy, so I begged my parents to let me rent a pair for the afternoon. After a safety briefing at the rental shop and a skeptical look from the shop owner, I spent the rest of the day blading around Central Park, my parents trying to keep up. I felt fast! I felt free! Then, I felt exhausted.

I’d exercised for hours without realizing it. That night, I was so wiped out I slept through my body’s need to pee and woke up in a urine-soaked hotel bed. I hadn’t wet the bed in 12 years, but neither I nor my parents cared much. It was the first time they’d seen their kid enjoy exercise.

Looking back, those in-line skates (as dorky as they were) helped change my mind about fitness. Maybe exercise didn’t have to be a pain to endure, deserving of a treat. Perhaps the first step to health wasn’t extreme dieting or obnoxious goal-setting but a simple shift in perspective.

Turns out, decades of research reveal how our beliefs and expectations shape our bodies.

How Thoughts Influence Health

To investigate how mindset affects the relationship between exercise and health, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a study of 84 female room attendants working in seven hotels.

These women spent their entire workday exercising—carrying vacuums up and down stairs and scrubbing bathroom surfaces—but in a survey, 67 percent said they weren’t physically active. A third said they didn’t exercise whatsoever.

Fascinatingly, Langer and her team discovered that the women’s health reflected their perceived, not actual, amount of exercise: Their physiological health variables, such as body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, weight, and body mass index, were correlated to the amount of exercise they thought they were getting.

Next, the women were separated into two groups: One was told that their work went above and beyond the Surgeon General’s recommendations for exercise. In contrast, the control group was told nothing.

After a month, Langer and her team remeasured the same physiological health variables in the women. They found that the informed group had lower blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratios—even though those women reported no change in their routines.

Langer concluded that their mindset caused the change. Critics of the study, however, say that because the women self-reported their routines and weren’t observed by the researchers, it’s possible they were more active or ate more healthily.

But this is a distinction without a difference. Either way, the women told to think of their work as exercise got healthier!

Even if they didn’t change their routines, the women in the informed group likely worked slightly more vigorously to burn more calories because they thought it mattered. Their health improved through a more positive outlook on their activity, perhaps motivating them to live more healthily.

“Thinking yourself thinner” doesn’t mean believing your mindset has the magical power to improve your health. You don’t have to believe that beliefs alone can change your body. Rather, belief is the first step in a reinforcing loop that increases your effort:

1. Believing effort leads to improvement …
2. …leads to believing you have agency to do something positive for your health…
3. …which encourages you to put in more effort…
4. …and results in a healthier you. That reinforces the efficacy of your original belief!

Belief isn’t magical. It’s logical!

Nourish Your Mindset and Your Body

Sometimes, it’s difficult to believe our efforts make a difference, especially when it takes so long to see the desired results, such as lower blood pressure or weight. Here’s what you can do when you feel helpless about your health:

Banish Negativity

Be particular about the health and fitness content you give your attention to. Don’t subscribe to the idea of the “perfect” body on social media, and don’t let fitness gurus sell you quick-fix solutions for health and fitness, like fad diets and unsustainable exercise routines. Instead of trying to attain an unrealistic body type, focus on what healthy means to you.

Stop setting unrealistic goals and believing you’re failing. When it comes to life-long fitness, you should largely avoid goal-setting altogether. The better option is to build an enjoyable journey that has no destination. For example, cultivate a love of exercise and find activities that feel like more than just dreadful calorie-burning. Looking forward to an activity you enjoy can be life-changing, no matter how small. Have you tried in-line skating, BTW?

Invest in Positivity

Focus on traction, or action that takes us toward what we want. Too often, we focus on what we’re not doing rather than what we are doing to become healthy. You might diligently go for walks most days but dwell on your lack of high-cardio exercise. Give yourself some credit!

The Langer study illustrates just how much the women underestimated the physical activity they did each day. Do an audit of your daily routine and acknowledge the physically demanding activities.

According to the Mayo Clinic, people burn between 100 and 800 calories through daily activities like walking around the house doing chores, gardening, or even fidgeting—also called nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).

To give yourself credit, use my free habit tracker to record your exercise or healthy eating routines. Over time, it will help you visualize your progress and dedication, showing that you are giving your body what it needs.

The habit tracker can also help you avoid an all-or-nothing mentality. Many people think they must strictly adhere to healthy routines or not bother doing them. Eating fried chicken for lunch might lead you to write off the entire day as unhealthy, even if you made other good choices.

But the habit tracker forces you to see all your healthy choices, reinforcing your belief that you’re doing well by your body.

Sneak in Exercise

Just as the women in Langer’s study found out, exercise doesn’t have to be lifting weights or going for a run. You can trick yourself into exercising more without ever going to the gym.

• Turn cleaning your house into a workout by playing music and cleaning quickly.
• Instead of inviting a friend to a movie, dinner, or a drink, suggest an outdoor activity like walking, hiking, or biking. You can even join a social sports team together!
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator.
• Get a standing or walking desk.
• Do squats while you floss or brush your teeth. It only takes two minutes to brush or floss, allowing you to work your leg muscles twice daily.
• When you drive somewhere, park farther from the entrance so you walk a little more.
• If you take public transportation, get off a stop earlier and walk the rest of the way.
• For destinations that are 30 minutes away or less by foot, walk instead of drive.

Every little bit counts.

If you think you hate exercise, the best thing you can do is find a positive mindset. Take stock of what you’re already doing. Find an exercise that doesn’t feel like a workout.

When in-line skating became outmoded, I took up running—and made it fun and more exciting by going barefoot. Doing something so contrarian and weird makes it more enjoyable for me and reminds me that exercise can be made your own. Today, at 46 years old, I’m in the best shape of my life.

Your mindset can shape your body more than you know. It’s not about magical thinking but about recognizing the power of belief as the first step toward positive change. Small shifts in perspective can lead to big changes in your health and well-being—you better believe it!

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Is there a reason everything some people touch turns to gold?

You know those people who just seem to get more and more successful? It’s as if each success gives them momentum to achieve even more.

Bridgit Mendler is a former Disney child star turned singer, lawyer, and entrepreneur. Amor Towles was a very successful investment banker for two decades and then became a very successful author. Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and Haruki Murakami have published and sold not just one but many different books to millions of people worldwide.

Well, there’s a secret to their success, and no, it’s not the obvious money, privilege, and social class (although those certainly count for something). It’s not even their natural talent.

Why is it that everything these people touch turns to gold?

Science Hints at Why Success Breeds Success

Expectations

In 2014, researchers who wanted to test the veracity of the adage “Success breeds success” created website-based real-world social settings and randomly bestowed “successes”—ranging from funding to awards, product endorsements, and even “signatures of support” on social or political campaigns—on study participants.

In all scenarios, receiving a modest reward early on “triggered a self-propelling cascade of success” for those participants. (Yet receiving large rewards early on did not proportionally increase later success.) Because these rewards were distributed randomly, not based on merit, the study concluded that a person who sees such early success might later achieve more than someone who is similarly qualified or talented but didn’t receive early success.

The study author reasoned that the unmerited early success people receive “produces arbitrary inequality by raising their future success expectations vis-a-vis equally talented non-recipients.”

Self-Belief

A more recent study of the same subject took a different approach, enlisting equally abled players to compete in a best-of-3 contest experiment. The results reveal that players who won the first round did indeed see better performance later. But winning alone was not the cause. Only when winning increased players’ confidence did it give them momentum toward success. “The effect of winning seems driven by an information revelation effect, whereby players update their beliefs about their relative strength after experiencing an initial success,” the researchers wrote. “Even with an initially even playing field, subjective self-confidence can play a critical role in future performance and, therefore, contribute to putting identical people on different paths in terms of long-term success.”

Status

From these studies, we understand that self-belief and expectations spur success. But that’s not all. As a person’s success builds, so does their network and reputation, which easily opens more doors to success.

There’s a term for this: the Matthew effect. Coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968, the Matthew effect posits that the work of high-status people receives greater recognition than work of equal quality by lesser-known people. At least two studies testing the Matthew effect determined it’s a real phenomenon, at least in the science community.

In the 2014 study, researchers compared the citation rates of papers before and after the scientists who’d written them won a prestigious science title. Then, they compared those citation rates to a control group of papers published by scientists who hadn’t earned the title. Results found a 12 percent bump in citations of papers after the scientists were recognized, leading experts to conclude that the Matthew effect plays a major role in scientists’ careers.

Also validating the Matthew effect is a 2018 study that tracked the career trajectories of winning and losing applicants to a Dutch grant program. The program used a points system to score applications and awarded funding to scientists whose applications met or exceeded a certain number of points. The study examined applicants just above and below the threshold, as their work quality would be similar, and found that over the next eight years, winners secured more than twice as much funding as nonwinners. That was just the beginning of the benefits that winners saw.

The study author offered two explanations for how the Matthew effect operates: Winning funding gives scientists accolades that increase their likelihood of winning more awards, funding, and jobs. Second, and critically, winners continue to seek grant money while discouraged nonwinners give up.

Optimism

Failure is practically a prerequisite for success, as any successful person will tell you. Steve Jobs—who was ousted from Apple before rejoining it when his next company, NeXT Computers, was acquired by Apple—is a well-worn example.

So, failure is not what inhibits success. A person’s outlook after that failure does.

One 1990 positive psychology study of athletes showed that optimism can lead to success even in the short term. The study had college-level swimmers complete a questionnaire to determine whether they were optimists or pessimists. Then, the swimmers were told to swim their best race, and afterward, the researchers gave each athlete a swim time that was slower than their actual time. After a few hours’ rest, the athletes swam again.

The study results showed that while the optimists swam 0.5 percent faster on average during the second round, the pessimists swam 1.6 percent slower. The author concluded that optimists saw failure as an opportunity to do better, while pessimists were simply discouraged.

These studies argue that expectations, optimism, and positive beliefs drive success. Successful people aren’t necessarily smarter and more talented than less successful people.

So, while you might not currently be as successful as Amor Towles, Bridgit Mendler, or whichever uber-successful person makes you green with envy, you can adopt and leverage their successful mindset for yourself.

Pursue Success Like a Successful Person

Anyone with the right outlook can find the momentum of success. Here’s how you build it for yourself.

Grow Your Self-Belief

Throughout our lives, we have experiences that lead us to label ourselves in specific ways; then, we tend to stick with those labels and their accompanying behaviors. Yet expectations form our reality, so we should take care not to label ourselves in ways that limit us.

The first step to building new beliefs is to challenge your old ones: Identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that undermine your confidence and expectations of success. Replace these beliefs with more realistic perspectives. Reflect on and celebrate your strengths, talents, and past successes. Remind yourself of your capabilities and resilience in overcoming challenges.

Aspire to have the same unfailing belief in yourself as Donald Trump does. Even when he fails, he spins it into the greatest success. And people believe him. One of his 2016 presidential campaign promises was to build a wall on the U.S. southern border to stop illegal crossings and make Mexico pay for it. Instead, the 455 miles of the wall cost U.S. taxpayers $15 billion and failed to do the very thing it was intended to do. Yet Trump still touted it as an “extraordinary milestone” that “achieved the most secure southern border in U.S. history.”

To shake up your self-beliefs and tap into your potential, push yourself outside your comfort zone. Take a risk or try something new, and you might learn something about yourself or conquer a fear. Plenty of successful entrepreneurs practice facing their fears, including Tim Ferriss, who quit a corporate job and wrote a book called The 4-Hour Workweek that was rejected by 26 publishers before it sold and became a global hit. Just the simple act of trying increases your chances of success.

Practice Optimism

Once you have a new view of your self-beliefs, practice positive self-talk to enforce them and improve your self-confidence. Pay attention to your internal dialogue and replace negative thoughts with affirmations.

Expect Success

To boost your expectations for success, use positive reinforcement. My advice to people who want to build a new routine or habit is to start with a minimum enjoyable action—a task or activity that’s so easy, it’s laughable—and track it. If you want to write a book, for example, tell yourself you’ll write one sentence daily. Use my free habit tracker to mark each time you complete it.

Over time, the tracker allows you to visualize how many times you have done that task. If you skip a few times—which is inevitable!—don’t berate yourself. Use the opportunity to practice optimism and positive self-talk. You might have backslid a little, but the tracker shows you were capable of sticking to your routine. You can do it again.

Remember, success isn’t just about striking gold; it’s about building unwavering self-belief, expectations for success, and optimism that prevent you from accepting failure.

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