"The mind is an incredibly powerful yet fallible pattern matching engine. It can find anything, from any input, it seems. Just the same way you can make a face

"The mind is an incredibly powerful yet fallible pattern matching engine. It can find anything, from any input, it seems. Just the same way you can make a face or a zoo animal from a pattern of water vapor in the sky, you're making a failure out of a pattern of events in the past. In both cases, it's illusion." I don't often recommend Tony Robbins, but one lesson from his work that is stuck with me is exactly that. The way he puts it: "Our brain is amazingly good at answering questions. Any question you ask yourself, and your brain will come up with an answer. So if you ask yourself 'why am I such a failure?', you'll get an answer. On the flipside, ask yourself 'Why am I such a success?', you'll also get an answer. The trick is asking yourself the right questions". (This is heavily paraphrased, as I'm doing it entirely from my memory of a tape from 10 years ago). This is also why I think the best self-help tool is the famous saying: "Fake it til' you make it". Pretending you're the kind of person you want to be is a great way to trick your brain into getting the patterns and habits such a person would have, and the fact that you essentially realize you're "fooling yourself" actually doesn't matter that much.