I agree that visualizing success doesn’t work, but I do believe in the opposite: visualizing failure. It’s sometimes called a pre-mortem (as opposed to a post-mortem). And in Stoicism it’s called negative visualization.

The benefit of negative visualization is that it makes you come up with contingency plans that let you better deal with the future when things don’t turn out well. Moreover, when your visualizations are negative, the surprises that the future holds for you will all be positive. Something bad happens? So what? You were expecting something like that anyway. Something good happens? What a pleasant surprise!

In any case, nice article, Todd :-)