affirmations

Affirmations is the technique of visualising your goal and then trying to make it happen with a pen and paper.

It's an interesting and debatable technique, but many people claim it works. I'll leave you to decide.

Firstly, you must have a clear and precise goal. It's important you have a precise goal. For example, instead of writing -

"I, Noung, will win a major award."

You would write -

"I, Noung, will win a nobel peace prize."

Once you have this goal in mind, write the goal down fifteen to twenty times a day in the form shown above. There is no set time frame in which you should expect a result, although Scott Adams says that if he didn't get a result in about six months he'd assume he was never going to get one and he'd move on to another objective.

The Rule of Affirmations is a means of reaching an end by, in essence, being stubborn. To begin, you must have a goal. Say, for example, that your goal is to become a pedant on E2. By writing your goal on a piece of paper 15 times in a row every day in the form "I, your name here, will blah blah blah...." after an indeterminate (unless otherwise stated) period of time, you will reach your goal. Goals can be to become rich or powerful, or less material things like becoming more personable or friendly. And obviously an element of realism is required, if my affirmation was "I, lambda68, will be given 10 million dollars and a new decked-out PowerBook G4 by a bum on the street tomorrow my affirmation would almost certainly fail, even if I did write it 15 times.

Affirmations certainly work, I have the hardware I have now because of (largely because of, at least) them. However, these goals may take more than just the affirmations. To become a pedant, you need something like 5000 write-ups and absurd numbers in XP. These things may not happen by themselves. Perhaps people will spontaneously upvote all of your nodes, but you'll have to write the write-ups. Keep it realistic, folks, but don't give up!