My Kind of Writing -- "Repetitive Affirmation Creates Belief" - by Alex Brogan

 

Repetitive Affirmation creates belief. Beliefs become conviction. Then things begin to happen.

Most people wait. They’re passive observers of their own lives. They think beliefs just happen to them. They don’t.

Your beliefs are not random. They’re deliberately constructed. Either by you or by others. The person who controls your affirmations controls your future.

Look at the most successfull people. They didn’t stumble into conviction. They hammered it into existence through daily ritual. They said the same things to themselves over and over until the impossible became inevitable.

The average person’s mind is a battlefield of conflicting affirmations. One day they’re worthy. The next they’re not. One day then can. The next they can’t. This mental chaos produces exactly what you’d expect — nothing.

Conviction isn’t born from variety. It’s born from repetition. The same words. The same thoughts. The same images. Day after day after day.

Most people’s self-talk sounds like this: “I hope this works.” “Maybe I can.” “Let’s see what happens.” This is the language of the spectator, not the participant.

The conviction-builder speaks differently. “This will work.” “I can.” “This is happening.” — Simple, direct, absolute. No hedging. No escape hatches.

The most dangerous affirmation is the one you don’t know you’re making. The unconscious one. The one that runs in the backround while you sleep. These are the affirmations installed by others that you never chose.

Your job isn’t just to create new affirmations. It’s to find and destroy the old one’s. The ones sabotaging you silently.

Most people try positive thinking for a day. Then quit when the universe doesn’t instantly rearrange itself. This isn’t magic — it’s agriculture. You plant. You water. You wait. You harvest.

The gap between affirmation and manifestation is filled with one thing: persistent action. Belief without action is fantasy. Action without belief is drudgery. Together, they’re unstoppable.

-- Alex 

4 Books on Identity, Freedom, and Becoming

4 Books:

✅1. James Dale & William Rees — The Sovereign Individual (1997)
✅2. Alexandre Dumas — The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
✅3. Peter Attia — Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity (2023)
✅4. Anna Lembke — Dopamine Nation (2021)

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Theme:

Humans never genuinely pursue happiness; they only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears.

Here's a glimpse of each book. The order is deliberate. The Sovereign Individual takes the crown for most compelling, powerful, and urgent for an eagle-minded person.

1. James Dale & William Rees — The Sovereign Individual (1997) ⭐

Rees and Davidson argue that the Information Age rewards those who master digital tools and reject dependence on traditional institutions. The sovereign individual is not employed—they own skills, assets, and leverage that transcend geography and government control. Digital literacy is not optional; it is the dividing line between those who thrive in the new economy and those left behind. Code, networks, and portable expertise become the foundation of freedom, replacing physical capital and institutional credibility. The book's core insight: your ability to operate independently in a digital world determines whether you command your future or remain subject to forces beyond your control.

• Chapter 1 Distilled:
• Chapter 8 Distilled:

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2. Alexandre Dumas — The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) ⭐

Edmond Dantès is a young sailor on the verge of marriage and promotion when jealous rivals falsely accuse him of treason. He is arrested on his wedding day and thrown into the Château d'If, a fortress prison, where he is forgotten for fourteen years. But Dantès does not merely escape—he vanishes completely, shedding his former self to construct something new. With the help of a fellow prisoner, Abbé Faria—a brilliant scholar and polymath—he educates himself, discovers a hidden treasure, and emerges as the wealthy, calculating Count of Monte Cristo. His transformation from naïve sailor to aristocratic mastermind happens in isolation, beyond society's gaze and judgment. The lesson is profound: true reinvention requires withdrawal from the world that defined you. You cannot rebuild your identity while still performing for the audience that expects the old version. Dantès emerges not as a reformed version of himself but as an entirely different being—wealthier, wiser, and unrecognizable. To disappear is to reject continuity with your past self and create the conditions for radical transformation.

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3. Peter Attia — Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity (2023) ⭐

Attia dismantles the illusion that health is intuitive or self-evident. Longevity requires measurement: blood markers, metabolic data, strength metrics, sleep quality. What you don't track, you cannot improve. Most people drift through life reacting to symptoms rather than optimizing inputs, and they pay for this neglect in their final decades. Attia's framework is simple but uncompromising: if you want to live well at 80, you must behave like an athlete at 40. Tracking is not obsession—it is clarity. It converts vague intentions into actionable data and forces confrontation with reality rather than hopeful assumptions.

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4. Anna Lembke — Dopamine Nation (2021) ⭐

Lembke reveals that modern life is engineered to exploit our dopamine systems, turning normal people into addicts—not to substances, but to behaviors: phones, food, validation, comfort. She introduces the brain's pain-pleasure balance: every intense pleasure (porn, binge drinking, social media) is followed by an equal and opposite pain (guilt, craving, emptiness). The bigger the dopamine spike, the deeper the crash. The escape is not moderation but radical honesty about what controls you. Most people deny their dependencies because naming them demands change. Lembke argues that breaking free requires confronting the truth without euphemism: you are addicted, it is harming you, and only complete transparency (with yourself and others) creates the conditions for recovery. Dopamine-driven cycles thrive in secrecy and self-deception; they collapse under honest scrutiny.

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These four books shaped how I think about freedom, health, and identity. If you read one, make it The Sovereign Individual. If you read all four, read them in this order.

Sam Madlala