How to 'Manifest' Your Own Success

The practice of visualizing desired outcomes, through listing goals and vision boards, has become popular this year

- ANN-MARIE ALCÁNTARA

Visualizing the success you want to achieve, or manifesting, took off this year.

Go online, and seemingly everyone is making vision boards, writing down their goals repeatedly and saying them aloud like a mantra.

Singer Dua Lipa swore by it to achieve big goals, and Cambridge Dictionary named "manifest" its word of the year. In the first eight months of 2024, there were more than 130,000 searches for it on the dictionary's website. On TikTok, the hashtag #manifesting has 1.6 million posts and #manifestation has 6.5 million.

Some psychologists say its current meaning, which involves visualizations and affirmations to make something happen, can be traced to the bestselling 2006 book "The Secret." Its recent resurgence reflects a desire for people to exert control over their lives, even when the outcome might be largely out of their hands.

"This has moved out of something that has really stayed in a very specific selfhelp space on social media, to a broader cultural trend," says Wendalyn Nichols, publishing manager of the Cambridge Dictionary.

Manifesting's rise mirrors other popular trends during the past year: people making their own luck, acting "delulu" to take risky leaps in work and relationships, and setting goals in October instead of January.

Successful people have long worked to visualize the outcome they wanted or repeated positive phrases to achieve a goal. But recently, as more people have taken it on, they say they have learned a key lesson: If you don't couple manifesting with action, it can be a waste.