Think of a lemon.
Hold it in your mind for a second. The yellow skin, how it’s waxy and cold. You bring it to your mouth and bite.
Your salivary glands fired. I know they did, even though there is no lemon.
Now let’s unpack what just happened, because it matters more than it seems.
To produce that response, your brain had to form a visual representation of a lemon, cross-reference it with stored sensory memory, retrieve the knowledge that lemon tastes sour, calculate your body’s appropriate chemical counter-response, send a neural signal down the cranial nerves to your salivary glands, instruct the acinar cells to open their secretory pores, and release fluid into your oral cavity.
Every one of those steps happened in under a second.
One second or less, from image to reaction.
We spend enormous energy talking about how difficult change is. How long it takes, how you need the right conditions, the right mindset, the right system before anything can move.
I used to believe that too.
Of course I also tried visualization the way it’s usually taught. Sit down, close your eyes, imagine success. See it clearly, feel it as if it has already happened.
So I did.
I vivdly imagined a side business taking off, passive income coming in. I could feel it.
And it felt good. And then nothing changed.
If anything, it made it worse. I had already “experienced” the reward, so the urgency and motivation to actually do the work dropped.
Looking back, I can trace more than ten failed attempts at building some version of a passive-income business back to exactly that pattern.
I was imagining outcomes. Not once did I sit down and think through what I would actually do the next day, or what would happen when things got difficult, or where I would get stuck. Or how that process should actually look like start to finish.
I was rehearsing the reward, not the work.
And the strange part is that I knew better.
In a completely different domain, I had already learned the opposite lesson.
In surgery, nothing is left to vague imagination. Before a complex case, I don’t picture a successful outcome and hope for the best. I go through the procedure step by step. The incision, the exposure, the critical structures, the points where things can go wrong, and what I will do if they do.
Not as a vague idea, but as a sequence. I actually built cards for that - SurgiCards, that I used for my training and offer my residents now as well.
Recently I even ran an online session on procedural goal setting, on the exact process I used to become head of department of a university department within 10 years, There I had an outcome AND a clear process plan.
The core idea is simple: if you can’t break something down into a sequence of concrete steps, you are not ready to execute it.
I just didn’t apply that to my own “side projects.”
And I missed that for years, despite using the same principle almost daily. But often we can’t transfer our own learnings from one area to another.
That is because the difference is often quite subtle.
Think about the lemon again.
You didn’t imagine yourself having successfully eaten a lemon at some point in the future. You imagined biting into it now. A specific action. We could have added specific substeps like picking the lemon up and raising the arm to your mouth.
That is why your body responded immediately.
Nothing moves because something sounds good. It moves when it’s clear what is next.
Most visualization fails because we focus on outcomes. A static image or short clip of you with the thing you want.
But the brain doesn’t act on pictures alone. It acts on associations, emotions and instructions. And vague outcomes don’t contain instructions.
Instead of imagining success, you imagine the next step.Instead of imagining the result, you imagine the process.Instead of imagining things going perfectly, you include where it gets difficult.
You run through the sequence.
Not to motivate yourself, but to remove some of the uncertainty about what comes next.
There’s a version of this in psychology as well. Alfred Adler called it “acting as if.” I always found that phrasing vague, but what he was pointing at is simple: once you act, the ambiguity disappears very quickly.
The system doesn’t change because you like what you see. It changes when the next move becomes obvious enough that it doesn’t require additional thinking to act.
That’s what you felt with the lemon. No debate, no hesitation. Just a direct line from image to action.
The mistake most people make is not that they don’t believe strongly enough. It’s that they are feeding the system the wrong kind of input.
A pleasant outcome is not enough. It’s too abstract, it doesn’t tell you what to do.
A concrete step does.
People like Michael Phelps with their 23 olympic gold medals have described this very process quite in detail. He imagined every single stroke and step of a race for hours right up to the ceremony.
The question is not whether you can change.
It is whether you can describe the next step clearly enough that you can’t not take it.
What is the thing you keep telling yourself requires more time, more preparation, more readiness before you can begin?
Don’t imagine the end result.
Imagine the first move. Then the second, then the moment where it gets uncomfortable and you would usually stop.
If you want to level up, think it backwards. Which step is right before the desired outcome. And which one before, and so on and so forth.
Walk through it.
At that point, time is usually not the problem anymore.
The lemon is just the simplest proof of that.
To more in life
Nicco
