How to hack the beliefs that are holding you back
This is pop psychology. Most self-help authors, and even successful people like Oprah, make the mistake of confusing cause and effect. Feeling confident helps with acquiring success (and I agree it is better than the opposite), but it is a very, very small component of it. On the contrary, if you talk to many successful people they will tell you that they didn't have much confidence in themselves at the beginning.<p>The trick, however, is that you definitely feel confident once you're successful, so you believe (after the fact) that this might be the cause.<p>Becoming successful by mental affirmations is like saying that you can have a convertible car by just feeling the wind in your face. Owners of a convertible will tell you that this is the real feeling -- but it is not the cause for them having the car in the first place.<p>The link between mental affirmations and making money is even weaker: many times you don't even need to be successful to have a lot of it. Most  fortunes are result of inheritance, marriage, blind luck (lottery winners), being in the right place at the right time (e.g., an early engineer at Google), and, don't forget about it, corruption.