Professor Bernard Roth: swap a few words and you'll be more successful

Often the main barrier to our own success is ourselves - including what we say, even if only alone with ourselves. For example, according to Stanford University Professor Bernard Roth, to achieve a positive change in life, sometimes it is enough to remove from his vocabulary a few innocent words.

Words matter by influencing how people approach their goals," says Bernard Roth, professor of engineering, founder and director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (also known as "d.school"), one of the leading experts in cinema and robotics.

In his new book, The Achievement Habit, he shares several tools that should help his readers overcome life's obstacles and realize what they have in mind. He proposes a problem solving strategy called "design thinking". According to Roth, "this is a set of principles that our group has developed to effectively address a wide variety of 'design issues'.

Among other things, the author of the book cites a number of linguistic "tricks" that are supposed to help you change your attitude towards life and achieve your goals. And here are the two easiest of them:

1. Replace "but" with "and."

What's wrong with "I want to go to the movies, but I have too much work"? According to Roth, by using an alliance of "but" instead of "and" in such a situation, we "create a conflict (and sometimes a reason) for ourselves, which in fact does not exist. In other words, in this case, the "but" can be an excuse, whereas you can well combine both things - going to the movies and doing the work. The only question is how to do it.

Instead, Roth advises me to say, "I want to go to the movies, and I have a lot of work to do.

According to him, when we use an alliance of "and" in these and similar situations, our "brain can start thinking about how it can deal with both parts of the sentence. You may be able to find a compromise solution - watching a shorter movie, for example - is not ideal, but both goals (what you need and would like to do) will be achieved.

2. Replace "I must" with "I want".

Roth suggests a simple exercise: try every time you say the phrase "I have to", mentally replace it with "I want".

"This exercise is very effective because it makes people realize that everything they do in their lives - even the things that seem unpleasant - are actually what they've chosen," he writes.

Roth cites the example of one of his students who was forced to take a hateful math class because it was necessary for his studies. By doing the exercise in the book, he realized that he really wanted to take these courses, because the benefits of being successful outweigh the inconvenience of studying a subject he didn't like.