From the Pavel Durov episode of the Lex Fridman podcast:

Lex Fridman (04:19:33) Another thing we’ve talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought. Do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it, by manifesting it into being? What do you think?

Pavel Durov (04:19:55) There are many explanations why it works. One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident does allow you to achieve the things you want to achieve. It’s very hard to believe though that you can just manifest things into being without applying effort in the direction that seems to be logical. Maybe some people exist that can just sit on the bank of a river and materialize things by the power of their thought. But I’m not sure I’m one of these people. I always found it more easy to believe that if you couple this optimism and faith with logical action, then it is bound to be successful.

Lex Fridman (04:21:04) Prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus, thinking about the thing.

Pavel Durov (04:21:13) Oh yes, over many, many, many days. It’s possible to imagine our world as a high dimensional universe where humans have the ability to navigate through it with the power of belief, which is coupled with positive emotion and logical thinking. But we are getting into an esoteric realm. We don’t have any proof of that. But we also know that we probably at this point haven’t discovered even 1% about this universe.

Lex Fridman (04:22:00) I agree with you fully, and I like what you said in the way you were thinking about it. You’ve told me before that maybe there’s a way that with effort and with the focused mind, you can shape, you can morph the landscape of probabilities around you. It’s a nice way to visualize it, that somehow our effort and our focus changes the things that are likely and less likely. And by focusing on it, we make the thing more and more likely, at least as an estimate, as the kind of field that we, through our thoughts and through our actions, change that field.

Every major accomplishment in my life has been from prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus, thinking about the thing I wanted to accomplish. Pretty much to the point of obsession. Taking notes, writing down ideas, setting goals, and tracking my progress. Waking up early or staying late to work on it. Putting in the work day in and day out. The times in my life where maybe I didn’t accomplish much were all because I didn’t have a goal, and I didn’t have focused effort. Sure you get stuff done, but its no where near the same level of what you could have pulled off. Not even close.