I was ten years old when my body started failing me. My legs swelled until I couldn't recognize them as mine. My face looked like someone else's. The doctors had a name for it: nephrotic syndrome - a kidney disorder where the filtering system breaks down, leaking protein into the urine, and the body begins to retain fluid in places it shouldn't. I was a kid in Buenos Aires who loved rugby and hated sitting still, and suddenly I was in a hospital bed, being told my kidneys weren't working properly.
Nobody gives you a manual for that. Not at ten.
The Weight of It
Nephrotic syndrome isn't the kind of illness you hide easily. The swelling is visible. The fatigue is constant. The medication, heavy doses of corticosteroids, brings its own set of side effects: weight gain, mood swings, a face you don't recognize in the mirror. You feel like your body has betrayed you before you've even had a chance to understand what a body is for.
For several years, my life orbited around the condition. Relapses would come without warning. A simple cold could trigger an episode. I would go through cycles of remission and return, each relapse a reminder that I was still not free of it. I missed rugby. I missed the version of myself that didn't have to think about any of this. I watched other kids run and play and not think twice about their health, and I carried a quiet anger about that for a long time.
The medical team was excellent. The treatment worked, in the clinical sense. But no one ever talked to me about why the body does what it does when the mind is in chronic stress. No one connected those dots for me. That would come later, and when it did, it changed everything.
The Shift at Sixteen
I was sixteen when I first came across the concept of the law of attraction. Not through some polished self-help course, but through a book that someone left out, a conversation that went longer than it should have, and a slow, reluctant curiosity that I couldn't quite suppress. The idea was simple and, at first, I thought it was naive: that what you focus on, with genuine feeling and sustained belief, you begin to draw toward you. That the mind doesn't just observe reality. It participates in creating it.
I was skeptical. I was a teenager with a science-oriented mind, and the idea felt uncomfortably close to wishful thinking. But I was also desperate in the quieter sense - not dramatically, not in crisis, but tired. Tired of relapses. Tired of the cycle. Tired of defining myself by a condition that had followed me for six years.
So I decided to try.
"I stopped picturing myself as sick. I started, very deliberately, picturing myself as well."
What I Actually Did
The practice was uncomfortable at first, because it required me to hold a version of myself in my mind that didn't yet exist in my body. I would sit quietly and visualize my kidneys functioning perfectly. I would imagine the protein staying where it belonged. I would see myself training without swelling, running without fatigue, waking up and not immediately scanning my body for symptoms. I did this consistently - not once or twice, but daily, for months.
I also began paying attention to what I was telling myself outside of those practice sessions. The law of attraction, as I came to understand it, isn't only about visualization. It's about the background frequency of your thoughts. If I was deliberately visualizing health in the morning but spending the rest of the day bracing for the next relapse, anxiously monitoring every sign, catastrophizing every minor change in how I felt, I was working against myself. The visualization was the tool. The harder work was changing the default setting.
I started catching the fear-based thoughts and replacing them - not with blind denial, but with a calm, grounded certainty that my body was capable of healing. I stopped identifying as a sick person managing a condition and started identifying as a healthy person who had been through something difficult. That distinction sounds small. It wasn't.
What Happened Between Sixteen and Eighteen
Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, my relapses slowed and then stopped. My protein levels normalized. The doctors, who had been cautiously optimistic for years, began to use words like "stable" and then "clear." I continued the treatment as prescribed - I am not suggesting I abandoned medicine or that visualization replaced it. But something shifted in the trajectory that the clinical picture alone didn't fully explain.
I cannot tell you with scientific certainty that the law of attraction healed my kidneys. I am not a doctor. What I can tell you is that the period in which I most deliberately and consistently practiced it coincided with the most sustained period of remission I had experienced. I can tell you that I felt different from the inside, calmer, more certain, less braced against my own body. And I can tell you that when I finally stopped carrying the diagnosis as my primary identity, something in me relaxed in a way that nothing else had managed to produce.
By the time I was eighteen, the condition had receded so far into the background of my life that I had to consciously remind myself it had ever been there. That was new. That was everything.
Why This Matters Beyond Health
The reason I still think about this, years later, isn't just that it helped my kidneys. It's what it revealed about the relationship between the mind and outcomes in every other area of life.
When I moved to Miami. When I started building Wallstreet.ai without a network or a roadmap. When I walked into rooms where I was the youngest person and had the least institutional backing. In all of those moments, I was drawing on the same muscle I had first built at sixteen, lying in bed in Buenos Aires, deciding to believe in something I couldn't yet see.
The law of attraction, stripped of any mysticism, is really a theory about where you direct your attention and energy, and how that direction shapes what you notice, what you pursue, and what you ultimately create. When you believe something is possible, you act differently. You persist longer. You spot opportunities that your fear-filtered self would have dismissed. You show up in a way that other people respond to.
I've watched this play out too many times to be dismissive of it. In finance, in sport, in every environment where outcomes are uncertain and the gap between those who make it and those who don't often comes down to one thing, the ones who genuinely believed they would.
A Tool I Carry Everywhere
I don't talk about this often. It feels private in a way that most things don't, partly because it's personal and partly because I know how it sounds in rooms that prize empiricism. But I think there's something dishonest about presenting a version of yourself that omits the experience that most shaped how you operate.
This shaped me. A diagnosis at ten that could have defined me. A decision at sixteen to not let it. Two years of practice that quietly rebuilt my relationship to my own mind. And a tool, tested first on the hardest possible thing, that I now carry into every room, every pitch, every new chapter.
The body heals when the mind stops fighting it. And the mind, it turns out, is something you can train.