I learned many years ago that visualizing or fantasizing is one of the most powerful means of achieving personal goals.

This proved true again at the recent women’s U.S. Open Tennis final, when 19-year-old Canadian Bianca Andreescu defeated Serena Williams. During her post-match press conference, a teary-eyed Andreescu mentioned how for years she would close her eyes and envision herself winning the U.S. Open against Williams, the greatest woman tennis player of her generation.

“I guess these visualizations really, really work,” she said.

Andreescu’s rise has been amazingly swift. She lost in the first qualification round at the last two U.S. Opens and was ranked outside the top 150 women players when the 2019 season began. She won a tournament earlier in the year, but then missed significant time with a torn rotator cuff. Since she returned to the tour in early August, she has beaten Serena Williams twice. Such is the power of active visualization.

Numerous studies have shown that mental practice through visualization can be as effective at improving skills as real practice. You can actually develop and reinforce real skills by visualizing yourself practicing them.

This explains why visualization is part of most world-class athletes' training: because it works! They have future vision. They see things a split second before they happen.

That's what a place-kicker does when he comes on the field to kick a winning field goal. Three seconds left in the game, 80,000 screaming fans, 30 million people watching on TV and the game is still in balance. As the kicker begins his moves, he makes the final adjustments necessary to achieve the mental picture he's formed in his mind so many times -- a picture of himself kicking the winning field goal!

That’s all well and good for athletes, but what about the rest of us whose dreams of success follow other paths?

Get a notebook and carve out some alone time for yourself. Give yourself a little space to think about what things you really want in life. Make a list of everything you want and everything you want to do during your lifetime -- no matter how crazy it sounds.

If you want to drink champagne in the south of France, write it down. If you want to ride a camel in the desert, write it down. If you want to own a Ferrari, write it down. Nothing is too big or too small. Search every corner of your mind for whatever you want and commit it to paper. Then put the list where you can look at it whenever you wish.

Before I wrote my first book, “Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive,” I had put a Post-it note on my bathroom mirror that read, “Be a New York Times best-selling author.” It worked for me, and it can work for you.

The late writer and visualization expert Shakti Gawain encouraged her readers to go further; she urged them to cut out pictures of those material things they want from magazines and other sources and hang them up. I’ve used that method too.

It’s important to remember not to expect all of these desires to be fulfilled immediately or at all. But when you take action, like making a list of what you want or cutting out an image of a car you want to own, you open up a pathway to possibility that was not present before. Give the process time and have faith, and it’s likely that you will be surprised by how many things on your list actually start appearing in your life.

Olympic pentathlete Marilyn King said, “If you can't imagine it, you can't ever do it. In my experience, the image always precedes the reality.” And she provides a very moving example of the power of visualization.

When King was preparing for the 1980 Olympic trials, she suffered a severe back injury and was confined to bed just nine months before the trials. Determined not to let this injury keep her from performing, she spent the next four months doing nothing but watching films of the best performers in the pentathlon events and visualizing herself going through the same events.

King placed second at the Olympic trials despite her lack of physical preparation. She stated that it was her psychological state, not her physical condition that gained her success.

Mackay’s Moral: Whatever a person does, he or she must first do in their mind.

It seems like artificial intelligence is taking over the world, leaving many of us non-techies feeling terrified.

Yet when you stop to think about it, we all use artificial intelligence (AI) every day. When we Google something, use Siri on our smartphones or ask Alexa a question, we are using AI.

Hollywood has certainly featured AI in many movies from “The Terminator” series to “Robocop” and “I, Robot.” In “Minority Report,” algorithms predict who is going to commit a crime, and the person is arrested before the crime can be committed.

What we want to consider is not a fictional near future of robots taking over the world but a more pressing issue of jobs. According to a McKinsey report, 400 million to 800 million jobs worldwide could be displaced by 2030 as a result of machines.

“The bigger concern with AI is that those who do not adapt and learn how to work alongside machines might be seen as obsolete in certain sectors,” said Susan Sly, co-CEO and co-founder of RadiusAI, which was just named a top 10 start-up in the highly competitive Phoenix tech market.

AI is big business. Microsoft recently agreed to invest $1 billion in a partnership with the research group OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk and other wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. According to Bloomberg News, OpenAI will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to train and run the group’s AI software, and the two will jointly develop supercomputing technology.

Those are big players in any industry, to be sure, but how will AI benefit the rest of the business world?

According to the Harvard Business Review, 36% of executives say that their primary goal for incorporating AI is to optimize internal business operations. Eighty-four percent of global business organizations believe that AI will give them a competitive advantage.

A whopping 72% of execs believe that AI will be the most significant business advantage of the future, according to a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, says by the end of this year, startups will surpass the leading giants like Google, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon in driving the AI economy. By 2020, it is expected that AI will become a more integral part of the sales process for up to 30% of companies around the world.

Artificial intelligence will transform the relationship between people and technology. Our skills and creativity will be challenged and enhanced. Real and sustainable benefits to business transformation will be the end result.

Rather than fear these bold changes, consider this: The share of jobs requiring AI has increased by 450% since 2013, according to Adobe. Investment into AI startups by venture capitalists has soared six-fold since 2000. The number of AI startups since 2000 has increased 14 times, said an article in Forbes.

AI has enormous potential to affect the profitability of companies that find appropriate ways to use it.

The statistics website Statista projects that global revenues from AI for enterprise applications are forecasted to grow from $1.6 billion in 2018 to $31.2 billion in 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 52.6% in this seven-year period.

Global retail spending on AI will grow to $7.3 billion a year by 2022, up from $2 billion in 2018, according to Juniper Research. This is because companies will invest heavily in AI tools that will help them differentiate and improve the services they offer customers.

And here’s a statistic that merits your attention: Approximately 61% of companies with an innovation strategy are using AI to identify opportunities in data that they would have otherwise missed, according to Narrative Science.

That’s a lot of data to absorb, but I think it’s a roadmap to the future. If all those numbers haven’t convinced you that artificial intelligence is a trend to be embraced rather than feared, you might be on the road to nowhere.

Mackay’s Moral: Businesses with the brightest futures are "AI" -- All In -- on AI.

Never give up. Never quit! That is the motto of Travis Mills, one of only five surviving quadruple-amputee soldiers from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I firmly believe and often preach that one person can make all the difference in the world. Travis is a shining example. What a story of perseverance! I was amazed at his positive outlook, humor, confidence and devotion to help people, especially disabled veterans and amputees.

Travis recently met me in Minneapolis for a coaching session. In some ways, I felt like I was the student. A good friend of mine, Jac Arbour, called and said he wanted to surprise me and bring a couple people to Minneapolis for a session on street smarts. The “surprise” was Travis and his father-in-law, Craig Buck, who is also his business manager.

U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills was serving with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan during his third tour of duty. On the night of April 10, 2012 -- four days before his 25th birthday -- he was on patrol when he was critically injured from an improvised explosive device that blew off portions of both his legs and arms.

Travis thought he was going to die. Still, he asked the medic to treat two of his friends who suffered shrapnel injuries first.

He spent 19 months at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and went through 13 surgeries. At first, he was angry, embarrassed and upset. But he soon realized those feelings were selfish. He was determined not to just lie around.

Travis said: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish once you make that all-important decision to go forward. I could choose to quit. If I’d wanted, people would have spoon-fed me for the rest of my life. I could have stared at the ceiling for the next 60 years and spent the rest of my life angry, frustrated, grieving and dismayed. But I chose to heal. I was the same ‘me’ as I’d always been. I was a man with scars who chose to live life to the fullest and best.”

The key was believing he was going to get better. He said: “Keep going. Keep persevering. You’re going to get through tough times. Never give up. Never quit.”

Travis understands that attitude is extremely important. He knows that enthusiasm is contagious, and he wants to start an epidemic. Understanding that people need a bit of a push from time to time, doctors called on him regularly during his recovery to motivate others.

He said he was fortunate that he had a great support group, especially in his wife, Kelsey. He had a strong network of family and friends to lean on. These mentors let him know he could get better. He told me, “It’s amazing what good things can happen when somebody knows you’re cheering them on.”

I mentioned that Travis has a good sense of humor, and he doesn’t shy away from his past. For example, when we first met, he said we are going to have a BLAST. Since he knew I wrote the book “Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive,” he said that he was bitten by a shark. To put me at ease, he said he wanted to “disarm the situation” and looked at where his right arm should be. After we finished dinner that first night, Travis took off his prosthetic hand and quipped, “Let me lend you a hand.”

In September 2013, he founded the Travis Mills Foundation, a nonprofit organization that assists wounded and injured veterans and their families get a new chance at a better life. Through the Travis Mills Group, he consults with and speaks to companies and organizations nationwide, inspiring all to overcome life’s challenges and adversity.

Travis’ main message is one that many people can relate to: “Hard times come to everybody. When hard times happen, we have a choice to make. We can become discouraged and bitter, or we can choose to never quit. When life gets hard, the key is just to keep pushing forward. Instead of saying, ‘It could be worse,’ the key is to say, ‘It’s going to get better!’ Then work with all your might toward that goal.”

Mackay’s Moral: Travis Mills is more than a war hero -- he’s a life hero.