Being told you're gifted often isn't a self fulfilling prophecy, and can easily lead to failure or giving up when being gifted isn't working.

"Giving up when things get too hard" is a gift in itself. Not everyone is good at knowing when to stop.

I'd say that applies extremely rarely. When success depends on putting in the work (which is most often the case, especially if you have a higher aptitude than most), giving up easily is a major impediment.

I say this as someone who had this problem myself. Always being told "things come so easily to you" made me immediately avoid everything where I didn't excel out of the gate.

Not answering your specific question, or strawman to discredit cynicism, but to your point, the cynicism comes from manifesting not being something that can be substantiated by any metric.

“Having a goal” doesn't need telekinetic abilities or a connection with a sentient universe that alters other people’s behaviors for your benefit. Whereas manifesting and similar concepts rely on this. Additionally, they rely on any positive outcome to be retroactively attributed to what was manifested. And negative outcomes to be attributed to not manifesting hard enough. Both the manifesting and the outcome are unilaterally made by an individual and have no ability to be part of any statistic to judge its utility, hence the unsubstantiated nature, in fact it exempts itself from being able to be substantiated.

That's a great point, and this is a documented effect in education:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_effect

Generally, people treat us differently when they expect more or less from us (based on what they've seen from us or facts they know about us). People also experience a tendency to rise to high expectations or fall to low ones. See also:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/10/hi...