📙 You can beat the genetic lottery.No matter who you are, where you were born, or how you grew up, you have one thing in common with everyone else: You started life with a ticket in the genetic lottery. Some people definitely hold winning tickets: born into the arms of two loving, stable parents, in a safe country, with no worries about food or shelter or access to a good education.Many others, of course, start life in a far less promising way — carrying the genes of unstable, unhealthy, or unloving parents, born into a world of poverty, prejudice, lack of opportunity. For many, this random beginning becomes the middle and end of their life story as well. And yes, our genes, our environment, and our experiences do shape who we are — but they don't have to define who we become.Picture rolling a rock down a hill. It will keep going until something stops it, right? That's your mindset: your habitual, unconscious ways of living and thinking. Like that rock, your mindset keeps you eating too much, or believing you're unworthy of love, or dwelling on past pain, until something causes it to change. Or rather, until something causes you to change your mindset.You might believe that you can alter the effects of your environment but are stuck with your genes, and in one sense, you're right. You'll always have those brown eyes or that curly hair. But just as you can use colored contacts or straighten your hair, you can overcome your family's predilection for, say, ...