An ode to people who don’t believe in themselves - Modern Wisdom.
What comes first, belief or action?
Do you need to believe you can do a thing before you do it?
“Fake it until you make it” is one option, but incredibly hard if you’re introspective or have low self-belief and high standards.
So what about make it until you fake it?
Here are some lessons I’ve learned:
- You can believe you’re not worthy of a thing and still attain it.
- You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed.
- You can grip and grasp and fear and it ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted, and things still go well.
- You can have no self-belief and show up anyway.
- And still win.
- You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like.
- You can doubt the process, question your talent, be uncertain that you’re making progress, disparage your accomplishments, permanently feel like you’re not working hard enough no matter how hard you work, never give yourself a break, fail to fully feel gratitude, be terrified of never reaching your goals, and still end up in a place your 20 year old self could not imagine you’d ever get to.
“Self-belief is overrated, generate evidence.” - Ryan Holiday
So, some things to keep in mind…
Don’t grip life so tightly.
Being too serious creates a kind of brittle fragility which a playful attitude insulates you against.
Your goal is dynamic persistence over the long term.
Taking things seriously gives you a huge advantage in bursts, but chronic seriousness makes you rigid and at risk of blow-up.
What would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable?
“Make a sense of humour your default emotion.” - Matthew McConaughey
Don’t be so worried about winning that you forget what winning is supposed to feel like.
Is your presiding feeling when things go well one of happiness and satisfaction or one of relief?
Is it joy or simply the abatement of fear?
After a while of winning, you realise that HOW you win is more important than IF you win.
How you feel during the event is more important than the outcome of the event.
How the people who read your work are impacted is more important than how many are impacted.
Do not be so terrified of failing that even the act of winning is made miserable.
It’s all vibes man.
Ultimately you are doing things not to say you have done them, but for the experience of having done them.
When you look back, it’s the experience itself, not just the outcome that matters.
Outcomes are more important than inputs, but vibes are more important still.
One of the big determining factors in how you feel will be the outcome, but it’s not everything.
Oddly enough, optimising for how you feel detaches you from caring about outcomes, but is the very thing that drives outcomes the most.
And if it doesn’t, what do you care, you’re enjoying it.
Emotional pain is a hell of a teacher.
But it won’t kill you.
Would life be easier if you didn’t feel everything so very deeply?
Perhaps.
But the only reason you’re getting the outcomes that you want is because of your depth of thought.
As bad as it feels, this is the breadth of human existence.
You are ALIVE.
Your inner landscape is a fascinating world to explore.
Act with curiosity.
What you are doing right now is a hypothesis to be tested, not an ideology to be proved.
Is your goal to survive, or thrive, or flourish?
You have dealt with everything that life has thrown at you so far.
Do you think that’s due to the way you grasped and controlled?
The way you feared and ruminated?
Or could it be because you are capable, competent, gifted, and the world is fundamentally fair.
Over a long enough time horizon, most people get what they deserve.
You are doing this for you.
After a certain level of material comfort, the only person you need to do this for is you.
Your conscience knows when you’re being honest and not.
Optimise to make him happy.
Be the person your mum thinks you are.
Be the person your younger self wanted as a role model.
Brave, courageous, earnest, honest, virtuous, flaming.
“And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate - and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.” - Ted Hughes via Visakan Veerasamy
