Source: YouTube - An Ode to People Who Don't Believe in Themselves
What comes first: belief or action? Do you need to believe that you can do something before you can do it?
"Fake it until you make it" is one option, but it's incredibly hard if you're introspective and have low self-belief and high standards. So what about "make it until you believe it"?
You can:
...and still end up in a place that your 20-year-old self could not imagine.
Being too serious creates a brittle fragility, while a playful attitude protects you. 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?" - Joe Hudson
When you're in a meeting, having a conversation with your partner, playing sport, or doing something you love or hate—ask yourself this question.
As Matthew McConaughey said: "Make a sense of humor your default emotion."
Ask yourself: 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 realize:
You can't be so terrified of failing that even the act of winning is made miserable.
Ultimately, you're doing things not to say that you've 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.
Sure, outcomes are more important than inputs, but vibes are more important than all of that, because that's what you're going to remember: your felt experience of it.
Oddly enough, optimizing for how you feel detaches you from caring about the outcomes but is the very thing that will drive outcomes the most. And if it doesn't, what do you care? Because you're enjoying it.
Would life be easier if you didn't feel everything so 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, what you're going through right now is the breadth of human experience—and you're alive. Your inner landscape is a fascinating world to explore, so act with curiosity. What you're doing right now, your goals, the desire for attainment, your attachments to this world—these are hypotheses to be tested, not ideologies to be proved.
You have probably dealt with everything that life has thrown at you so far. Do you think it's because of the way you grasped and controlled and feared and ruminated? Or could it be because you're a capable, competent, gifted person, and the world is fundamentally fair? Over a long enough time horizon, most people get what they deserve.
After a certain level of material comfort, the only person you need to do this thing for is you. Your conscience knows when you're being honest and when you're not. Optimizing to make that conscience happy is a really good idea.
You should basically be:
"Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you." - Ancient Greek proverb
We judge people based on how much life they can tolerate, how much feeling they can deal with and carry and enjoy. That's something we should all try to have more of in ourselves.
As Ryan Holiday says: "Generate evidence." Self-belief is overrated. The resilience of doing good things in spite of not believing in them or believing they're going to happen is pretty miraculous. The world only knows the actions you take—it doesn't know about your internal state until that shows up in the way you actually perform.
Chris Williamson | @chriswillx