Everyone who succeeds in business believes that they can do it.

Not everyone who believes they can do it succeeds.

Therefore, believing you can succeed is necessary, but only a small percentage of people who believe are actually correct.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe, but chances are you are wrong.

But that kind of belief doesn't foster the mindset of "if I fail, that's just life and I will move forward." Having that much confidence in accomplishing something means staking my self-worth on it, because this is a test of my own effort and nobody else's. The results begin and end with my actions only, and the things I want are too important to me to not take seriously. If those things are what I ultimately want to spend my time on Earth succeeding in before I die, then not succeeding is devastating to my mental health.

I don't understand how not to think like this, because every real success I've fought for and won came as a result of believing my life was over if I didn't succeed. In some cases I really would become poor or have no future if I didn't succeed, so it grants too much legitimacy to the method.

I think that's mixing up cause and effect. People who succeed usually have reason to believe they will. Don't work on your belief; instead, work on your ability. You'll know you're ready when you think you can, realistically, succeed (though best to start as soon as you can do what you'll definitely be able to, and think you might be able to handle the rest, because learning as you go is often much more effective than trying to prepare for hypothetical eventualities ahead of time).

And it's a lie that you need to believe you will succeed. You just need to act like it. Be invested, and don't quit until you actually can't go on any more (unless there's an actual dead-end, like you've got a business with 70% of your target audience as customers and still can't afford to feed yourself with it). Though you might not need to compensate for this particular cognitive bias, if you're already practised at it.

What I learnt over the years as I improved at sailing was that you take decisions to consolidate your position and eliminate risk when you reach the place you believe you should be in the field. You don’t attack any more because you believe that if you do, you will probably lose what you have. In this situation, the allegory is in fact true.

If you want to win a race, you have to make race winning decisions and you won’t do that unless you believe you can win the race.

So why don’t you just do that, and then you’ll start winning?

Because you won’t and you shouldn’t. You should only make “race winning” decisions if you actually have the ability to win.

So how do you know when you should “believe”? That in itself is an ability you have to learn. In order to win you need to have the ability or skill, and you have to recognise a situation where your ability or skill means you can win. This is what the “believing” really is. Then you have to successfully execute and ride through the things you cannot control (the part that luck always plays).

I've approached this by taking the stance that life should be process-oriented, not results-oriented. Sometimes you can do the right thing and still lose. Sometimes you can do the wrong thing and win. "Success" is often just luck with a nice backstory written after the fact. That isn't to downplay anyone's hard work, but often it's luck that provides the opportunity to work hard for something worthwhile in the first place.

It's entirely possible that in your life, you could have succeeded and still ended up becoming poor due to circumstances beyond your control. It's also possible that if you had ultimately failed, circumstances would not have turned out the way it so obviously looked like they had to play out.

Ultimately, you can only control yourself in this universe. If you've done everything you could do and gave it your best, really did all you can, then regardless of the outcome, you should be proud of yourself.

Not having a plan means a 100% failure rate. Not following your plan means a 100% failure rate. Not revising your plan when circumstances change usually means a 100% failure rate.

Which is why most people fail. They quit at the first obstacle.

For humans it can be things like going to college, getting a computer science degree opens a lot of door so it is good even if you don't plan to do anything specific. Similarly as a company founder you can just try to do things opening doors, like Google focused on making a great search engine because they believed that having the best search engine would make all other aspects of the company easy.

You could say that focusing on areas which will give you more options in the future is a plan, but I don't think that most people see it that way. For example when you ask a kid why they go to college and they answer "I don't know what I want to do, I'll just study something interesting and see where it leads" you'd typically not say they have a plan. Yet many of them still go on to get valuable degrees and succeed in getting a much better job than the average person.

Getting a 4 year degree requires planning.

In 2010, I had just graduated college, was quickly running out of money, and had no luck applying to jobs at software shops with languages I knew. Out of desperation, I applied to a PHP shop, with my only qualification being that I knew Perl, a cousin of PHP. Embarrassingly, I had to admit this in the interview, and even though they let me finish the interview in Perl, I wasn't optimistic.

A week later, I got a call back that the job was mine. There was a big learning curve, but I picked up PHP well enough to rise up to a leadership position on the dev team. When I was promoted, I learned that when I originally applied, the only other person that applied for the position was a guy who brought a guitar with him hoping that would sell them on the fact that he was a great culture fit. They said if anyone had applied that actually knew PHP, they would have gotten the job by default.

I was lucky that no one who knew PHP applied to the job when I did, but it was my hard work that kept me there.

Later in the thread you state "Being born in a free country with a working brain and body is most of what you need". This is the luck of winning genetic, social, and geographical lotteries.

You put yourself in a position where luck could find you.

> This is the luck of winning genetic, social, and geographical lotteries.

It's the luck that 99% of Americans share.

What does being poor have to do with it?

You can succeed at lots of things, but if you don't try to get rich(assuming you don't start that way) you're probably not going to. But if you've never tried, then how can you fail at it?

Getting rich is a focus in and of itself. There's lots of people successful at many things, they might not get rich off it, but unless that's something they really wanted, they probably won't feel much a of a sense of failure because they're not.

I was addressing OP's concern about his own life: "In some cases I really would become poor or have no future if I didn't succeed"

I agree with you that part of OP's problem is framing success together with things like being rich and having a future.

This makes me think of: acting. One way to act like a character is to try to believe you are that character. Or to believe everything the character believes. Then you figure out the detailed implications: when you see x, you think y, so you feel z (which should show on your face and body language) and do w. One way of finding the implications is to physically put yourself through experiences your character has had; if that is impractical, you can look for substitutes. (There is a famous story[1] of an actor who gave a compelling performance of a character agonizing over killing himself with a revolver in his hand... by imagining he was about to take a very cold shower.)

Which then brings to mind an approach: imagine you are the person you would like to be, imagine how that person would act, and act that way. (I'm not sure whether, to the parent commenter, that would be "a greatly successful person in the early stages" or "a person who will do the best he can—choosing the strategies with highest expected value—knowing bad luck may crush his efforts in the small or in the large, and won't be bothered if/when that happens because his choices were still the best".)

[1] https://www.rehearsalroom.com/offcuts/offcut31.html

This way even if you fail, you still come out on top as you should have less regret having tried and failed than if you never tried.

There was no messaging that life was easy, or that you only had to believe, or only had to try hard. You could do all of that, and fail. Then you reflect on the failure and try again, presumably having learned something.

People quote people because they want to express the same sentiment but they believe someone else did it better. Not because they believe the quote to be an absolute truth.

It comes from a person who has likely commanded nothing more than a typewriter. The real world does not work like the fantasy saccharin world of Star Trek, and wise sayings from it being applicable to the real world would just be happenstance.

For example Elon Musk very well knows the possibility of failure. But it seems he finds it important enough to try it.

Same for Jeff Bezos, who has a regret minimalization strategy.

So seems they are very aware of the possibility of failure, but it's important enough to try it.

I like that, because it's a more rational approach than "I'm sure I can do it"

Elon Musk knew the chances of failure. He also knew the chance that he would succeed. The potential chance at success outweighed the potential loose from failure. That was my equation as an entrepreneur. I knew it was possible I would fail but the upside of success drew me in regardless.

You don’t hear about these people as few people push much past 100m unless wealth or fame is inherently a goal.

This means don't be over confident, but also don't be under confident.

But absolutely don't believe your chances are great for no reason as the self-esteem enthusiasts would tell you. I see countless people wasting their life away chasing ideas just because their self esteem is way too high. Don't do that.

If I remember correctly, Musk even had the mindset of "I will probably fail, but something good will come out of it, even if I fail". I think the details on this mindset matter on the "believe" part.

The quitters, of course, get nowhere.

So dark and brilliant and illuminating at the same time.

I know a lot of people with the kind of indefatigable optimism and self confidence that leads to success over the long-term. They're almost always failures, they're almost always wrong about intricacies of how the world works, and are blind to the difficulties faced by both themselves, and others.

A select few of them are very, very successful, and in spite of no clear superiority to their peers, their careers go up like bottle rockets with no shortage of fuel.

I don't envy them their success they've usually earned it about as much as anyone else. But I do wish I had the boundless sense of hope and energy they have, and the mindset that it takes to push through challenges like they do.

when people say things like believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything! i think what they're referring to is this mindset you mentioned.

I would say it is more about disbelieving in yourself, and still trying to pursue a goal greater than oneself.

"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." - GK Chesterton

I'd argue that grit, status and luck have just as much to do with success than anything.

So 'having the talent' is really just one small part of it.

And FYI it's not about 'being wrong', really I do think large numbers of people could do A or B if they had the right connections, were born wealthy, and wanted to work really hard at it. The talent part is somewhat unique, but far unique so in sports than for example business.

It really depends what the specifics are, what does success look like? Not everything is so difficult that a large majority will fail at it. Believe you will become a $500B dollar company? Ok you’re probably wrong. But believe that you can make a decent living and not end up homeless? Most people who set out to accomplish that succeed, after all most people are not homeless.

I am rich because I believed in myself and WORKED HARD!

There are a lot of people that bought a lottery ticket and believed they could win.

At least the lottery winners have a chance of changing the world for the better, so the myth serves society, even if it deludes the players.

No, not at all. For example Larry Page offered to sell Google for 1 million dollars, he didn't believe he would succeed. Yet he went on to create one of the most valuable companies on earth. Being modest does not prevent you from succeeding.

All examples of normal family help if family can afford it.

If you are a man, four kids affect you less in employment options too.

It is that thing, even very bad choices have significantly less bad impact on you if you are rich.

> That takes you really far if you are in the top 1% of intelligence.

99% of people are not in 1% of intelligence. Per definition and there is really nothing they can do to change it. You can't change own intelligence.

(Pls biggest screw up I know had measured intelligence super high and that person is complete absolute fail cause intelligence is not that useful practically on itself)

It's like Michael Phelps who was born with a talent for swimming. But that talent was worthless without putting in endless hours of directed training.

Similarly, a no-talent swimmer can actually learn to swim rather well. And certainly being very successful in life does not require you to be the best swimmer in the world. Just an adequate swimmer will do just fine.

Yes, rich people have it easier. There is no path for your life to be better by complaining that life is unfair. You could vaporize all the rich people, and it still wouldn't make your life any better (and would likely make it worse).

The good news, however, is you don't have to be born rich to become rich in a free market country. Lots of people do it - 85% of American millionaires are self-made. There's even a book about it and how ordinary people become wealthy - "The Millionaire Next Door".

Having taken it out themselves doesn't make the mortgage any less real.

Free will implies the ability to choose freely.

I can list a few:

1. having a baby is a choice

2. getting married is a choice

3. buying a house is a choice

4. buying snazzy furniture is a choice

5. buying a new car is a choice

6. buying lottery tickets is a choice

7. where you live is a choice

8. using drugs/alcohol is a choice

These are the kinds of chains that people forge on themselves.

1 is certainly a choice if people are given access to sex education and contraceptives; unfortunately that is not uniformly the case.

As it pertains to business, I’d say that self belief is probably the primary thing I can think of as a predictor for success. It implies that you are more persistent, more determined and willing to put more on the line.

Blaming yourself, or at least thinking what you could do differently, is the sane default when something goes wrong.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference."

> "Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing."

- Stephen King, "The Drawing of the Three"

Your post is wise (or at least, it resonates to my best thinking on it which boils down to the serenity prayer as well.)

But I disagree that the two things in your first paragraph are equally bad.

If you think nothing is in your control and just blame others all the time - then you pass up every opportunity to make your life better, and I agree this is extremely common.

If you are on the other extreme and think you can control everything - you do end up tilting at windmills and wasting a lot of time and energy, but you also end up doing things that make a real difference in your life. It's a strategy strictly dominant to passivity.

Thus blaming others is always worse and I agree with your paragraph #2 and #3.

Your point is well taken. There's the other side of the balance" - the factors outside of one control define the ceiling limit of your delta change [0]. Of course, you can ask people to focus on the controllable and ignore the things one can not control. However, the fact that the family/country/skin color you are born determines pretty much most of your fate is not easily accepted by everyone. And rightly so, they have every right to be aggrieved about it.

[0] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-...

The two things aren’t necessarily the same. I think about this a lot in the context of the culture of former colonies. I’m from Bangladesh, which was colonized by the British for several centuries (not to mention Islamic empires before that). As a matter of historical fact, the British Empire imposed many capital- and wealth-destroying and transferring policies on the Indian subcontinent. It’s fair to say that development in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh runs into barriers that are the result of that history—that the world is “hard and unfair” as a result.

How should that shape culture on the Indian subcontinent going forward? In my view, almost not at all. The UK is a shadow of its former self and isn’t going to write a multi-trillion check any time soon. What’s true or not historically doesn’t really have any bearing on how Bangladeshis should see the world. The legacy of colonialism is just another thing to be overcome through grit and perseverance, no different than natural phenomenon like flooding or drought. When it comes to socializing children to view the world a certain way, what other view could possibly be more helpful?

Having grown up in the US, I think this is one of the biggest reasons for the deep dysfunction we have seen there in the past few decades. The value for "the pursuit of happiness", and almost religious belief in meritocracy places the blame for failure on the shoulders of the individual in the eyes of society, and helps to create an environment where courts and legislators can dismantle safety nets, and fail to support the population in times of collective crisis.

In times like we are living through, where there are a great many forces beyond the control of the average citizen which have the power to utterly wipe them out financially, it can be actively harmful to tell people that each individual is the master of their own destiny. We can and should expect and contribute to a collective good as well.

I tend to agree that from the perspective of public policy we should take a more systematic view. But as I said, I think how we want politicians to view to world for public policy purposes is different than how we want people (individually and collectively) to view the world.

Is it really though? For instance, in the post-war period of the 1950's which is often taken as the period where the American Dream was in full force, organized labor was much stronger in the US than it is today, and a huge chunk of the population was essentially inserted into the middle class through the GI bill, which was really a social welfare program when it comes down to it.

I think the degree to which individual grit gave rise to American prosperity is often over-stated, and the degree to which it was a result of collective action is often overlooked.

That measure inherently excludes the “wealth” represented by ownership of enslaved people. It includes what those people produce, but the “per capita” measure also includes enslaved people in the denominator.

The production of enslaved people represented a small fraction of the economy—about 5% of GDP during the peak of the cotton boom: https://fee.org/articles/no-slavery-did-not-make-america-ric... see also https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c...

More importantly, you can’t increase a country’s overall level of production by enslaving people. Its basic economics—unfree labor misallocates labor resources to industries controlled by slave owners. Slavery obviously redistributes wealth from enslaved people to a slaveholding aristocracy, but that comes at the expense of economic growth for the country overall. This is true both theoretically and empirically. As shown in the GDP chart linked above, the end of slavery didn’t produce an economic collapse, as you would expect of it really was responsible for America’s productivity. There was not even a dip. In fact, ending slavery made America richer, exactly as economic theory would predict: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html

It was not just reallocation of wealth like tax, it completely changed his money were made.

I don't really understand this argument. Surely reducing one of the operating costs of doing business to zero leads to economic growth right? In your hypothetical scenario, wouldn't the business owner just invest some of that profit into growing the business, thereby increasing productivity?

Alternatively, they can lower their prices in order to beat competitors. If they're producing a commodity, this can have the knock-on effect of lowering the price of finished goods using that commodity.

Another point of comparison is, in places where they discover "free resources" like petrochemicals, like Norway, that does lead to prosperity, doesn't it?

Sure, but imagine the alternative where the slaves are paid workers instead: then the same money that you use to invest into your business in slave scenario is instead spent by your workers on other businesses, which then use it to produce other things or invest in their businesses. Again, slavery, instead of increasing total wealth, just redistributes it in favor of slaveholders.

You are however averaging production to slaves too. So in countries where blacks outnumber whites you get much smaller wealth then what contemporaries commented on.

The alternative scenario is north in any case. The kind of society and production south was is plain impossible without slavery. It just did not exist.

I thought it was the abundant resources, rule of law, respect for property rights, free slave labor (for the first ~200 years, including before independence), and wave upon wave of immigrants who through self-selection were highly motivated and risk-taking. The post-WW2 prosperity was largely due to a lack of competition from other developed nations.

Do you think a free person or an enslaved one produces more economic value? If we decided to enslave everyone with green eyes tomorrow do you think GDP would grow or shrink?

Just because a certain practices makes certain individuals wealthy does not mean it makes the society wealthier.

> self-selection were highly motivated and risk-taking

This is beliefs seems to be very entangled with belief in a meritocracy. If you believe hard work and risk taking doesn't pay off why work hard and take risks. If you believe hard work and risk taking does pay off, well than that sounds a lot like belief in meritocracy to me.

And if slave labor were an important component driving the relative wealth of the US, wouldn't you expect the abolition of slavery to decrease the relative wealth of the US?

But that isn't what we see in the decades after the abolition of slavery in the US: "In the last third of the 19th century the United States entered a phase of rapid economic growth which doubled per capita income over the period. By 1895, the United States leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output." See also, "Gilded Age".

So an argument against an educational policy to emphasize grit is that, as far as we know, this will not actually increase grit in the students. Socializing children to view the world a certain way will have many effects, but not that.

It's almost the prosperity gospel nonsense, but it's exactly the Amway nonsense.

There's a good Oglaf comic about this. "The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."

[1] (content warning: The one I'm linking is tame but it's generally a NSFW comic) https://www.oglaf.com/conviction/

I found it hard to read the rest of your post after this. While I think it is indeed a common failing to go too far with the "believe in yourself" mindset, it does actually have real, practical use in moderation, and it seems nuts to "hate" people for it.

However I think it is fairly appropriate to 'hate' the people who preach it. It has a sinister ideological component of advocating individualism above all else, mostly to justify lack of taking responsibility for the collective good, or categorically blaming individuals for their situation. It also has fuelled a gigantic self-help industrial complex that's fairly effective at parting desperate people from their money.

To me this advice is a net negative. Of course you should believe in yourself, but that's just the baseline.

It becomes just another way to say “you failed because you’re lazy and didn’t try hard enough”.

But focusing on things you can control and having grit on average increases your chances. It’s a good default.

It wasn't even hard to get here.

From what I've seen, this is really the thing. Having a reasonably comfortable life is just about doing what you are supposed to do. Pay attention in school and make a decent effort at learning. Be sober at least most of the time. Get a job and take it seriously. Get married and be in a position to support your children before you have children. We've understood these things for millenia and they are encoded in our religions and cultural norms.

One of my favorite quotes from Calvin Coolidge: If all the folks would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.

Be healthy, physically and mentally. Be born into a reasonably affluent family. Be able to attend a good school. Be able to find a partner.

Success is personal. Whatever it means to you, believing you can achieve that and working towards it against setbacks, makes it more likely (but not guaranteed) that you eventually will.

If you got this far w/o working too hard I’d suggest working a little harder to stay above your peers and diversify your future options. Gold rushes don’t last forever. Live to work (own business) or work to live (for someone else) and afford your hobbies.

"It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose. That is not a failing. That is life."

Properly interpreted, I like the "hard work is what matters" child rearing trend.

I’ve seen this happen to again and again to friends and people in my support group.

ADHD wasn’t an excuse to “not try”.

At school I got told I could do these things and just needed to “believe in myself” and I wasn’t trying to do that either.

Doing homework is not necessary to get good grades - I personally took a lot of pride in optimizing for the smallest amount of homework I could do while still getting good grades - but it is necessary to do homework in order to be working hard at school. (I think not getting in trouble is important but orthogonal to this conversation about whether to value work or outcomes.)

I don't see how valuing hard work is an excuse to "not try" due to ADHD. I think it's the opposite? Trying is the requirement.

I think maybe I don't understand your comment at all. Sorry about that.

Edit: For instance, is it the case that it is prohibitively difficult for people with ADHD to work hard in the skilled trades? That isn't how I usually think of it, but perhaps I'm wrong.

> For instance, is it the case that it is prohibitively difficult for people with ADHD to work hard in the skilled trades? That isn't how I usually think of it, but perhaps I'm wrong.

If it isn't interesting/exciting they wont work hard at it without medication. Think of ADHD as people with more of a cat personality while normal humans are more like dogs. Cats gets distracted easily but hyper focus when they find something fun, while dogs can be taught to behave. Cats don't act that way because they hate you, they are just wired differently than dogs. Same with ADHD people.

Another point about ADHD is that they can work hard at school etc with medication, it isn't an unfixable problem. I grew up never studying, everyone being angry that I didn't do the work I should, teachers being disappointed etc. Then I got a diagnose as an adult and got medication and then suddenly I could work as hard as everyone else and life became 100 times easier. So I went from smart and lazy to smart and hard working, suddenly working hard to learn to code, practice algorithms, get into Google etc became possible while before medication I didn't even believe I could hold a job. So to me ADHD is 100% real, there is no way it can't be.

However it might be a bit over diagnosed, I don't support giving kids pills to stay quiet in a classroom. It isn't like not studying in high school or early college hurt me at all (Except that parents and teachers got angry of course, avoiding that would be the main reason to study harder...).

> The biggest hurdle for kids to work hard at is school

You are focusing on school-work, and that is not the primary thing I'm thinking of. I think there are lots of other kinds of hard work kids can, and ideally should be given the opportunity to, practice. Things like sports and music and community participation and outdoor activities (for instance, backpacking/camping and rock climbing are things that are popular where I live and require hard work) and other non-school activities along these lines that require effort. Even something like getting really good at a difficult video game requires hard work. Watching TV and YouTube videos and such doesn't.

As is obvious from this thread, I don't have much expertise in what kinds of things are particularly hard with ADHD, but I suspect there are some kinds of hard work which are compatible and can be encouraged, and I'm definitely not focused solely, or even primarily, on school.

Edit: By the way, I have really appreciated your comments and patience in this thread. I certainly hope I haven't implied I don't think ADHD is "100% real".

Of course, you could argue my parents didn’t teach me right. I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at, but if you don’t want your kid to be like me, my outcome might be something to keep in mind :)

I think that for me (and I suspect for you as well though I wouldn't presume to say for sure), while my outcomes have been good without having internalized a high value for hard work, it could have only been better if I had. It's true that I can get quite far on the power of privilege and intellect alone, but I'm convinced I would get much farther still with a better work ethic. And that's what I'd prefer for my children.

That's fair. For me personally, I feel that even better outcomes are meaningless when my outcomes have been more than good enough already. I wouldn't disparage hard work in the right contexts, but would you say hard work is still valuable and important even when the results of said hard work are not valuable or important?

> I do think hard work is valuable ... because building a hard work habit ... is likely to lead to hard work with high value results later in life.

It sounds like you still value hard work because it increases the expectation value of future outcomes, and not entirely “just because” you value hard work. And so, maybe we agree somewhat on the philosophical level too, after all :)

The "rich" attribute their success to high self-esteem, when it is actually the reverse.

If you start with much, of course you will be more confident, as you can take more risk, unlike the poor.

In reality, most of the things we have in life was "given" with "hard work" disguised as our responsibility to make the best with the cards we have been dealt.

I've been through a bunch of therapy personally and read a lot in the psychology category and the deeper I get, the less I care about any of it. There are very few hurdles in life needing psychological tools. So much of it is a distraction for unsolvable problems. Some people see the targets, some see the obstacles (too often). Free psychological advice is worth it's price.

In all but few cases, self-modification is the superior strategy. And I find that self-deception gives me the ability to perform self-modification much more easily.

And after all, my objective is success by my own metric. If the parameters of my life are constrained by outside factors, it hardly changes the actions which I take where I have agency. Imagine my objective as ending up in the top right corner of an infinite plane. You say that the universe actually constrains me to the rectangle whose corners are (-500, -500) and (+100, +100). Well, now all my actions to reach the top right corner will now target me into (+100, +100). That is adequate. That will do.

In any case, I'm fairly certain that those who don't work hard and who don't believe in their ability to achieve success (by their own metric) will outcompete in survival metrics all those who don't. If societies choose to overempower the latter, they will eventually be outcompeted by societies that empower the former, c.p.

My limited experience has me fairly convinced about this. But it doesn't matter, because if I'm wrong, I'll be outcompeted in turn.

This is such a great quote. I honestly hate people that spout nonsense like anything is possible if you just believe, and that if you don't, it's that you obviously don't believe enough"

Well, it is the same with, you can do anything if you want it enough. True, but in a tautological way.

You want to levitate, but can't? Clearly you don't want it enough and still have doubts.

So all in all just a quite useless statement.

Thing is, if you just strip the part about 'not trying hard enough', this is actually true in quite a lot of cases? Yes the world is hard and unfair, but that doesn't mean people make mistakes for which only they are themselves to blame, that also is completely natural. No not all burden lies on you, but it's perfectly possible a lot of it actually does. Yet, I have a feeling in some circles there's this tendency to always try and blame something or someone else, which is almost living in denial. Maybe I look at things in a different way sometimes because I'm in engineering, were hard problems just lead to mistakes and in most cases it's obviously my mistake so you learn to deal with that. But to give some examples: people getting lawyers to fight teachers which gave bad grades to their children even when it's obvious the children just didn't perform well where the rest of the class did. My neighbour blaming the trees because the leaves fall on his lawn, despite the tree being there already when he moved in. People going to live next to a river and then starting action comitees becasue their basement floods when it rains a lot. Etc. Don't get me worng, I know in a case like the last it can in fact be nuanced and it can be possible there are actually upstream problems, but these are just examples to give a gneral idea of cases which I see where I think 'maybe, just maybe, there really isn't something else to blame and you should just accept it'.

I feel this way about teaching young children "when you grow up, aim to be a professional sports player or a famous magician"

What percentage of people who try to make it in those careers make it? It seems toxic to train children from a young age "try to pull of something that has 0.5% of happening"

Not only our economical system is in on the joke - also our justice system.

The problem is, there is no solution to this, we have to overplay an individuals responsibility to get anything done in society.

In German the saying "life is hard, but fair" can be jokingly turned around into "life is hard, but unfair". I feel like a little bit of cynism (the original kind the Greeks invented) can help you to still try your best, even though the system is rigged.

Having higher self esteem or a bit more belief that you can do something than is strictly warranted can be advantageous in certain situations, but it has its limits when it encourages people to attempt things they'll fail at. People tend to not do the latter with their own children.

The thought experiment works in many situations: take an online programming course rather than going to college, dropping out of college to start a company is great, sex work is a cool occupation, abortion is murder, smoking weed is cool.

If you take this as the definition, I do think the saying is accurate. Unfortunately, too many people understand the saying as “believe in yourself and you will definitely succeed”.

Look at it this way, if you don’t believe you can achieve some hard task, then you won’t start it on your own. If you do believe in yourself, you’ll almost certainly start the task. Whether you succeed is a different matter. But if you don’t start, you are guaranteed that you won’t succeed in that particular task.

But sometimes people try to do something that is actually impossible. Like praying away cancer or medical problems, or believing they have magic powers. Sometimes believing you can do something that you can't (or will never happen) is a detriment.

Now let's talk about the "not certain or probable" as I think this is more interesting ground. Sometimes you have to realize that you need to do something differently. If what you want to do isn't probable, then maybe you should look at the problem in a way that has more probable success. I struggle with this all the time at work, sometimes I feel like I'm right on the cusp of a breakthrough or bugfix, and other times it feels hopeless. But that doesn't always mean it is so. Sometimes knowing when to give up is important, as long as you start again. Or maybe you realize it wasn't that important after all, and you should just do something else.

I could believe all I want I need to win the lottery. I could buy a ticket every day and it's not probable I will win, but it's not impossible. And you never know!

The left broadly assumes that we're all equally capable and that it's just opportunity that's the problem. The right assumes that we're all equally able to achieve if only we would apply ourselves more.

Of course both are equally wrong and right and lots in between.

Some people will get nowhere no matter how much you give them. And some will fail no matter how hard they work.

What amazes me somewhat is that none of these are new problems for humanity, human beings are broadly the same for 1000s of years.

I don't think it matters if we are equally capable. Capability, or at least talent, is just another form of opportunity.

The difference between now and then is that now you know it is possible, before you only believed. If you stopped working hard it isn't because you now no longer believe hard work pays off, but because you now no longer care enough to work hard for the rewards you'd get.

Yep I agree fully with that being nonsense. But at least it implies some modicum of responsibility or necessity of action even if it's just "belief".

One I've heard a few times lately (from some people) is stuff like "The universe will provide" "the universe cares about us". That's even more irritating because not only is it nonsense, it implies a complete lack of personal responsibility.

This sort of Chicken Soup for the Soul, chessy simplification is indeed not useful and not going to help people who read it gain much at all.

However, as many others have pointed out, the simple fact in this world is that, to be successful, there might be a lot of systematic forces at play, and luck might play a huge role, but those are the things that you as an individual can't control. The only thing you can do as a person is always to improve yourself and strive hard. In that sense, I don't think either "high self-esteem" or "grit" are anything negative at all. Surely they're infinitely better than the contrary which would be "low self-esteem" and "don't work hard"?

I think a more realistic and helpful formulation would be "1. Believe in yourself, but don't expect to succeed magically without great sacrifices. 2. It may well be that luck > systematic barriers > individual effort, but that's irrelevant, since your own effort is the only thing you can control". Then you would be mentally well-prepared for failures but still strive hard regardless.

I agree with a comment that in terms of thinking about public policies, it's debatable whether too strong an emphasis on bootstrapping is a good thing. But that shouldn't be confused with teaching individuals work ethics. Those two can be viewed separately. You may not succeed with strong self-belief and a lot of efforts, but you will definitely fail with an overly cynical outlook and no efforts. It's not that complicated.

Maybe what this whole discussion reveals more is that, when a huge amount of people in a country deeply doubt meritocracy or self-made success, there must be some deep, entrenched systematic problems with the country, which may well be in decline in a lot of ways (when a country is growing and a lot of opportunities are open, the ethos would be well different). But still, as mentioned above, this doesn't change much the way in which one should perceive and approach their individual behaviors when they want to succeed.

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P.S.: As a side note. The highest-rated visual novel of all time, Muv-Luv Alternative https://vndb.org/v92, explores this topic really well. And I just read this post recently, which summarized some aspects of the idea perfectly: https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/7mczwb/at_4...

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.

I was confused the first time I heard the term PPE. To me they are masks, goggles, gloves., etc... But then again I read the safety sheets and don't care about slimly invented terms.

I used to have the same perspective, used to scoff at religion, ritual, blind beliefs, etc.

The truth is, I don't think they're meant to be taken literally. When someone says "Just believe in yourself and anything is possible", they don't actually believe that ANYTHING is possible.

Phrases like that provide a framework for people to live their life by. Religion is the same thing. These are psychological tools that can be used, to help keep yourself on the right path - One of happiness, productivity, etc.

Anyways, just another way to look at it I guess rather than dismissing them. I have that initial reaction too.