Purposely believing in something that you know is most likely to be incorrect is difficult to me. In this case you have to think illogically on purpose in order to have any chance at succeeding.

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.

> Purposely believing in something that you know is most likely to be incorrect is difficult to me. In this case you have to think illogically on purpose in order to have any chance at succeeding.

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.

You’ve put that quite beautifully. I was trying to resolve something that I’ve learned from competing at a high level in a skill based adversarial sport (sailing), with the fact that it’s trivially obvious that just believing that you can do something doesn’t mean that you can.

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 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'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.

> often it's luck that provides the opportunity to work hard for something worthwhile in the first place.

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.

You don't need a plan to succeed, you just need to know that what you are doing is good. A normal general AI strategy is to try to increase the number of future options, it doesn't really plan it just makes choices which gives it more choices in the near future.

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.

> 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.

How so? If you just go to school and do your work, one day at a time, for 16years, you'll get a degree without planning the whole thing.

You have to plan things like registering for the school, planning where you're going to live, planning your finances for the school, planning your schedule around the school's requirements, etc. Just aimlessly going about things isn't going to result in a degree.

I'll provide an anecdote from my own life that I feel highlights the interplay between luck and work:

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.

> I was lucky

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.

Being born rich can overcome a lot of obstacles. Plans are not always required. Didn't Slack start at a gaming company?

Being born in a free country with a working brain and body is most of what you need. 85% of American millionaires are self-made.

>It's entirely possible that in your life, you could have succeeded and still ended up becoming poor

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.

> What does being poor have to do with it?

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.

> Purposely believing in something that you know is most likely to be incorrect

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

One way to overcome this is 'regret minimization'. For example: "I will regret not trying this or not giving it my all"

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.

A saying I remember from my childhood was "if at first you don't succeed, try try again."

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.

""It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life."" - J.L. Picard

Star Trek is a hollywood fiction.

“But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own.”

All quotes are equally worthless so I don't know why you bring that up.

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.

Picard's "wisdom" does not come from a man experienced in battle and leading men and flying a starship around the galaxy.

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.

I don't think you require to believe as an entrepreneur.

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"

You have to believe there is a chance you will succeed or you will not put in the work to do so. But you don't have to believe that you will be successful despite all odds.

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.

Plenty of successes where accidents, someone inherited a business, or pivoted a hobby, or whatnot. You need to put effort in, but the reason you do doesn’t need to related to seeking wealth.

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

They tried/are trying those things because they believe there's a non-zero probability of success. Belief in success being a possible outcome is pretty fundamental to accomplishing any goal or strategy in general.

There is a non-zero probability of you winning the lottery, why don't you spend all your money on lottery tickets? Realistically assessing risk is necessary for success, being over-confident in your odds will just waste money or time.

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

The odds on starting a business are pretty bad. You kind of have to ignore them, or else have some reason you think they don’t apply to you.

You shouldn't ignore them. If the odds are bad and you only do it for the money then don't start a business, you'll just make yourself unhappy. Start a business because that is what you want to do, then the odds doesn't really matter because you aren't doing it for the money. Or because you have a good reason believing that your case is special.

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.

That is pretty obvious. But believing you will succeed is still very different than believing you have a non-zero chance to succeed.

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.

Many entrepreneurs failed multiple times before finally succeeding.

The quitters, of course, get nowhere.

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

So dark and brilliant and illuminating at the same time.

This was one of the most disheartening realizations I ever came to.

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.

"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.

"Everyone" is a strong word. I'd wager you could find impressive achievements by quite a few business people with Imposter Syndrome. Believing you can succeed isn't necessary, or Imposter Syndrome wouldn't be a thing.

A number of years ago, an HN article said the most successful entrepreneurs are the most pessimistic.

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

Yet entrepreneurs are more optimistic than non entrepreneurs.

Also you have 'can do it' and 'correct' which imply the issue here amounts to ability.

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.

> but chances are you are wrong.

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.

Lottery winner fallacy!

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.

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

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.

Because he wanted to finish his PhD. At that time Google was just a cute research project. The engineering behemoth that became Google came after, and Page might have done that anyway after graduation.

The proposition that everyone who succeeded believed they could do it is demonstrably false as it implies underdog victories are impossible. Sometimes we surprise ourselves with our victories. I experienced this on several occasions playing competitive chess in my teens.

This advice perhaps even more apt for grad students. Entrepreneurs at least have the luxury of pivot.

grad students can change majors. Entrepreneurs can pivot. Workers can quit. We all have free will. I think, if anything, sunken cost fallacy keeps people “believing” well after the picture is revealed.

This is one of the most important comments, free will is underrated. I signed up to Blind app few months back and just can see how many people rant about their jobs and salaries and just stay in the same company (I'm not talking about cases which people has no skills or not many job opportunities)

Not everyone has the uzery of quitting. Free will we all have but situations can drastically curb our options.

Some people I know told me they couldn't quit because of various chains that kept them in place. I went over these chains with them (such as a mortgage) and pointed out all of them were of their own making.

I agree with this, most of peoples problems comes from poor choices earlier in life. Like when I say that it isn't hard for poor people to get a good job as long as they are smart people go "But what if you are poor, have 4 kids, no house and have to work two jobs, huh, what would you do?????". Well, every person starts out young with no debt and no kids and at least 12 years of free schooling. That takes you really far if you are in the top 1% of intelligence. If you are worse off than that then you spent your life making it worse instead of better.

But, if you are from rich family you can get well paid job where you slack whole time. Cousin Johny or dad will get it for you. Or you parents will pay nanny. You never get into the two jobs situation. Or you just get house gifted from mom.

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)

Intelligence is useless if you don't train it, use it, apply it towards something useful, etc.

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.

> if you are from rich family

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".

>all of them were of their own making.

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

I didn't say it wasn't real. I said something along the lines of they are victims (if they are victims) of their own choices.

If the options from which they could choose were constrained by other factors then they weren't really choices.

Free will implies the ability to choose freely.

Please describe some choices that aren't really choices for a typical healthy person in a free country?

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.

7 and 8 are quite debatable. Where you live is limited by what you can afford, where you work, etc. Drug and alcohol dependence is considered to be an illness by medical doctors, and it's well-known to have strong genetic components.

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

How about those who freely choose to reduce their choices? Does that mean their original freedom was not real?!

It means they made a tradeoff and shouldn't blame the world for it later. If you laze around and don't gather firewood during autumn then the reason you freeze to death in the winter isn't because nature is unfair but because you didn't get the wood.

“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re probably right”

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.

A lot of people can believe in themselves. Fewer people can believe in the "right" things about themselves. And even fewer can execute well with those justified beliefs.

It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success.