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"‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." This is such a great quote. I honestly hate people that spout nonsense like anythi

by cbanek 6y ago

"‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." 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. It's almost the same as the prosperity gospel nonsense. And later on in the article, talking about grit, I feel like this is the swing the other way. And now we're getting messages like "nothing is impossible if you work hard enough at it", which also shift the burden back to you. If you fail, it's not the world that's hard or unfair (it naturally is both), but again it's a personal failing on your part for not trying hard enough (or believing you are good enough). Everyday I see blog posts with the same kind of thing about how they have accomplished so much before most people have breakfast. Yet that seems to be mostly writing posts about how to get stuff done. Obviously many things in life are hard, and you have to believe that you can do them to put the hard effort in believing you can accomplish them. But leaning so hard one way or the other that you will get some magic power is the kind of nonsense people love to buy, and therefore sell.

chris_wot 6y ago
One of the definitions of possible is “that may exist or happen, but that is not certain or probable.” 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.
- cbanek 6y ago
  I agree with your later sentiment, and think I shared the same at the end of my comment. 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!
qsort 6y ago
I hate those cheesy, halftime-talk lines as well, but there's a balance that needs to be found. Some things are outside of your control, and it's just silly to believe you can change everything by sheer force of will; but most things are at least somewhat within your control, and blaming everything and everyone except yourself is equally bad (and extremely more common). 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."
- cutitout 6y ago
  Or as Roland's teacher Cort put it: > "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"
- xyzelement 6y ago
  >> "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." 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.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    There are pathologies that come with thinking you can control everything. You might find you are materially better off but never really feeling satisfied with what you have. To me this seems far more common in wealthy countries like America than your first point.
clay_the_ripper 6y ago
There’s no denying that mindset is incredibly important. As a business owner myself I can attest to this. But I think the advice gets twisted. The way I see it is this: 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.
- DenisM 6y ago
  This advice perhaps even more apt for grad students. Entrepreneurs at least have the luxury of pivot.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    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.
    - katbyte 6y ago
      Not everyone has the uzery of quitting. Free will we all have but situations can drastically curb our options.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        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.
        katmannthree 6y ago
        >all of them were of their own making. Having taken it out themselves doesn't make the mortgage any less real.
deleted 6y ago
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mythrwy 6y ago
"‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." 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.
- xwdv 6y ago
  "You are the universe. Provide for yourself."
  - mythrwy 6y ago
    Nonsense. You aren't the universe.
    - xwdv 6y ago
      A small portion of it.
friendlybus 6y ago
What are people supposed to tell you? Useful information would be stuff that's private, like how you get past your current work-related roadblock. 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.
mrpickels 6y ago
I believe in you that you are a hyper rational idiot
- dang 6y ago
  Hey, could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately, and we're trying for something different in this community. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.
dkersten 6y ago
Well, believing in yourself isn't enough on its own (and nothing is guaranteed in any case), but believing in yourself IS the first step to succeeding at anything and therefore IS important.
deleted 6y ago
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anoncake 6y ago
You really need some kind of doublethink here. Believe you can do anything, but make decisions "as if" you couldn't.
gabereiser 6y ago
I agree with this. I used to tell people “Talent is just understanding and time. Time to practice, to learn, to grow your understanding, to improve your talent”. Naturally, there are folks naturally talented in a skill. Most have to work at it really hard. My take is “you can too if you put in the time”.
happytoexplain 6y ago
>I honestly hate people that spout nonsense like anything is possible if you just believe 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.
- iherbig 6y ago
  "This version of the sentiment which you did not express is totally reasonable, therefore it seems nuts to hate people for the sentiment that you DID express."
- Tade0 6y ago
  Problem is, there's no stop criterion, so more often than not there is no moderation. To me this advice is a net negative. Of course you should believe in yourself, but that's just the baseline.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  it's inappropriate to hate the people who adopt it, because they're often in a position where they rely on that sort of belief for one reason or another. 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.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    Hate no one. Hate bad and dangerous ideas and deeds.
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  The problem is when “believe in yourself” becomes blaming people for things outside of their control because they didn’t “believe in themselves”. It becomes just another way to say “you failed because you’re lazy and didn’t try hard enough”.
mumblemumble 6y ago
> It's almost the same as the prosperity gospel nonsense. 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/ https://www.oglaf.com/conviction/
allendoerfer 6y ago
And when you continue going down that road, it get's even worse: Not only is the impact an individual has on their success limited, such is the impact on their failure. If you come from a rich family, you are far more likely to succeed, but you are also far more likely to end up in prison, if you come from a poor family. 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.
Swizec 6y ago
Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner have a great podcast on this. The world is unfair and you aren’t guaranteed success no matter what you do. But focusing on things you can control and having grit on average increases your chances. It’s a good default.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  There's an inverse notion too, that doubling down on efforts in an unfavorable context is just a quicker death.
- cbanek 6y ago
  Yes, this. I'm reminded of a great Captain Picard line after Data fails his game of strategema: "It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose. That is not a failing. That is life."
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Define success. I'm college educated and make nearly $100k a year. To me this is the bare minimum. I don't feel comfortable where I am but I still meet people who envy me. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to. It wasn't even hard to get here.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    > I'm just doing what I'm supposed to. 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.
    - zx321 6y ago
sanderjd 6y ago
As a pretty new parent, I don't think the grit / hard work focused trend is as you describe it. The idea, as I understand it, is to teach the value of hard work as an end to itself, rather than as a means to achieve the impossible. This really resonates with me, as someone who felt like the lesson of my own childhood was to achieve quite arbitrary goals (grades on tests, correct answers to trivia questions, that sort of thing), which didn't really require me to work very hard, to my detriment. Properly interpreted, I like the "hard work is what matters" child rearing trend.
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  The “hard work is what matters” method really falls apart when child can’t meet the expectations of the parent and the parent believes this is due to the child not “working hard”. I’ve seen this happen to again and again to friends and people in my support group.
  - sanderjd 6y ago
    You're saying that the parent claims that hard work is what matters, but secretly has other expectations they aren't expressing to their child? Yeah, that definitely sounds like a failure mode to be aware of and avoid.
    - kayodelycaon 6y ago
      Well. I was expected to be able to do my homework, get good grades, and not get in trouble in school. I was “smart but didn’t apply myself”. 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.
      - sanderjd 6y ago
        I honestly don't understand what your comment has to do with what I'm talking about... 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.
rubicon33 6y ago
Don't take this the wrong way but, are you young? 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.
hutzlibu 6y ago
""‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." 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.
stinos 6y ago
If you fail, it's not the world that's hard or unfair (it naturally is both), but again it's a personal failing on your part for not trying hard enough 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'.
- bahmboo 6y ago
  A point in the article is that self esteem as a feeling alone was supposed to fix the problem instead of doing actual work.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    Yes, it was classic conflation of cause and effect. The observation was that successful people had high self-esteem. The (wrong) conclusion was that they had the high self-esteem first and that led to their achievements and success.
varispeed 6y ago
To be fair, when I started to think every day about the life I want to live it slowly started to happen. If I knew what I know now 5 years ago, I would have never believed something like this would be possible and yet here we are. Of course there are limits to anything, for example if you dream to be a commercial pilot and you are 50 now, then that's kind of too late.
- username90 6y ago
  > If I knew what I know now 5 years ago, I would have never believed something like this would be possible 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.
renewiltord 6y ago
No one who doesn't believe they can accomplish something ever accomplishes it. Few things in life are certainties. But I know there are many paths for my next action: some which involve self-modification and others which involve world-modification. 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.
rayiner 6y ago
I’m not sure you can “swing too far” toward emphasizing grit and perseverance. We need to realize that we are actually talking about two different things here: (1) what is true as a matter of sociological and economic fact; and (2) what is the most useful and beneficial world view in which to socialize children. 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?
- skohan 6y ago
  I agree with you that emphasizing grit is a good recipe for optimizing perfect success. However fetishizing grit is a terrible guiding principal for public policy. 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.
  - 6y ago
MuffinFlavored 6y ago
> "‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." > > This is such a great quote. 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"
ponker 6y ago
Outcomes are a monotonic function of talent, effort, and luck. One is mildly controllable, one you can control in quantity and quality, and one is out of your hands.
ponker 6y ago
If Stephen Hawking’s dream was to become an Olympic gymnast no amount of work would have made it happen. This is the example I use when people make this claim.
rufus_foreman 6y ago
If you read the right news, nothing is possible. You seem to be on the right track.
mymythisisthis 6y ago
It's like the term 'PPE', (personal protective equipment). It's a weaselly term that turns the idea of safety back on you. 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.
jules 6y ago
A good thought experiment to determine what people actually think: would they give that as advice to their own children? 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.
mgh2 6y ago
Typical correlation vs. causation problem. 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.
Guthur 6y ago
Some of the problem here, imo, is a overly linear view of people and society. 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.
- anoncake 6y ago
  > The left broadly assumes that we're all equally capable and that it's just opportunity that's the problem. I don't think it matters if we are equally capable. Capability, or at least talent, is just another form of opportunity.
SZJX 6y ago
> Believe in yourself and anything is possible 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. --- P.S.: As a side note. The highest-rated visual novel of all time, Muv-Luv Alternative https://vndb.org/v92 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_40_have_i_really_failed_in_life/drt3gim/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/7mczwb/at_4...

by cbanek 6y ago

chris_wot 6y ago

One of the definitions of possible is “that may exist or happen, but that is not certain or probable.” 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.

cbanek 6y ago
I agree with your later sentiment, and think I shared the same at the end of my comment. 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!

qsort 6y ago

I hate those cheesy, halftime-talk lines as well, but there's a balance that needs to be found. Some things are outside of your control, and it's just silly to believe you can change everything by sheer force of will; but most things are at least somewhat within your control, and blaming everything and everyone except yourself is equally bad (and extremely more common). 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."

cutitout 6y ago
Or as Roland's teacher Cort put it: > "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"
xyzelement 6y ago
>> "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." 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.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  There are pathologies that come with thinking you can control everything. You might find you are materially better off but never really feeling satisfied with what you have. To me this seems far more common in wealthy countries like America than your first point.

clay_the_ripper 6y ago

There’s no denying that mindset is incredibly important. As a business owner myself I can attest to this. But I think the advice gets twisted. The way I see it is this: 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.

DenisM 6y ago
This advice perhaps even more apt for grad students. Entrepreneurs at least have the luxury of pivot.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  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.
  - katbyte 6y ago
    Not everyone has the uzery of quitting. Free will we all have but situations can drastically curb our options.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      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.
      - katmannthree 6y ago
        >all of them were of their own making. Having taken it out themselves doesn't make the mortgage any less real.

deleted 6y ago

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mythrwy 6y ago

"‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." 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.

xwdv 6y ago
"You are the universe. Provide for yourself."
- mythrwy 6y ago
  Nonsense. You aren't the universe.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    A small portion of it.

friendlybus 6y ago

What are people supposed to tell you? Useful information would be stuff that's private, like how you get past your current work-related roadblock. 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.

mrpickels 6y ago

I believe in you that you are a hyper rational idiot

dang 6y ago
Hey, could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately, and we're trying for something different in this community. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.

dkersten 6y ago

Well, believing in yourself isn't enough on its own (and nothing is guaranteed in any case), but believing in yourself IS the first step to succeeding at anything and therefore IS important.

deleted 6y ago

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anoncake 6y ago

You really need some kind of doublethink here. Believe you can do anything, but make decisions "as if" you couldn't.

gabereiser 6y ago

I agree with this. I used to tell people “Talent is just understanding and time. Time to practice, to learn, to grow your understanding, to improve your talent”. Naturally, there are folks naturally talented in a skill. Most have to work at it really hard. My take is “you can too if you put in the time”.

happytoexplain 6y ago

>I honestly hate people that spout nonsense like anything is possible if you just believe 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.

iherbig 6y ago
"This version of the sentiment which you did not express is totally reasonable, therefore it seems nuts to hate people for the sentiment that you DID express."
Tade0 6y ago
Problem is, there's no stop criterion, so more often than not there is no moderation. To me this advice is a net negative. Of course you should believe in yourself, but that's just the baseline.
Barrin92 6y ago
it's inappropriate to hate the people who adopt it, because they're often in a position where they rely on that sort of belief for one reason or another. 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.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Hate no one. Hate bad and dangerous ideas and deeds.
kayodelycaon 6y ago
The problem is when “believe in yourself” becomes blaming people for things outside of their control because they didn’t “believe in themselves”. It becomes just another way to say “you failed because you’re lazy and didn’t try hard enough”.

mumblemumble 6y ago

> It's almost the same as the prosperity gospel nonsense. 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/ https://www.oglaf.com/conviction/

allendoerfer 6y ago

And when you continue going down that road, it get's even worse: Not only is the impact an individual has on their success limited, such is the impact on their failure. If you come from a rich family, you are far more likely to succeed, but you are also far more likely to end up in prison, if you come from a poor family. 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.

Swizec 6y ago

Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner have a great podcast on this. The world is unfair and you aren’t guaranteed success no matter what you do. But focusing on things you can control and having grit on average increases your chances. It’s a good default.

agumonkey 6y ago
There's an inverse notion too, that doubling down on efforts in an unfavorable context is just a quicker death.
cbanek 6y ago
Yes, this. I'm reminded of a great Captain Picard line after Data fails his game of strategema: "It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose. That is not a failing. That is life."
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
Define success. I'm college educated and make nearly $100k a year. To me this is the bare minimum. I don't feel comfortable where I am but I still meet people who envy me. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to. It wasn't even hard to get here.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  > I'm just doing what I'm supposed to. 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.
  - zx321 6y ago

sanderjd 6y ago

As a pretty new parent, I don't think the grit / hard work focused trend is as you describe it. The idea, as I understand it, is to teach the value of hard work as an end to itself, rather than as a means to achieve the impossible. This really resonates with me, as someone who felt like the lesson of my own childhood was to achieve quite arbitrary goals (grades on tests, correct answers to trivia questions, that sort of thing), which didn't really require me to work very hard, to my detriment. Properly interpreted, I like the "hard work is what matters" child rearing trend.

kayodelycaon 6y ago
The “hard work is what matters” method really falls apart when child can’t meet the expectations of the parent and the parent believes this is due to the child not “working hard”. I’ve seen this happen to again and again to friends and people in my support group.
- sanderjd 6y ago
  You're saying that the parent claims that hard work is what matters, but secretly has other expectations they aren't expressing to their child? Yeah, that definitely sounds like a failure mode to be aware of and avoid.
  - kayodelycaon 6y ago
    Well. I was expected to be able to do my homework, get good grades, and not get in trouble in school. I was “smart but didn’t apply myself”. 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.
    - sanderjd 6y ago
      I honestly don't understand what your comment has to do with what I'm talking about... 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.

rubicon33 6y ago

Don't take this the wrong way but, are you young? 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.

hutzlibu 6y ago

""‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." 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.

stinos 6y ago

If you fail, it's not the world that's hard or unfair (it naturally is both), but again it's a personal failing on your part for not trying hard enough 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'.

bahmboo 6y ago
A point in the article is that self esteem as a feeling alone was supposed to fix the problem instead of doing actual work.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  Yes, it was classic conflation of cause and effect. The observation was that successful people had high self-esteem. The (wrong) conclusion was that they had the high self-esteem first and that led to their achievements and success.

varispeed 6y ago

To be fair, when I started to think every day about the life I want to live it slowly started to happen. If I knew what I know now 5 years ago, I would have never believed something like this would be possible and yet here we are. Of course there are limits to anything, for example if you dream to be a commercial pilot and you are 50 now, then that's kind of too late.

username90 6y ago
> If I knew what I know now 5 years ago, I would have never believed something like this would be possible 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.

renewiltord 6y ago

No one who doesn't believe they can accomplish something ever accomplishes it. Few things in life are certainties. But I know there are many paths for my next action: some which involve self-modification and others which involve world-modification. 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.

rayiner 6y ago

I’m not sure you can “swing too far” toward emphasizing grit and perseverance. We need to realize that we are actually talking about two different things here: (1) what is true as a matter of sociological and economic fact; and (2) what is the most useful and beneficial world view in which to socialize children. 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?

skohan 6y ago
I agree with you that emphasizing grit is a good recipe for optimizing perfect success. However fetishizing grit is a terrible guiding principal for public policy. 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.
- 6y ago

MuffinFlavored 6y ago

> "‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true." > > This is such a great quote. 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"

ponker 6y ago

Outcomes are a monotonic function of talent, effort, and luck. One is mildly controllable, one you can control in quantity and quality, and one is out of your hands.

ponker 6y ago

If Stephen Hawking’s dream was to become an Olympic gymnast no amount of work would have made it happen. This is the example I use when people make this claim.

rufus_foreman 6y ago

If you read the right news, nothing is possible. You seem to be on the right track.

mymythisisthis 6y ago

It's like the term 'PPE', (personal protective equipment). It's a weaselly term that turns the idea of safety back on you. 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.

jules 6y ago

A good thought experiment to determine what people actually think: would they give that as advice to their own children? 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.

mgh2 6y ago

Typical correlation vs. causation problem. 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.

Guthur 6y ago

Some of the problem here, imo, is a overly linear view of people and society. 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.

anoncake 6y ago
> The left broadly assumes that we're all equally capable and that it's just opportunity that's the problem. I don't think it matters if we are equally capable. Capability, or at least talent, is just another form of opportunity.

SZJX 6y ago

> Believe in yourself and anything is possible 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. --- P.S.: As a side note. The highest-rated visual novel of all time, Muv-Luv Alternative https://vndb.org/v92 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_40_have_i_really_failed_in_life/drt3gim/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/7mczwb/at_4...