"‘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.
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.
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."
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?
> 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."
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
""‘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.
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'.
> "‘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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
"‘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.
Having adopted a lot of quasi Buddhist frames in recent years, I increasingly look in askance at the self esteem framework.
A friend was going through a crisis of confidence in their professional life, and was basically saying, I think I’m not a good psychologist, and the fact that I “wasted” 10 years training for this makes me want to kill myself.
Their buddhist teacher (In practice, a therapist, and also by education the teacher is literally a therapist) responded: so what if you’re not good at being a psychologist? What if it’s true? Isn’t it better to know?
Being emotionally invested in our specialness/abilities/whatever is a trap, because we’re not special, we all have deep limitations in our capabilities. Whatever you’re the best at: there are people better than you. There are people who are probably better than you at every single thing you do. So what? Part of the Sunday chanting service: “let us overcome the inferiority complex, the superiority complex, and the equality complex.”
None of which is to say we shouldn’t treat ourselves lovingly and with compassion. We definitely should, and it takes a lot of work and growth to do that, and pretending we’re not limited is a false solution.
Any book recommendations? I’ve been meditating with apps like calm for a few years. I’ve gotten a lot from breathing meditations, but feel like I’m only scratching the surface.
"let us overcome the inferiority complex, the superiority complex, and the equality complex"
This is a lot easier to do if we're alone on a desert island or in a cave on a mountain top. Even then, most of us have a lifetime of baggage to let go of, as we've been taught to idealize superachievers and geniuses, and despise underachievers and mediocrity from an early age.
I'm reminded of the start of one of my favorite Hardcore History episodes -- the first of the Death Throes of the Republic series[1]:
I want you to think back to the house you grew up in as a child. I want you to picture a room in that house that didn't exist. I want you to pretend it did, and the whole time you were a young child, growing up in to your adolescence and until you leave home you're aware of this room in the house.
The room has faces on the wall, dead people's faces -- the faces of dead people who were related to you. The faces are made of wax, and they were made immediately upon death of the individual whose face it was.
The wax was put on the face and, like a modern version of a wax museum, an accurate representation of your dead ancestor's dead face was made and was put on your wall connected by a painted line to his ancestor, your even earlier ancestor whose wax face made after death is also on the wall, and that is connected by another line to his ancestor whose wax mask is there as well.
These may have been full color versions of these ancestors of yours and their names were there and from your very earliest childhood memory you're aware of this room, and you are aware of who these people are and you are aware of what they did. It's sort of freaky, though, isn't it? Now you know how Julius Caesar felt growing up.
Now I remember being terrified by paintings -- completely innocuous paintings -- in my house when I was a child, and I know my children get freaked out at the slightest thing like that, but to Julius Caesar and people like him this "ancestor room" as it's sometimes called, had a profound effect on firing their ambition.
The ancient historian Sallust said that the Romans described their children's spirits as blazing like flames when they would look at the sight. The ancient historian Polybius said, "It would be hard to imagine a more impressive scene for a youth who aspires to win fame and practice virtue."
To these people who spent time amongst the Romans or who were Roman themselves, they thought this was a good way to create in your young people this desire for achievement which was the hallmark of Roman society during this time period...
> The logic was simple: If low self-esteem is tied to so many maladaptive responses, to so many forms of underachievement and bad behavior, then surely raising kids’ (and other’s) self-esteem could bring with it untold benefits.
It’s interesting to watch this same logic play out again in the software world under a new name. This time, we’re not increasing self-esteem, we’re attacking “impostor syndrome”.
In both cases the underlying association between feelings of low self-esteem or impostor syndrome and underperformance can be very real. Correcting low self-esteem or impostor syndrome can provide very real benefits. I’m not suggesting that either condition isn’t real.
However, in both cases the popular literature tends to assume that low self-esteem or imposter syndrome are conditions which occur independent of ability or skill level. Instead of teaching people how to teach themselves the skills they need and develop accurate and honest self-assessment techniques, we’ve skipped past the difficult work and simply tried to instill confidence in people. Imposter syndrome literature takes this a step further by implying that no one knows what they’re doing, that everyone is equally bad, and that there are no adults in the room. The goal isn’t just to lift people up, it’s to mentally bring everyone else down.
In both cases the intentions are good, but the end results are mixed. Some times, being able to honestly self-evaluate and accept that one needs to make some improvements is more valuable than short-term soothing of the ego. Obviously it’s not good if people are paralyzed by imposter syndrome or feelings of perpetual inadequacy, but it’s also not good if we try to offset those feelings with arbitrary ego boosts and misleading ideas that everyone is equally incompetent. Instead, we should be giving people skills to accurately self-assess without tying current abilities to their self-worth. Trajectory is more important over the long term, but ironically some of the imposter syndrome literature tends to reduce learning trajectory by telling people that they already have all of the abilities they need to be successful.
It’s a tricky situation. Interesting to read this article and see that it’s hardly a new issue in society.
I feel like you cannot really discuss the "self-esteem craze" without the larger underlying societal forces at play. When psychologists observe high self-esteem scores you roughly notice two categories of people:
1. a healthier kind linked to positive outcomes: it centers on a fairly well-founded sense of confidence, with a reasonably accurate view of one's strengths in different situations and an ability to recognize one’s weaknesses.
2. an unhealthy, insecure narcissism: it is primarily defensive and involved a denial of weaknesses, i.e. an internal attempt to talk oneself up and maintain a positive sense of oneself in the face of threats to self-esteem.
At the same as we saw a rise in self-esteem scores, we see a surge in anxiety and depression. This apparent paradox is solved by considering that the second kind and the rise in anxiety are linked to an increase in social evaluative threat: threats which created the possibility for loss of social esteem. They are the main source of stress in experiments since they are closely linked to the primary sources of stress in modern society: low social status, lack of friends, and stress during one's early life.
In short, our social status is closely linked to how we define our worth and how much we are valued. In our increasingly-mobile world where we do not have settled communities but are surrounded by strangers, our social status becomes even more important. The greater the social status differentials in our society, the bigger the potential social evaluative threat.
Hence, greater inequality seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. And our society has only become more unequal.
This is one of the reasons why higher social inequality among rich nations is so closely linked to a range of health and social problems and is uncorrelated to the average income among those rich nations.
This is discussed much more cogently in The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
I was thinking recently about how this term had disappeared at some point. It's a very interesting history, but I think some of the conclusions drawn are overly negative.
- They’re all very individualistic, they’re all very self-focused, they’re also all delusional. ‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true.
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone literally believed that. You're not qualified to be CEO because you love yourself, but you're also unlikely to achieve anything with no confidence. It seems to me that we just talk about taking care of mental health instead now. Similar ideas, just a different angle.
Funny to see it mentioned in the article: I remember my middle school English teacher coming back from a continuing education course and saying she would no longer grade us in red ink, because studies showed red ink felt more critical and hurt students' self-esteem, which in turn made them less receptive to learning.
The data matches my intuition, as I've certainly seen the tendency to shut down in the face of criticism in myself, but I'm inclined to believe learning to cope with red ink is just as important a life skill as whatever we were learning in 7th grade English.
Self-esteem is positive, but achieving it by shielding kids from criticism in order to maintain a fragile fiction of how perfect and special they are is harmful. It's the ones who have good self-esteem even after seeing their mistakes circled in red who are best prepared for life.
It seems to me that self-esteem does have value. Telling yourself you're useless, stupid, etc. eventually becomes self-fulfilling. So why not try to maintain a positive self-view?
That being said, what's seems to have gone wrong is how to build self-esteem. It's simply not a gift given to you by others, or even yourself. Instead, it's something that is earned. It's a muscle that when exercised develops depth and breadth over time. Put another way, you don't develop self-esteem by avoiding adversity; or canceling anything remotely uncomfortable.
You build proper self-esteem by facing the darkness, not closing your eyes and pretending the lights are on. Self-esteem isn't something that's said, it's something you do. Like anything of value you have to put in the work, you have to put in the time. There are no shortcuts.
This is similar in theme to the article about frequent feedback that was posted here a few days ago.
On some level there's a choice between experiencing and growing from your failures, or being shielded from recognizing failure in the first place.
The second one "feels" better until someone comes along and eats you in your weakness.
The thing I am curious about is how this will play out in America. Meaning will weak americans just fade away as the strong ones accumulate skills, wealth and family? Or is weakness so permitted that we will be taken over externally?
The former will be a good cultural and physical rejuvenation for the republic. The second a disaster.
Self esteem is attacking the is-vs-ought problem. Sure, in the cold, social Darwin paradigm, those without ability have no worth - but this is not how things SHOULD be.
I think it’s important for people to know that they have value, regardless of their abilities. This doesn’t mean that people should not be encouraged to succeed. I think self esteem and achievement can go hand in hand. For me personally, I think believing that I was special helped motivate me to achieve more! After all, If you’re not special, what chance do you have competing against the other 7billion people in the world?
Anecdotally, I was raised by two very people-self esteem parents, and have become fairly successful compared to my peer group. I also remember the first time I heard someone say that self esteem was bad. It came from the evangelical, objectivist parents of a kid I knew in early high school. That kid ended up failing college and getting addicted to opioids.
Self-esteem is a good thing to have, lacking it is not. Every psychologist will tell you that. Making it an industry or government target is bad but inevitable. Let's move on
Who can dis Mr Rogers but did he contribute by telling me that I was special? What I have learned since then is that I am not, or at least not to anyone except a select few people in my life. I feel like the more I have felt this way the more successful I’ve been, because I know that most people aren’t really paying attention to me, and I can pursue what makes me happy in my personal and professional life.
Is it a craze? Or is it fashion? Today it's jeans with cuts on the knees, tomorrow it's polkadots. Yesterday it was self esteem, today it is he/him, she/her.
I like trends. I enjoy fashion. There are many trends to choose from. Delightful.
Self esteem was innocuous light reading that soothed my teenage and young adult anxiety. I found it beneficial at the time.
Not sure what's the point of attacking self-esteem as a general concept. Perhaps there's some valid criticism of policies aimed at boosting it.
But the article is trying to convince us we shouldn't want to feel good about ourselves because a random study here and there didn't show a desirable correlation.
If a study shows happiness doesn't make you rich should you stop being happy?
It's a story of how most psychological research struggles with major epistemological issues.
I seems to me that the thing with self-esteem is much like with money. Happy, confident people do have self-esteem but trying to increase self-esteem doesn't mean one becomes happy and confident - much like wealthy people have money but merely giving the same amount of money to someone doesn't make that person wealthy. Wealth, like happiness and confidence, comes from another place and money, like self-esteem, is just the signal of how it shows up.
My understanding was that self esteem is actually just the opposite of what it is usually purported - it is how you view how the rest of society views you and your role in it. If that is true, just telling someone "you're special" isn't enough - you actually have to be special and be recognized and respected for it. It's about as useful as telling a person "you're tall" regardless of their height.
Everybody has the potential to be 'somebody', but we all need help getting there. Some of my greatest successes as a taxi driver involved helping people with low self-esteem. Two of my passengers, whom I'm still in contact with, come to mind...
One was quiet, and just provided directions. "Right, right, right, left (into a parking lot)..." Oh, we're going to the drive-through liquor store. After she bought her vodka and cigarettes she said to take her back to her apartment.
"Do you have any food in your apartment?" Alcoholics are always malnourished. She did not, so I stopped the taxi meter and detoured to McDonald's. I called her back a few times, and detected a hint of hope in her voice: "someone cares about me". She found my card a few months later, and I learned more about her story. The state had tried to help her with her prescription-exacerbated drinking problem by sending her to minimum-security prison for 2 years (3rd DUI). She'd tried to stay sober upon release, but life happened and she still didn't know how to cope. After her taxi ride, she drunk-called her good friend, who called her youngest son with instructions: "GO SOBER UP YOUR MOTHER." I eventually told her daughter that her mother needed to feel safe to finish her recovery. She lived with that daughter for a while, then moved to a couch at her son's. Now she has a room at her son's house, and is doing quite well for herself.
I got crucified trying to protect another passenger from do-gooders. She's doing well now, no thanks to the professionals who mis-categorized her as a hopeless drug addict. She found that she's good at something, and is developing her skills to help herself and others.
On a submission about the 1% rule I commented: "We're all in our little alcoves of the human experience, trying the best we can to make the most of the situation we find ourselves in. For most of us, no matter how good we are at something, there are probably 100-million other people just as good as you.
"The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual snowflakes are not special." [0]
Most people are not special snowflakes, but we never know which child will turn out to be someone significant, and who will turn out to be just regular someones.
Everyone has the potential to be someone important to someone else. My former-alcoholic passenger (above) calls semi-regularly with updates about her family drama. She is now an asset ("grandma") to her family, rather than the hopeless drunk I took to the liquor store almost 8 years ago. She recently got her drivers license reinstated, contributes by watching her grandkids and (now) driving people around, and is appreciated by her family.
I'm invited to her daughter's Christmas party in a few weeks. They're rather well-to-do, but I didn't know that when I took a few minutes out of my day to pay attention to my nobody-passenger.
Very few of us will turn out to be special snowflakes, but everyone has the capacity to become someone significant to the other people in our lives. I think this is the true essence of what this submission calls the "self-esteem craze".
> Everybody has the potential to be 'somebody', but we all need help getting there.
That's utter garbage. You fail to define the mesure to be "somebody" as well as the acceptable amount of "help" to invest into someone to reach that undefined goal.
FWIW, I'm perfectly fine, in the grand scheme of things, to be a nobody and certainly wouldn't want it any other way.
I always thought self-esteem comes from a feeling of empowerment. The most we can do in this effort is do our best to match kids with their innate talents and help develop them.
[+] [-] cbanek|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] clay_the_ripper|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qsort|5 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] rayiner|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mumblemumble|5 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] happytoexplain|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Swizec|5 years ago|reply
But focusing on things you can control and having grit on average increases your chances. It’s a good default.
[+] [-] sanderjd|5 years ago|reply
Properly interpreted, I like the "hard work is what matters" child rearing trend.
[+] [-] mgh2|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] friendlybus|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|5 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] allendoerfer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jules|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chris_wot|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dkersten|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Guthur|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] varispeed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gabereiser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mythrwy|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anoncake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roflc0ptic|5 years ago|reply
A friend was going through a crisis of confidence in their professional life, and was basically saying, I think I’m not a good psychologist, and the fact that I “wasted” 10 years training for this makes me want to kill myself.
Their buddhist teacher (In practice, a therapist, and also by education the teacher is literally a therapist) responded: so what if you’re not good at being a psychologist? What if it’s true? Isn’t it better to know?
Being emotionally invested in our specialness/abilities/whatever is a trap, because we’re not special, we all have deep limitations in our capabilities. Whatever you’re the best at: there are people better than you. There are people who are probably better than you at every single thing you do. So what? Part of the Sunday chanting service: “let us overcome the inferiority complex, the superiority complex, and the equality complex.”
None of which is to say we shouldn’t treat ourselves lovingly and with compassion. We definitely should, and it takes a lot of work and growth to do that, and pretending we’re not limited is a false solution.
[+] [-] the_only_law|5 years ago|reply
Isn’t there a saying, “ignorance is bliss”
[+] [-] teaTime042|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|5 years ago|reply
This is a lot easier to do if we're alone on a desert island or in a cave on a mountain top. Even then, most of us have a lifetime of baggage to let go of, as we've been taught to idealize superachievers and geniuses, and despise underachievers and mediocrity from an early age.
I'm reminded of the start of one of my favorite Hardcore History episodes -- the first of the Death Throes of the Republic series[1]:
I want you to think back to the house you grew up in as a child. I want you to picture a room in that house that didn't exist. I want you to pretend it did, and the whole time you were a young child, growing up in to your adolescence and until you leave home you're aware of this room in the house.
The room has faces on the wall, dead people's faces -- the faces of dead people who were related to you. The faces are made of wax, and they were made immediately upon death of the individual whose face it was.
The wax was put on the face and, like a modern version of a wax museum, an accurate representation of your dead ancestor's dead face was made and was put on your wall connected by a painted line to his ancestor, your even earlier ancestor whose wax face made after death is also on the wall, and that is connected by another line to his ancestor whose wax mask is there as well.
These may have been full color versions of these ancestors of yours and their names were there and from your very earliest childhood memory you're aware of this room, and you are aware of who these people are and you are aware of what they did. It's sort of freaky, though, isn't it? Now you know how Julius Caesar felt growing up.
Now I remember being terrified by paintings -- completely innocuous paintings -- in my house when I was a child, and I know my children get freaked out at the slightest thing like that, but to Julius Caesar and people like him this "ancestor room" as it's sometimes called, had a profound effect on firing their ambition.
The ancient historian Sallust said that the Romans described their children's spirits as blazing like flames when they would look at the sight. The ancient historian Polybius said, "It would be hard to imagine a more impressive scene for a youth who aspires to win fame and practice virtue."
To these people who spent time amongst the Romans or who were Roman themselves, they thought this was a good way to create in your young people this desire for achievement which was the hallmark of Roman society during this time period...
[1] - https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-death-thr...
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
> The logic was simple: If low self-esteem is tied to so many maladaptive responses, to so many forms of underachievement and bad behavior, then surely raising kids’ (and other’s) self-esteem could bring with it untold benefits.
It’s interesting to watch this same logic play out again in the software world under a new name. This time, we’re not increasing self-esteem, we’re attacking “impostor syndrome”.
In both cases the underlying association between feelings of low self-esteem or impostor syndrome and underperformance can be very real. Correcting low self-esteem or impostor syndrome can provide very real benefits. I’m not suggesting that either condition isn’t real.
However, in both cases the popular literature tends to assume that low self-esteem or imposter syndrome are conditions which occur independent of ability or skill level. Instead of teaching people how to teach themselves the skills they need and develop accurate and honest self-assessment techniques, we’ve skipped past the difficult work and simply tried to instill confidence in people. Imposter syndrome literature takes this a step further by implying that no one knows what they’re doing, that everyone is equally bad, and that there are no adults in the room. The goal isn’t just to lift people up, it’s to mentally bring everyone else down.
In both cases the intentions are good, but the end results are mixed. Some times, being able to honestly self-evaluate and accept that one needs to make some improvements is more valuable than short-term soothing of the ego. Obviously it’s not good if people are paralyzed by imposter syndrome or feelings of perpetual inadequacy, but it’s also not good if we try to offset those feelings with arbitrary ego boosts and misleading ideas that everyone is equally incompetent. Instead, we should be giving people skills to accurately self-assess without tying current abilities to their self-worth. Trajectory is more important over the long term, but ironically some of the imposter syndrome literature tends to reduce learning trajectory by telling people that they already have all of the abilities they need to be successful.
It’s a tricky situation. Interesting to read this article and see that it’s hardly a new issue in society.
[+] [-] Quanttek|5 years ago|reply
I feel like you cannot really discuss the "self-esteem craze" without the larger underlying societal forces at play. When psychologists observe high self-esteem scores you roughly notice two categories of people:
1. a healthier kind linked to positive outcomes: it centers on a fairly well-founded sense of confidence, with a reasonably accurate view of one's strengths in different situations and an ability to recognize one’s weaknesses.
2. an unhealthy, insecure narcissism: it is primarily defensive and involved a denial of weaknesses, i.e. an internal attempt to talk oneself up and maintain a positive sense of oneself in the face of threats to self-esteem.
At the same as we saw a rise in self-esteem scores, we see a surge in anxiety and depression. This apparent paradox is solved by considering that the second kind and the rise in anxiety are linked to an increase in social evaluative threat: threats which created the possibility for loss of social esteem. They are the main source of stress in experiments since they are closely linked to the primary sources of stress in modern society: low social status, lack of friends, and stress during one's early life.
In short, our social status is closely linked to how we define our worth and how much we are valued. In our increasingly-mobile world where we do not have settled communities but are surrounded by strangers, our social status becomes even more important. The greater the social status differentials in our society, the bigger the potential social evaluative threat.
Hence, greater inequality seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. And our society has only become more unequal.
This is one of the reasons why higher social inequality among rich nations is so closely linked to a range of health and social problems and is uncorrelated to the average income among those rich nations.
This is discussed much more cogently in The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
[+] [-] vlunkr|5 years ago|reply
- They’re all very individualistic, they’re all very self-focused, they’re also all delusional. ‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true.
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone literally believed that. You're not qualified to be CEO because you love yourself, but you're also unlikely to achieve anything with no confidence. It seems to me that we just talk about taking care of mental health instead now. Similar ideas, just a different angle.
[+] [-] mrfredward|5 years ago|reply
The data matches my intuition, as I've certainly seen the tendency to shut down in the face of criticism in myself, but I'm inclined to believe learning to cope with red ink is just as important a life skill as whatever we were learning in 7th grade English.
Self-esteem is positive, but achieving it by shielding kids from criticism in order to maintain a fragile fiction of how perfect and special they are is harmful. It's the ones who have good self-esteem even after seeing their mistakes circled in red who are best prepared for life.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|5 years ago|reply
That being said, what's seems to have gone wrong is how to build self-esteem. It's simply not a gift given to you by others, or even yourself. Instead, it's something that is earned. It's a muscle that when exercised develops depth and breadth over time. Put another way, you don't develop self-esteem by avoiding adversity; or canceling anything remotely uncomfortable.
You build proper self-esteem by facing the darkness, not closing your eyes and pretending the lights are on. Self-esteem isn't something that's said, it's something you do. Like anything of value you have to put in the work, you have to put in the time. There are no shortcuts.
[+] [-] xyzelement|5 years ago|reply
On some level there's a choice between experiencing and growing from your failures, or being shielded from recognizing failure in the first place.
The second one "feels" better until someone comes along and eats you in your weakness.
The thing I am curious about is how this will play out in America. Meaning will weak americans just fade away as the strong ones accumulate skills, wealth and family? Or is weakness so permitted that we will be taken over externally?
The former will be a good cultural and physical rejuvenation for the republic. The second a disaster.
[+] [-] bromquinn|5 years ago|reply
I think it’s important for people to know that they have value, regardless of their abilities. This doesn’t mean that people should not be encouraged to succeed. I think self esteem and achievement can go hand in hand. For me personally, I think believing that I was special helped motivate me to achieve more! After all, If you’re not special, what chance do you have competing against the other 7billion people in the world?
Anecdotally, I was raised by two very people-self esteem parents, and have become fairly successful compared to my peer group. I also remember the first time I heard someone say that self esteem was bad. It came from the evangelical, objectivist parents of a kid I knew in early high school. That kid ended up failing college and getting addicted to opioids.
[+] [-] known|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] momirlan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vaslo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexashka|5 years ago|reply
I like trends. I enjoy fashion. There are many trends to choose from. Delightful.
Self esteem was innocuous light reading that soothed my teenage and young adult anxiety. I found it beneficial at the time.
[+] [-] auganov|5 years ago|reply
But the article is trying to convince us we shouldn't want to feel good about ourselves because a random study here and there didn't show a desirable correlation.
If a study shows happiness doesn't make you rich should you stop being happy?
It's a story of how most psychological research struggles with major epistemological issues.
[+] [-] yason|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] taxicabjesus|5 years ago|reply
One was quiet, and just provided directions. "Right, right, right, left (into a parking lot)..." Oh, we're going to the drive-through liquor store. After she bought her vodka and cigarettes she said to take her back to her apartment.
"Do you have any food in your apartment?" Alcoholics are always malnourished. She did not, so I stopped the taxi meter and detoured to McDonald's. I called her back a few times, and detected a hint of hope in her voice: "someone cares about me". She found my card a few months later, and I learned more about her story. The state had tried to help her with her prescription-exacerbated drinking problem by sending her to minimum-security prison for 2 years (3rd DUI). She'd tried to stay sober upon release, but life happened and she still didn't know how to cope. After her taxi ride, she drunk-called her good friend, who called her youngest son with instructions: "GO SOBER UP YOUR MOTHER." I eventually told her daughter that her mother needed to feel safe to finish her recovery. She lived with that daughter for a while, then moved to a couch at her son's. Now she has a room at her son's house, and is doing quite well for herself.
I got crucified trying to protect another passenger from do-gooders. She's doing well now, no thanks to the professionals who mis-categorized her as a hopeless drug addict. She found that she's good at something, and is developing her skills to help herself and others.
On a submission about the 1% rule I commented: "We're all in our little alcoves of the human experience, trying the best we can to make the most of the situation we find ourselves in. For most of us, no matter how good we are at something, there are probably 100-million other people just as good as you.
"The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual snowflakes are not special." [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22623162
Most people are not special snowflakes, but we never know which child will turn out to be someone significant, and who will turn out to be just regular someones.
Everyone has the potential to be someone important to someone else. My former-alcoholic passenger (above) calls semi-regularly with updates about her family drama. She is now an asset ("grandma") to her family, rather than the hopeless drunk I took to the liquor store almost 8 years ago. She recently got her drivers license reinstated, contributes by watching her grandkids and (now) driving people around, and is appreciated by her family.
I'm invited to her daughter's Christmas party in a few weeks. They're rather well-to-do, but I didn't know that when I took a few minutes out of my day to pay attention to my nobody-passenger.
Very few of us will turn out to be special snowflakes, but everyone has the capacity to become someone significant to the other people in our lives. I think this is the true essence of what this submission calls the "self-esteem craze".
[+] [-] alacombe|5 years ago|reply
That's utter garbage. You fail to define the mesure to be "somebody" as well as the acceptable amount of "help" to invest into someone to reach that undefined goal.
FWIW, I'm perfectly fine, in the grand scheme of things, to be a nobody and certainly wouldn't want it any other way.
[+] [-] hatmatrix|5 years ago|reply
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10144
[+] [-] satisfaction|5 years ago|reply