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.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So all in all just a quite useless statement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t there a saying, “ignorance is bliss”

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...

Compare with an upper class upbringing which tends to come with a sense of confidence and entitlement. Reality often responds accordingly.

Generally we seem bad at noticing and rewarding genuine competence and much better at noticing and rewarding confidence, even if it's wildly unrealistic. And even if it comes with a spectacular record of failure or obvious evidence of limited integrity.

So imposter syndrome may not be so much about an unrealistically low feeling of competence, but about not having internalised the performative social signifiers of confidence - to the point where someone can navigate them without having to second-guess them consciously.

In other words there are two different games being played, and being good at something is only one of them.

This assumes that low self-esteem (and consequently impostor syndrome) are logical esteem issues - in other words, one learns to perform the correct calculations, and the problem is solved.

I believe low self-esteem problems are emotional in nature, and there's no amount of correct calculations that can solve that. There is an associated phenomenon indeed - the bucket with a hole; if somebody has low self-esteem, no matter how they fill the bucket, the bucket will never be full.

I agree that there is a reinforcement cycle with increase of skills, and that there is a component of "self-medication" that one can apply, but in general, I believe that low self-esteem has different causes, and is better handled by qualified professionals.

> The end result of all this was an increasingly massive cottage industry devoted to self-esteem

This in my opinion is a problem inside the problem: mainstream, unqualified, gurus are damaging, as they divert attention from qualified therapy.

This also breeds distrust of expertise and anti-intellectualism. After all, they've been taught that everybody's equally bad so those experts signaling that their skills/knowledge are not up to snuff are clearly doing so for ulterior motives such as "gatekeeping" or for their own financial or other gain.

It may seem like that at first, but carry it to the logical conclusion. Assuming one does have imposter syndrome and isn't just incompetent:

1. Other people in your field are not as highly skilled or immune from mistakes as you think

2. You are not as far below them as you think

3. Their amazing accomplishments, which had convinced you of their inhuman skill and your incompetence, are still amazing. And how can you call somebody who achieves amazing things incompetent?

4. So, if there's less distance between you and them than you thought, the only explanation is that you're not as incompetent as you thought.

>Instead, we should be giving people skills to accurately self-assess without tying current abilities to their self-worth

Is it any better to tie self-worth to future abilities? I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it might just be delaying the problem.

The whole point is to end up where you’re seeing everyone as they are.

One, there is a very strong ethos in our culture that the only thing that matters for results is effort. We want to believe that we are in control of our own destiny, and that everyone can each any level of success if they choose to exert the required effort. Any lack of success is tied to a lack of effort (or, occasionally, people will say the lack of success is caused by misapplied effort)... in both cases, the implication is that any person just needs to make the right series of choices to achieve any level of success that is possible.

The second thing is that even if we realize that some people won't be able to achieve at a certain level, it is probably still a good idea to act as if they can. Someone who thinks they can achieve something but can't will end up in the same place regardless of that belief, but someone who actually can achieve something will have a different outcome if they believe they can instead of can't.

Could you please provide an example book, I'd like to check that out. Thanks!

I would like to add one aspect, which is that if everyone is equally amazing, there isn't much that you can do to improve your situation in life. In a sense, it can be empowering if you know that your job situation is bad because you didn't pay attention in school, because that also means that there is an obvious fix.

“It’s tribal shaman rain dance that grows corn!”

“It’s Jesus!”

“It’s sound economics!”

Real human logistics work one way. Stabilize a reality destroying itself.

Semantic games about why and for whom are the outdated traditions.

For the species, because it demands it is the only true answer.

Happy to tear down industry designed by men who hold no true power. Just advantaged access in a social system where we can clearly watch them manipulate markets with handouts

I'm not a parent so I have no idea if this is good or not.

But it strikes me that there is more to giving feedback than just quantity of it, or positive/negative. "Almost" introduces another dimension, and potentially activates a different set of motivating emotions as well.

However, this attitude could help someone become successful as it removes the notion that one is inherently inferior and can help one feel that bouncing back when things go wrong is possible.

I think a lot of kids grew up being told they're special, then grew up to realize they're not beautiful and unique snowflakes. "Flight Club" the book might have been a response to the self esteem movement, but the movie landed at the right time for kids who grew up being told they're special, but now feel ennui, to find it.

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 kind of get what you're saying...but if its based in Puritanism, it's probably a perverted form of it

I actually attribute the origins to the New Age movement (rooted and perverted from Hinduism) and the power of positive thinking that resulted of it during the 70s. Essentially if you believe in something hard enough then it can become true

They used to rely on religion, for better or worse. Dogma is the only true constant, trading one God for the other, first an elusive supernatural being, then the State, then science. It will still result is the same failed outcome.

I really like polytheist religion. You are warmonger ? Pray to Mars. You like to party and have sex ? Pray to Hathor. You are more inclined to wisdom and justice ? Pray to Athena.