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.
Everyone who succeeds in business believes that they can do it.
Not everyone who believes they can do it succeeds.
Therefore, believing you can succeed is necessary, but only a small percentage of people who believe are actually correct.
Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe, but chances are you are wrong.
But that kind of belief doesn't foster the mindset of "if I fail, that's just life and I will move forward." Having that much confidence in accomplishing something means staking my self-worth on it, because this is a test of my own effort and nobody else's. The results begin and end with my actions only, and the things I want are too important to me to not take seriously. If those things are what I ultimately want to spend my time on Earth succeeding in before I die, then not succeeding is devastating to my mental health.
I don't understand how not to think like this, because every real success I've fought for and won came as a result of believing my life was over if I didn't succeed. In some cases I really would become poor or have no future if I didn't succeed, so it grants too much legitimacy to the method.
For example Elon Musk very well knows the possibility of failure. But it seems he finds it important enough to try it.
Same for Jeff Bezos, who has a regret minimalization strategy.
So seems they are very aware of the possibility of failure, but it's important enough to try it.
I like that, because it's a more rational approach than "I'm sure I can do it"
So dark and brilliant and illuminating at the same time.
I know a lot of people with the kind of indefatigable optimism and self confidence that leads to success over the long-term. They're almost always failures, they're almost always wrong about intricacies of how the world works, and are blind to the difficulties faced by both themselves, and others.
A select few of them are very, very successful, and in spite of no clear superiority to their peers, their careers go up like bottle rockets with no shortage of fuel.
I don't envy them their success they've usually earned it about as much as anyone else. But I do wish I had the boundless sense of hope and energy they have, and the mindset that it takes to push through challenges like they do.
I would say it is more about disbelieving in yourself, and still trying to pursue a goal greater than oneself.
"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." - GK Chesterton
I'd argue that grit, status and luck have just as much to do with success than anything.
So 'having the talent' is really just one small part of it.
And FYI it's not about 'being wrong', really I do think large numbers of people could do A or B if they had the right connections, were born wealthy, and wanted to work really hard at it. The talent part is somewhat unique, but far unique so in sports than for example business.
It really depends what the specifics are, what does success look like? Not everything is so difficult that a large majority will fail at it. Believe you will become a $500B dollar company? Ok you’re probably wrong. But believe that you can make a decent living and not end up homeless? Most people who set out to accomplish that succeed, after all most people are not homeless.
I am rich because I believed in myself and WORKED HARD!
There are a lot of people that bought a lottery ticket and believed they could win.
At least the lottery winners have a chance of changing the world for the better, so the myth serves society, even if it deludes the players.
No, not at all. For example Larry Page offered to sell Google for 1 million dollars, he didn't believe he would succeed. Yet he went on to create one of the most valuable companies on earth. Being modest does not prevent you from succeeding.
As it pertains to business, I’d say that self belief is probably the primary thing I can think of as a predictor for success. It implies that you are more persistent, more determined and willing to put more on the line.
Blaming yourself, or at least thinking what you could do differently, is the sane default when something goes wrong.
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference."
> "Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing."
- Stephen King, "The Drawing of the Three"
Your post is wise (or at least, it resonates to my best thinking on it which boils down to the serenity prayer as well.)
But I disagree that the two things in your first paragraph are equally bad.
If you think nothing is in your control and just blame others all the time - then you pass up every opportunity to make your life better, and I agree this is extremely common.
If you are on the other extreme and think you can control everything - you do end up tilting at windmills and wasting a lot of time and energy, but you also end up doing things that make a real difference in your life. It's a strategy strictly dominant to passivity.
Thus blaming others is always worse and I agree with your paragraph #2 and #3.
Your point is well taken. There's the other side of the balance" - the factors outside of one control define the ceiling limit of your delta change [0]. Of course, you can ask people to focus on the controllable and ignore the things one can not control. However, the fact that the family/country/skin color you are born determines pretty much most of your fate is not easily accepted by everyone. And rightly so, they have every right to be aggrieved about it.
[0] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-...
The two things aren’t necessarily the same. I think about this a lot in the context of the culture of former colonies. I’m from Bangladesh, which was colonized by the British for several centuries (not to mention Islamic empires before that). As a matter of historical fact, the British Empire imposed many capital- and wealth-destroying and transferring policies on the Indian subcontinent. It’s fair to say that development in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh runs into barriers that are the result of that history—that the world is “hard and unfair” as a result.
How should that shape culture on the Indian subcontinent going forward? In my view, almost not at all. The UK is a shadow of its former self and isn’t going to write a multi-trillion check any time soon. What’s true or not historically doesn’t really have any bearing on how Bangladeshis should see the world. The legacy of colonialism is just another thing to be overcome through grit and perseverance, no different than natural phenomenon like flooding or drought. When it comes to socializing children to view the world a certain way, what other view could possibly be more helpful?
Having grown up in the US, I think this is one of the biggest reasons for the deep dysfunction we have seen there in the past few decades. The value for "the pursuit of happiness", and almost religious belief in meritocracy places the blame for failure on the shoulders of the individual in the eyes of society, and helps to create an environment where courts and legislators can dismantle safety nets, and fail to support the population in times of collective crisis.
In times like we are living through, where there are a great many forces beyond the control of the average citizen which have the power to utterly wipe them out financially, it can be actively harmful to tell people that each individual is the master of their own destiny. We can and should expect and contribute to a collective good as well.
So an argument against an educational policy to emphasize grit is that, as far as we know, this will not actually increase grit in the students. Socializing children to view the world a certain way will have many effects, but not that.
It's almost the prosperity gospel nonsense, but it's exactly the Amway nonsense.
There's a good Oglaf comic about this. "The real magic is manipulating people by telling them to believe in themselves. The more you believe, the less you check facts."
[1] (content warning: The one I'm linking is tame but it's generally a NSFW comic) https://www.oglaf.com/conviction/
I found it hard to read the rest of your post after this. While I think it is indeed a common failing to go too far with the "believe in yourself" mindset, it does actually have real, practical use in moderation, and it seems nuts to "hate" people for it.
However I think it is fairly appropriate to 'hate' the people who preach it. It has a sinister ideological component of advocating individualism above all else, mostly to justify lack of taking responsibility for the collective good, or categorically blaming individuals for their situation. It also has fuelled a gigantic self-help industrial complex that's fairly effective at parting desperate people from their money.
To me this advice is a net negative. Of course you should believe in yourself, but that's just the baseline.
It becomes just another way to say “you failed because you’re lazy and didn’t try hard enough”.
But focusing on things you can control and having grit on average increases your chances. It’s a good default.
It wasn't even hard to get here.
"It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose. That is not a failing. That is life."
Properly interpreted, I like the "hard work is what matters" child rearing trend.
I’ve seen this happen to again and again to friends and people in my support group.
Of course, you could argue my parents didn’t teach me right. I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at, but if you don’t want your kid to be like me, my outcome might be something to keep in mind :)
The "rich" attribute their success to high self-esteem, when it is actually the reverse.
If you start with much, of course you will be more confident, as you can take more risk, unlike the poor.
In reality, most of the things we have in life was "given" with "hard work" disguised as our responsibility to make the best with the cards we have been dealt.
I've been through a bunch of therapy personally and read a lot in the psychology category and the deeper I get, the less I care about any of it. There are very few hurdles in life needing psychological tools. So much of it is a distraction for unsolvable problems. Some people see the targets, some see the obstacles (too often). Free psychological advice is worth it's price.
In all but few cases, self-modification is the superior strategy. And I find that self-deception gives me the ability to perform self-modification much more easily.
And after all, my objective is success by my own metric. If the parameters of my life are constrained by outside factors, it hardly changes the actions which I take where I have agency. Imagine my objective as ending up in the top right corner of an infinite plane. You say that the universe actually constrains me to the rectangle whose corners are (-500, -500) and (+100, +100). Well, now all my actions to reach the top right corner will now target me into (+100, +100). That is adequate. That will do.
In any case, I'm fairly certain that those who don't work hard and who don't believe in their ability to achieve success (by their own metric) will outcompete in survival metrics all those who don't. If societies choose to overempower the latter, they will eventually be outcompeted by societies that empower the former, c.p.
My limited experience has me fairly convinced about this. But it doesn't matter, because if I'm wrong, I'll be outcompeted in turn.
This is such a great quote. I honestly hate people that spout nonsense like anything is possible if you just believe, and that if you don't, it's that you obviously don't believe enough"
Well, it is the same with, you can do anything if you want it enough. True, but in a tautological way.
You want to levitate, but can't? Clearly you don't want it enough and still have doubts.
So all in all just a quite useless statement.
Thing is, if you just strip the part about 'not trying hard enough', this is actually true in quite a lot of cases? Yes the world is hard and unfair, but that doesn't mean people make mistakes for which only they are themselves to blame, that also is completely natural. No not all burden lies on you, but it's perfectly possible a lot of it actually does. Yet, I have a feeling in some circles there's this tendency to always try and blame something or someone else, which is almost living in denial. Maybe I look at things in a different way sometimes because I'm in engineering, were hard problems just lead to mistakes and in most cases it's obviously my mistake so you learn to deal with that. But to give some examples: people getting lawyers to fight teachers which gave bad grades to their children even when it's obvious the children just didn't perform well where the rest of the class did. My neighbour blaming the trees because the leaves fall on his lawn, despite the tree being there already when he moved in. People going to live next to a river and then starting action comitees becasue their basement floods when it rains a lot. Etc. Don't get me worng, I know in a case like the last it can in fact be nuanced and it can be possible there are actually upstream problems, but these are just examples to give a gneral idea of cases which I see where I think 'maybe, just maybe, there really isn't something else to blame and you should just accept it'.
I feel this way about teaching young children "when you grow up, aim to be a professional sports player or a famous magician"
What percentage of people who try to make it in those careers make it? It seems toxic to train children from a young age "try to pull of something that has 0.5% of happening"
Not only our economical system is in on the joke - also our justice system.
The problem is, there is no solution to this, we have to overplay an individuals responsibility to get anything done in society.
In German the saying "life is hard, but fair" can be jokingly turned around into "life is hard, but unfair". I feel like a little bit of cynism (the original kind the Greeks invented) can help you to still try your best, even though the system is rigged.
Having higher self esteem or a bit more belief that you can do something than is strictly warranted can be advantageous in certain situations, but it has its limits when it encourages people to attempt things they'll fail at. People tend to not do the latter with their own children.
The thought experiment works in many situations: take an online programming course rather than going to college, dropping out of college to start a company is great, sex work is a cool occupation, abortion is murder, smoking weed is cool.
If you take this as the definition, I do think the saying is accurate. Unfortunately, too many people understand the saying as “believe in yourself and you will definitely succeed”.
Look at it this way, if you don’t believe you can achieve some hard task, then you won’t start it on your own. If you do believe in yourself, you’ll almost certainly start the task. Whether you succeed is a different matter. But if you don’t start, you are guaranteed that you won’t succeed in that particular task.
But sometimes people try to do something that is actually impossible. Like praying away cancer or medical problems, or believing they have magic powers. Sometimes believing you can do something that you can't (or will never happen) is a detriment.
Now let's talk about the "not certain or probable" as I think this is more interesting ground. Sometimes you have to realize that you need to do something differently. If what you want to do isn't probable, then maybe you should look at the problem in a way that has more probable success. I struggle with this all the time at work, sometimes I feel like I'm right on the cusp of a breakthrough or bugfix, and other times it feels hopeless. But that doesn't always mean it is so. Sometimes knowing when to give up is important, as long as you start again. Or maybe you realize it wasn't that important after all, and you should just do something else.
I could believe all I want I need to win the lottery. I could buy a ticket every day and it's not probable I will win, but it's not impossible. And you never know!
The left broadly assumes that we're all equally capable and that it's just opportunity that's the problem. The right assumes that we're all equally able to achieve if only we would apply ourselves more.
Of course both are equally wrong and right and lots in between.
Some people will get nowhere no matter how much you give them. And some will fail no matter how hard they work.
What amazes me somewhat is that none of these are new problems for humanity, human beings are broadly the same for 1000s of years.
I don't think it matters if we are equally capable. Capability, or at least talent, is just another form of opportunity.
The difference between now and then is that now you know it is possible, before you only believed. If you stopped working hard it isn't because you now no longer believe hard work pays off, but because you now no longer care enough to work hard for the rewards you'd get.
Yep I agree fully with that being nonsense. But at least it implies some modicum of responsibility or necessity of action even if it's just "belief".
One I've heard a few times lately (from some people) is stuff like "The universe will provide" "the universe cares about us". That's even more irritating because not only is it nonsense, it implies a complete lack of personal responsibility.
This sort of Chicken Soup for the Soul, chessy simplification is indeed not useful and not going to help people who read it gain much at all.
However, as many others have pointed out, the simple fact in this world is that, to be successful, there might be a lot of systematic forces at play, and luck might play a huge role, but those are the things that you as an individual can't control. The only thing you can do as a person is always to improve yourself and strive hard. In that sense, I don't think either "high self-esteem" or "grit" are anything negative at all. Surely they're infinitely better than the contrary which would be "low self-esteem" and "don't work hard"?
I think a more realistic and helpful formulation would be "1. Believe in yourself, but don't expect to succeed magically without great sacrifices. 2. It may well be that luck > systematic barriers > individual effort, but that's irrelevant, since your own effort is the only thing you can control". Then you would be mentally well-prepared for failures but still strive hard regardless.
I agree with a comment that in terms of thinking about public policies, it's debatable whether too strong an emphasis on bootstrapping is a good thing. But that shouldn't be confused with teaching individuals work ethics. Those two can be viewed separately. You may not succeed with strong self-belief and a lot of efforts, but you will definitely fail with an overly cynical outlook and no efforts. It's not that complicated.
Maybe what this whole discussion reveals more is that, when a huge amount of people in a country deeply doubt meritocracy or self-made success, there must be some deep, entrenched systematic problems with the country, which may well be in decline in a lot of ways (when a country is growing and a lot of opportunities are open, the ethos would be well different). But still, as mentioned above, this doesn't change much the way in which one should perceive and approach their individual behaviors when they want to succeed.
---
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.
> 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.
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.
> So imposter syndrome may not be so much about an unrealistically low feeling of competence, but about not having internalized the performance social signifies of confidence.
Well... I don't know if imposter syndrome is so black and white. All I have is anecdata; I grew up upper middle class, went to some great schools, and held some really wonderful jobs (especially my current job, which is my dream!) - but each day I wonder if today is the day they realize just how little value I bring to the team. The frameworks I've built always need some kind of improvement and when my coworkers look at code, they just debug it in their minds almost instantly. Me? I need to manually step through the debugger with most of the bugs I work on. Management will discuss new features with our team and I'm still trying to figure out fixing the technical debt from the last feature. I've held this job for quite a while so I guess I'm doing something right but holy cow there's no way I'm in the same tier as my coworkers.
I dunno, I'm not saying that I disagree, all I'm really saying is I think there could be more that goes into imposter syndrome than class upbringing. It's a dissonance of knowledge and belief: I know I bring value, but I sure don't believe that I do.
Such a situation can easily lead towards imposter syndrome and low actual confidence combined with a faked posture of high confidence - even if actual competence is expected to be good compared to poorer classes as socioeconomic status does (on average) lead to better skills due to better opportunities and other aspects.
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.
And the other part turned out to be true multiple times in my life. I thought how much better those people are and when I got close, they were good, but normally good and were clueless a lot.
Or put another way: that one is a good plumber does not mean one is a good heart surgeon. Yet for some reason we assume that is the case in intellectual pursuits because we don't see the stuff ideas are made of.
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.
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.
Isn’t there a saying, “ignorance is bliss”
You can kind of view Buddhism as a three step process: the breathing/physical meditation techniques are for learning to direct your attention, and calm yourself down enough that you can pay attention to bodily sensations/your feelings. The next is getting acquainted with your patterns, identity the maladaptive bits, and use various meditations to train your mind into different patterns. The final phase is the more woo-sounding stuff about ego death and no self, and I don’t pretend to have a handle on it.
Some great introductory books: “Radical Acceptance” by Tara Brach, which is pretty much anti-self esteem. This was personally the most useful to me.
“Peace is Every Step” by Thich Naht Hanh is a great intro, too, followed by “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings.” If you want something that is minimal woo, “Buddhism Without Belief” is pretty great.
Also, the center I’m peripherally involved in is The Florida Community of Mindfulness, based in Tampa. They’ve moved all of their programming to zoom since the pandemic. Practicing meditation with other people is probably the most useful thing you can do. No doubt there are other centers near you, and it might make sense to invest in them, but might be worth watching a couple of saved dharma talks, or tuning into a Sunday service (10am EST). The teacher at FCM, Fred Epsteiner, is very well regarded, though. Tbh I get kind of triggered by older white dudes giving me advice, but lots of people like him. :)
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...
Who taught you that?
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.
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.
So a statement like, “Wow, you are good at reading!” might become “Wow, you are getting so much better at sounding out those really tricky words!”.
The first statement is more self-esteem building where the second is more highlighting an area where growth has happened and can continue to happen.
To me the first also feels quite lazy and anecdotally speaking from my kids, they really like when I actually pay attention and give feedback on specifics of what they are working on.
By "weak" I mean ones with poor reading comprehension :) J/K - I think it should be clear from the previous paragraph that I am making a contrast with those who can handle perceiving and learning from failure and those who can't.
On a relative level - two kids go to the same school. They get the same math homework. The first kid gets it wrong but it's told it's fine. The second kid gets it wrong too, but he's told that he got it wrong and feels bad about it but also learns to get it right.
Compounded over a lifetime, person B learns and accumulated strength and capability relative to person A, with person A having relatively less wealth and power. That's what I mean by weakness and fading. Remember, kid B didn't start off with more wealth and opportunity, he was just not shielded from painful learning in the name of self esteem.
>> do you recognize the socioeconomic/environmental circumstances that greatly constrain how most of downtrodden America developed and continue to live
This is a different topic (I intentionally constrain my example to people who start off on the same rung) and not relevant to the point I am making.
But personally - as someone who came to the US as a penny-less immigrant (as did most of my current friends and family) - I refuse to "recognize" that and in fact attribute our relative success in this country to not thinking that way.
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.
In the US we love this stuff. We feel we can just will things into happening. Through the sheer force of will problems will just get solved. Unfortunately this behavior comes at the expense of just dealing with the issues in meaningful ways. We just pick elected officials who make claims that they can just solve hard problems without evidence.
We need to come to grips with the idea that success or failure is all really chance. You are no better than the beggar on the street; you just have more luck. You don't really deserve anything. We need to learn to be generous, virtuous and pay it forward so we need not rely on an inflated sense of self-esteem to get out of bed in the morning.
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
a.k.a "magical thinking" iirc
- 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.
Confidence makes big difference in initial willingness to try something new and in ability to persist after failure. People with low confidence don't try harder things and give up after failures.
And in many areas, confidence brings success. Even in tech people judge you on confidence a lot, and other professions are even more subjective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychology_of_Self-Esteem
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".
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.
That seems to be what happened here. Despite the absence of causal evidence linking self-esteem to positive outcomes, it was such an irresistible story that, from the point of view of excitable politicians like Vasconcellos, there was enough evidence to go ahead and run with it. And thus a simple, highly viral message — raising self-esteem can greatly improve people’s lives and productivity — was able to catch on because it offered a straightforward solution to a constellation of problems that are not, in fact, straightforward to solve. It felt like an easy fix because none of the nuance that should go into rigorous social science filtered down to policy makers themselves — many of those policy makers developed misconceptions about what, exactly, bona fide experts had and hadn’t discovered. “Social researchers have long told us that a lack of self-esteem underlies society’s most pressing problems,” wrote a Maryland House delegate in a 1989 letter to the editor which ran in the Washington Post, “the ones government shells out big dollars to alleviate.” She was wrong, of course, but it’s not hard to understand where she might have gotten the idea. The fact that self-esteem was such a bipartisan hit, with liberals and conservatives both supporting it in fairly high numbers (albeit couched in slightly different reasoning), also made it tougher for any unified opposition to the concept to develop — though there were certainly some (again, mostly ignored) skeptics along the way, among them conservative social commentators like Charles Krauthammer and “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger who saw the self-esteem movement as yet another manifestation of the saccharine mushy self-help drivel that was, in their view, undermining America.
This right here seems to be the core problem. And the problem seems to be getting worse, leaking beyond the realms of the social sciences.
The public seems to be relying more and more on science for guidance as our media and politicians keep failing us. But most people don't really understand what science is! You can defend anything with "science" if all you're looking for is some study that claims to show evidence for whatever it is you're defending.
I'm not sure what the answer is. A massive education campaign to inform the public about how to interpret studies and draw conclusions that are actually supported by science? Higher standards for scientific publications regarding content and reproducibility? Regulations which would force media to disclose more information about the "studies" they cite?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig —
I have heard that from so many bosses at various levels. Make me want to face palm every time.
Of course it is an option. Might even be the most likely outcome.
It does not inspire me work harder at all.
If failure really is not an option then the outcome is set no matter what I do.
"Number Six: Where am I? Number Two (not identified as yet): In the village. Six: What do you want? Two: Information. Six: Whose side are you on? Two: That would be telling. We want information...information... information!!! Six: You won't get it! Two: By hook or by crook, we will. Six: Who are you? Two: The new Number Two. Six: Who is Number One? Two: You are Number Six. Six (running on the Village's beach): I am not a number; I am a free man!!! Two: [Laughter]"
Some things require an inherent talent.
No matter how much I practice painting, I will never be good at it. I don't have a talent for it.
Same goes for things like music and writing , evidenced by the sheer amount of crap music and books out there.
Talent is not skill, and skill is not talent.
Then one day I came across this most profoundly enlightening article about a commentary on self esteem by the one and only Bruce Lee https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/12/18/bruce-lee-artist-of...
What does it mean to hold someone else in high esteem? One could argue it means you respect their opinion or their actions, and then they can serve as a role model, a source of validation.
So therefore self esteem is the critical ability to derive validation in your actions from your self.
Self esteem is NOT just believing you can do something or be great or whatever. That's confidence. That's got nothing to do with self esteem at all.
What self esteem comes down to is deriving direction, right from wrong, validation, etc. from one's self. This is so important, because, if you derive validation through pride in reflection of others then you become a slave to those others.
This is what self esteem is about and why it's so critical. The craze lost the view. But the core message is still true today.
Lee also recognizes the challenge in cultivating self esteem, that it requires constant effort. It's not simply about "believing it so therefore it's true" like so many self esteem preachers would have had you believe during the craze. It's a challenge and it's an ongoing effort, like any other kind of hygiene.
It's common to suggest people think for themselves. This is impossible without cultivated self-esteem. I would argue that a huge number of people today suffer due to a lack of self esteem. The personality cults that we see destroying society today can arguably be enabled by looking to others for validation instead ourselves. It's a drug. It's far too easy to find outside validation now. Self esteem is enabling, yes, but it's also grounding. It's too easy to believe lies if you fail to ground your validation of action and thought in something more constant than the fleeting voices of strangers on the internet.
TL; DR: Self esteem is not about confidence in your abilities (or the idea you can do something because you believe you can), it's about recognizing yourself as a legitimate (perhaps the most legitimate) source of validation of your actions and choices instead of deriving validation only from others and thus self-esteem is how you avoid becoming a slave to the judgement of others. It requires constant maintenance.
The "craze" definitely failed to understand and communicate this.
