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.
I've approached this by taking the stance that life should be process-oriented, not results-oriented. Sometimes you can do the right thing and still lose. Sometimes you can do the wrong thing and win. "Success" is often just luck with a nice backstory written after the fact. That isn't to downplay anyone's hard work, but often it's luck that provides the opportunity to work hard for something worthwhile in the first place.
It's entirely possible that in your life, you could have succeeded and still ended up becoming poor due to circumstances beyond your control. It's also possible that if you had ultimately failed, circumstances would not have turned out the way it so obviously looked like they had to play out.
Ultimately, you can only control yourself in this universe. If you've done everything you could do and gave it your best, really did all you can, then regardless of the outcome, you should be proud of yourself.
Not having a plan means a 100% failure rate. Not following your plan means a 100% failure rate. Not revising your plan when circumstances change usually means a 100% failure rate.
Which is why most people fail. They quit at the first obstacle.
For humans it can be things like going to college, getting a computer science degree opens a lot of door so it is good even if you don't plan to do anything specific. Similarly as a company founder you can just try to do things opening doors, like Google focused on making a great search engine because they believed that having the best search engine would make all other aspects of the company easy.
You could say that focusing on areas which will give you more options in the future is a plan, but I don't think that most people see it that way. For example when you ask a kid why they go to college and they answer "I don't know what I want to do, I'll just study something interesting and see where it leads" you'd typically not say they have a plan. Yet many of them still go on to get valuable degrees and succeed in getting a much better job than the average person.
In 2010, I had just graduated college, was quickly running out of money, and had no luck applying to jobs at software shops with languages I knew. Out of desperation, I applied to a PHP shop, with my only qualification being that I knew Perl, a cousin of PHP. Embarrassingly, I had to admit this in the interview, and even though they let me finish the interview in Perl, I wasn't optimistic.
A week later, I got a call back that the job was mine. There was a big learning curve, but I picked up PHP well enough to rise up to a leadership position on the dev team. When I was promoted, I learned that when I originally applied, the only other person that applied for the position was a guy who brought a guitar with him hoping that would sell them on the fact that he was a great culture fit. They said if anyone had applied that actually knew PHP, they would have gotten the job by default.
I was lucky that no one who knew PHP applied to the job when I did, but it was my hard work that kept me there.
Later in the thread you state "Being born in a free country with a working brain and body is most of what you need". This is the luck of winning genetic, social, and geographical lotteries.
What does being poor have to do with it?
You can succeed at lots of things, but if you don't try to get rich(assuming you don't start that way) you're probably not going to. But if you've never tried, then how can you fail at it?
Getting rich is a focus in and of itself. There's lots of people successful at many things, they might not get rich off it, but unless that's something they really wanted, they probably won't feel much a of a sense of failure because they're not.
I was addressing OP's concern about his own life: "In some cases I really would become poor or have no future if I didn't succeed"
I agree with you that part of OP's problem is framing success together with things like being rich and having a future.
There was no messaging that life was easy, or that you only had to believe, or only had to try hard. You could do all of that, and fail. Then you reflect on the failure and try again, presumably having learned something.
I think that's mixing up cause and effect. People who succeed usually have reason to believe they will. Don't work on your belief; instead, work on your ability. You'll know you're ready when you think you can, realistically, succeed (though best to start as soon as you can do what you'll definitely be able to, and think you might be able to handle the rest, because learning as you go is often much more effective than trying to prepare for hypothetical eventualities ahead of time).
And it's a lie that you need to believe you will succeed. You just need to act like it. Be invested, and don't quit until you actually can't go on any more (unless there's an actual dead-end, like you've got a business with 70% of your target audience as customers and still can't afford to feed yourself with it). Though you might not need to compensate for this particular cognitive bias, if you're already practised at it.
What I learnt over the years as I improved at sailing was that you take decisions to consolidate your position and eliminate risk when you reach the place you believe you should be in the field. You don’t attack any more because you believe that if you do, you will probably lose what you have. In this situation, the allegory is in fact true.
If you want to win a race, you have to make race winning decisions and you won’t do that unless you believe you can win the race.
So why don’t you just do that, and then you’ll start winning?
Because you won’t and you shouldn’t. You should only make “race winning” decisions if you actually have the ability to win.
So how do you know when you should “believe”? That in itself is an ability you have to learn. In order to win you need to have the ability or skill, and you have to recognise a situation where your ability or skill means you can win. This is what the “believing” really is. Then you have to successfully execute and ride through the things you cannot control (the part that luck always plays).
This makes me think of: acting. One way to act like a character is to try to believe you are that character. Or to believe everything the character believes. Then you figure out the detailed implications: when you see x, you think y, so you feel z (which should show on your face and body language) and do w. One way of finding the implications is to physically put yourself through experiences your character has had; if that is impractical, you can look for substitutes. (There is a famous story[1] of an actor who gave a compelling performance of a character agonizing over killing himself with a revolver in his hand... by imagining he was about to take a very cold shower.)
Which then brings to mind an approach: imagine you are the person you would like to be, imagine how that person would act, and act that way. (I'm not sure whether, to the parent commenter, that would be "a greatly successful person in the early stages" or "a person who will do the best he can—choosing the strategies with highest expected value—knowing bad luck may crush his efforts in the small or in the large, and won't be bothered if/when that happens because his choices were still the best".)
This way even if you fail, you still come out on top as you should have less regret having tried and failed than if you never tried.
