borderline delusion

I'm graduating from business school in one month with one lesson: You need unreasonable amounts of self-belief aka borderline delusion to do most things that matter.

Building self-belief is simple but not easy. It is simple because you're in charge of doing this but not easy because you get in your own way.

You get in your own way through one of three excuses:

You price yourself out, or
You tell yourself that something is out of reach, or
You commit to prefailing before trying.

This is therapeutic, when you think about it. If you never try, you never lose. If you never lose, you don't look dumb. If you don't look dumb, you feel good.

But feeling good comes at the expense of becoming the person you could have been.

I love this David Goggins quote: "You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realising your true potential."

This quote always reminds me of Albert Camus's 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus in which he writes about the 'absurd'. The absurd is that painful mismatch between what we want from the world and what the world gives us. We want clarity but the world gives us contradictions. Camus writes: "The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." And to live well, as Camus puts it, is to live fully and freely in a world that gives you no guarantees.

From Camus: "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to be so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

If you have unreasonable amounts of self-belief, you are free despite constraints, you operate without clarity, you do meaningful things without permission. And this quote has single-handedly transformed how I think about my own constraints.

Now this begs a question: When does borderline delusion become delusion and how do you know which side of the border you're on?

Here is the rule of thumb I have landed on: When you are convinced you cannot do something, you almost certainly can. When you are convinced you absolutely can, you need to audit it.

The frontier between I can't and I can is mostly drawn by your nervous system. So when your gut says this is not for me, that is usually data about your fear and not data about the task.

At the same time, unchecked self-belief could also curdle into Dunning-Kruger. If I say I want to become an astronaut today (and I believe I can), that is delusion and not borderline delusion. The biggest implosions tend to happen to people who were sure of things they should have been uncertain about.

From Howard Marks: "Most simply put, how often in businesses are people right for the wrong reason?"

You could be delusional and lucky at the same time. That is not self-belief. In contrast, you could have unreasonable amounts of self-belief and not be lucky at the same time. That does not mean you were wrong. The pattern I've observed is to have confidence where it isn't earned and hesitation where it is earned. If you can calibrate that, you have an advantage.

The second-order effect of developing unreasonable amounts of self-belief is that you no longer let negative feedback metabolize into self-doubt. It is not that you don't hear it. If at all, you hear it more clearly than before. It just doesn't downstream into the soundtrack you play in your own head. If at all, negative feedback further creates energy-accretive self-talk, which is the operating system of every great founder, leader, and artist we admire.

From Ayn Rand: "The question isn't who is going to let me. It's who is going to stop me."

There is a poem I keep returning to. Edmund Vance Cooke's How Did You Die? It opens with a beating:

You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?
Come up with a smiling face.
It's nothing against you to fall down flat,
But to lie there — that's disgrace.

I love this part because it assumes you will get hit. The whole question is what happens after you hit the ground.

The harder you're thrown, why the higher you bounce.

And then the closing turn, which has stayed with me longest.

It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts,
But only how did you die?

Self-belief is what lets you answer that question well. Without it, you don't even get to the arena. With it, you at least get to die well. Marred, beaten, bounced, sometimes all in the same week. But in the arena.

From Teddy Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

You will spend most of your life negotiating with the part of you that wants to disqualify you. That negotiation has to be won daily, in small acts of refusing to flinch, refusing to wait for permission, refusing to mistake your nervous system for the world's verdict. The operating layer is unreasonable amounts of self-belief that is borderline delusional.

Do what you can't.

Audit what you can.

And by every measure that matters, be in the arena.

Onward,
Abhi