Determination and Faith in the path to success

Success requires determination, determination requires faith, and faith requires support.

Success Requires Determination

In order to succeed in anything, we need determination. Stories abound of people that have overcome obstacle after obstacle to finally reach success, but I cannot think of even one, telling of a simple smooth road to unbounded success. Without determination, we tend to stop at the first obstacle. And obstacles there will be.

Determination Requires Faith

In order to be determined, we need to believe that somewhere beyond the obstacles lies success, and that we can -- and want to -- have that success.

Faith Requires Support

Believing something is not an independent, loosely floating concept. Faith in something can be compared to a platform. The supporting pillars are things you believe, which support the platform of your faith.

When you want to strengthen your faith in something, you need to look for supporting evidence that will add pillars under your platform. The more of these you have, the stronger and more stable your faith becomes.

Let's say I want to believe that I will become a successful writer. To strengthen that belief, I would look for supporting pillars.

One pillar might be the belief that good quality writing would improve my chances of success. In order for that belief to be of value to me, I have to believe that I can actually produce good quality writing. By subscribing to forums where I can get feedback on my writing, I might get more evidence to support my faith. Or I could get loads of negative feedback and eventually just give up, because the negative evidence will erode this pillar, until my faith in my ability to succeed at writing, has lost its support.

Another pillar might be that I believe that by being determined and focused on writing, I will get better and better at it. I believe that practice improves skill. This belief, in turn, might rest on some evidence from research that has been done, or maybe on the evidence of having practised, and seen an improvement in my own writing.

To strengthen your faith, find positive evidence and think about it

The process of strengthening a single pillar to support what I want to believe, is not necessarily a hundred percent rational. Our minds form neural pathways, and the size or strength of such a pathway, impacts on the strength of a specific belief. The size and strength of a neural pathway, however, is not related to its truth or rationality, but rather to its use. The more I use a pathway, the stronger it becomes.

So let's say that I believe that practice improves skill, and I have two pieces of evidence, of exact equal weight. One piece of evidence shows a research subject who had improved a certain skill with practice, and another, in identical circumstances, had not improved in skill at all.

The piece of evidence that I choose to think about the most, will cause a strengthening of that specific element of faith, through strengthening that neural pathway. If I continually dwell on the evidence of no improvement, I will find myself holding a stronger and stronger belief that practice does not improve skill.

A Negative focus will erase your ability to believe

Choosing to allow my thoughts to dwell on the negative evidence will systematically erode my confidence in my own ability to improve my skill through practice. I will consequently have lost one pillar of my belief that I will ultimately succeed as an author. I will also lose my motivation to practice, because I have removed the valence of this activity.

By not practicing, my skill will not only stop improving. It will actually deteriorate. Ultimately, I will almost have guaranteed my failure as an author.

A Positive focus will strengthen your belief

If I choose to think more on the evidence that showed practice improving skill, I will strengthen the neural pathway that holds that belief. The stronger it becomes, the stronger will be my expectation that practice will improve my skill. This will cause me to look for more and more opportunities to practice, which is likely to increase my chances of coming across exercises that have the potential to improve my skill.

I will write more, increasing the volume of publishable material I have available, and increasing the chances that someone will notice my writing.

Ultimately, I might not have guaranteed success through this one avenue, but I have at the least shut down one possible path to failure, and I have strengthened one of the pillars that will support my faith.

My strengthened faith will enable to be more determined, and as explained in the beginning, determination is a key ingredient of success.