Or Not To Be

Someone at some point in history was the first person to say 'if you believe in yourself, anything is possible'.

(Google reckons it was Miley Cyrus. Thanks Google.)

What absolute crap. Obviously. Of all the things you can do in this world, you will probably be mediocre at most of them, belief or no belief, and that’s just fine. You will probably also be limited by time and space and resources and bad instructions and structural oppression and that’s not fine but you can’t just believe that away.

However I suspect the converse is mostly true, or at least useful. If you don’t believe in yourself, everything is impossible.

'It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not'.

This quote we can more confidently attribute to Denis Waitley, a motivational speaker who wrote such books as ‘Quantum Fitness: Breakthrough to Excellence’ and ‘The Psychology of Winning for Women’, but we won’t hold those against him.

Who you think you’re not can be a good heuristic for saving time and effort in unnecessarily pursuing something that you won’t be good at or enjoy anyway. For example, a moment’s reflection would have told me I am not the kind of person who enjoys sailing in Thailand - I’m a landbound vomit grommet - so I shouldn’t have booked that holiday, and that’s okay.

Who you think you’re not can also help you make and stick to good choices. In my undergrad I didn’t want to be one of those students who worked on an assignment all weekend and then had to get up early on Monday morning to hand it in (it wasn't just that I didn't want to get up early on Monday mornings; I really didn't want to be the kind of person who did that) - so I learned how to be disciplined enough to submit assignments on the Friday before they were due.

The problem is when you become too committed to an idea of who you’re not. The Ancient Greeks (all of them, probably) said ‘Know thyself’, but sometimes ‘Know thyself’ feels like ‘Know thy brand’, where a brand is a very definite thing defined by not being other things - and you miss out on opportunities or make excuses for why you’re not doing something because it's 'not you', when you might be totally surprised to discover that something is you and you’re actually quite okay at that thing.

(No? Just me?)

The other problem is when you’re just plain wrong about who and what you’re not.

This video showed up this week, written by Cate Scott Campbell and directed by Carly Usdin, and it is giving me life.

Seriously, watch this video. I’ll wait.

Are you someone who’s just not good at maths? Do you just not have a maths brain? Are you just not that kind of person (i.e. a man)?

Actually what’s really interesting is that, at least according to this study (albeit a bit old now) by Ryckman and Peckham, men and women think about success and failure in maths in different ways. When men fail at a maths problem, they’re more likely to attribute that failure to lack of interest or preparation; when they succeed, they’re more likely to attribute that success to their own ability. Conversely, when women succeed in maths, they attribute that success to luck; but when they fail, they attribute failure to a lack of ability.

I am just not a maths person.

The same is true for languages - people will say 'I’m just not good at learning languages'; 'I don’t have the language gene'; 'I’m not the kind of person who can learn another language'.

Now to be fair, according to Zoltan Dörnyei (a well-respected second language acquisition researcher), the skills and processes involved in learning another language are composite; so it’s possible that you might have a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ working memory than someone else, for example; or you might be more or less tolerant of making mistakes and having a go.

But the idea that you’re just not a language learner? Poppycock.

The point isn’t that by 'believing in yourself', you’re going to become a maths genius or polyglot overnight. The point is that sometimes, the belief that you’re 'just not that kind of person' is wrong, your friends are getting annoyed with you, and it's holding you back.

Know yourself; forget about who you’re not.

(And if you succeed in this, tell me how.)