How Belief, Grind, and Success Can All Turn Against You

To accomplish anything important, you have to believe it’s possible for you. Even if it seems impossible, training your mind to believe it can be done is key. It can be difficult, but tools like visualization, meditation, and self-talk can help you get there. Push through the limiting beliefs and stay the course; eventually you’ll start to believe it.

The next part is staying on track even when you don’t see results. This can be incredibly difficult. You can spend weeks, months, even years working toward something before you see meaningful results. Getting in shape, learning an instrument, developing art skills, building a business. These things are difficult and take a lot of time and effort to cultivate the skills needed to get results.

These two things can work together to derail our progress. Grinding away without results can chip away at your belief. It’s a hard thing to deal with and it’s easy to get knocked off track. What we need to remember is we’re building the foundation, growing the roots for what’s to come. Push through this and you’ll get to the compounding stage.

Once you’ve overcome the doubt and kept at it, results start to come and compounding starts to kick in. Belief is strengthened. You keep pushing and results come faster. Then the trap of success can kick in.

Belief is strong now. You have the skills. You have the results. Things are growing. You start to feel like a winner. The hard part here is we can get complacent and slow down on the things that got us here. Things feel easier. We don’t feel like we need to push as hard as we did in the beginning.

This can put us right back to the start. If we start to coast, things go backwards. Momentum slows down, skills dull, results stop coming, and limiting beliefs get triggered again. Some of us spiral at this stage. Was all of this luck? Am I not as good as I think I am?

No. We stopped doing the things that got us here. We took our foot off the gas. We drank our own Kool-Aid.

The key is to keep your foot to the fucking floor even when you feel like you’re winning. We’re just getting started.

— Bus