Grounded conviction.

In part one I wrote about what conviction changes: how you read obstacles, where your attention goes, and how you deal with the discomfort of doing anything worthwhile. This part is about what happens next. Conviction feeds on itself, for better or worse, and the difference between conviction and plain stubbornness matters more than almost anything else in this piece.

01Conviction feeds itself

Your mindset shapes your actions, but your actions shape your mindset too, and the two feed each other in a loop.

Think about someone who believes they can't do something. Because they believe it, they don't try. Because they don't try, they never get any evidence or experience, and the belief that they can't goes unchallenged and gets stronger. Now think about someone who believes that effort can make a difference. They have a go, hit a few setbacks, learn something and make a bit of progress. That progress is evidence that their effort counts, so their confidence starts to rest on experience rather than hope, and they try again with more of it.

Psychologists call this self-efficacy: your belief in your ability to carry out the actions needed to reach a particular outcome [1]. I think it's a far more useful kind of confidence than the usual sort. You don't need to believe, against all the evidence, that you're the best candidate in the world to apply for a competitive job. You only need to believe that preparing well, presenting your experience properly and improving your interview technique will improve your chances. Every time you act on that belief, you add to the evidence, which is what I meant in Authenticity is your edge when I said to give yourself the evidence, again and again, until it would be stupid to deny it.

02Conviction isn't delusion

This is where conviction gets misunderstood. It doesn't mean being overconfident, fiercely motivated and completely wrong. People work relentlessly on businesses nobody wants. They spend years on a career that doesn't suit them because they won't let themselves reconsider. They mistake stubbornness for resilience, and they call it conviction.

Conviction is only useful when it comes with a willingness to update what you believe and change direction. It helps to think of three kinds.

Only the last one is worth having. Picture a ball rolling down a run towards an edge. If nothing changes its course, it rolls straight off. If it meets a lever that turns it, it carries on in a new direction, and when that path runs out, another lever turns it again. It takes a route nobody could have drawn in advance, but it keeps moving towards the finish.

In practice, the levers are feedback. Before you perfect a product, test whether anyone wants it, with surveys, a waitlist, the data that's already out there and a look at similar companies, which is the idea behind Eric Ries's minimum viable product [2] and the reason Ritual had a waitlist from the start. Better still, build and sell at the same time. With a friend, I worked in a loop: while building relationships with potential customers, we'd ask where their business was struggling and where customers and money were slipping away, feed that into the product, show them the new version and go again. Set yourself a stop-loss too, so you know in advance what result would tell you to change course. Be completely committed to where you're going, and flexible about how you get there.

03What makes a go-getter succeed

So what is it about go-getters that makes them more likely to succeed? It isn't that they're smarter or luckier. When I look at the ones I know, five things keep coming up.

Direction

They know what they're trying to achieve. That makes it far easier to decide what deserves their time, because every option can be held up against the goal.

Initiation

They start. They don't wait for perfect confidence, ideal circumstances or someone else's permission, because they know none of those will ever fully arrive.

Tolerance for uncertainty and discomfort

They can act despite rejection, awkwardness, fear or incomplete information. They feel all of it, but they don't let it make the decision.

Adaptability

They treat setbacks as feedback and refine their approach, rather than treating every setback as a verdict on their ability.

Consistency and compounding

They repeat useful actions for long enough to build skills, relationships, knowledge and a track record, and each of those makes the next effort more effective than the last. It's the same compounding I've written about with money, applied to everything else.

None of this guarantees success. What it does is make sure you actually use the opportunities and resources you already have, which is more than most people ever do.

04Take your life into your own hands

The most successful people I know open a lot of doors. They'll get on a train with a proposal nobody has bought yet and travel an hour to pitch a company that might say no. They shake whatever hands it takes to get a seat at the right table, and they walk into anything new with curiosity rather than fear. Most of the doors lead nowhere, and they know that. They keep opening them anyway, each one properly, because one of them leads somewhere.

It's easy to believe the universe has a plan for you. It's comforting, but it encourages you to sit back and wait for things to arrive. Psychologists call the driver's mindset an internal locus of control, the belief that what happens to you depends mainly on what you do [3], and it's at the heart of conviction. You can't hide behind a screen, avoid talking to anyone and put in numbers that aren't aimed at anything, and expect it to lead somewhere. Input without direction is just motion. It only becomes progress when you give it a target, aim properly and let go.

05Don't wait to feel ready

This is the deepest point in the whole piece. You don't have to wait until you feel like the person you want to become.

It's tempting to imagine that successful people first became confident, disciplined and ambitious, and only then started doing ambitious things. In reality, it runs both ways. You can start behaving like someone who takes their ambitions seriously before you feel completely confident. You can make the difficult phone call while you're nervous, send the application while you doubt your chances, and launch the product knowing it still needs work. Every one of those actions builds a bit of competence and gives you more evidence about what you're capable of.

You don't need to manufacture an unshakeable belief that you'll succeed. You need just enough conviction to take the next useful action, even when the outcome is uncertain.

Which brings me to one last image: starting a fire. You might have the fuel, the tools and a clear idea of what to do, but none of that gives you a fire until you create the first spark. And once there's a spark, you still have to nurture it, with the right conditions, enough fuel and some adjustments when the flame struggles to catch.

Conviction isn't the fire itself. It's part of what gets you to strike the match. Intention decides where you direct your effort, action creates the spark, feedback shows you how to keep it alive, and consistency lets the flame grow. And striking a match doesn't guarantee you'll start a fire, but refusing to strike one guarantees you won't.

06How Ritual helps

07Questions

1. Albert Bandura, "Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change", Psychological Review (1977)
2. The Lean Startup, Eric Ries (2011)
3. Julian B. Rotter, "Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement", Psychological Monographs (1966)

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