Aim Higher Than What You Think You Can Achieve

Why and when is self-belief required?

When you walk your dog around the park, are you congratulated for having such high amounts of self-belief?

What about when you show up at work on time? Or brush your teeth? Do you feel as though self-belief was required?

Of course not, right? 

I bring this up because suggesting that you should pursue the type of goals that leave you with no idea if you can achieve them or not might seem like a direct contradiction to self-belief.

If you truly have no idea, then you must not believe…

But there’s a reason you don’t need self-belief to walk the dog, and it’s because you’ve done it hundreds of times. You don’t question whether you can or not, you already know. Therefore, self-belief is unnecessary.

This is why chasing goals that are high enough to leave you clueless about their outcome, and believing in yourself, aren’t opposing experiences. In fact, they almost certainly come as a pair.

Self-belief is built from evidence, but it’s only truly needed when the goal is high enough to question its outcome.

Self-belief has already done its job the moment you set the goal. It’s believing that you COULD do it, not knowing that you WILL. The former are goals worth pursuing, the latter is as feeble as walking the dog.

So why are these types of goals so powerful?

If you had an exam and you aimed for a B, what do you think your chances are of you receiving an A? Reach for an A+, however, and suddenly the chances of getting an A significantly increase.

Same exam, same examiner, same conditions, different target.

Now imagine this principle outside of the confines of marked examinations, in a world where 100% doesn’t exist, where the heights that you can reach are infinite. Because that’s exactly the world that these sorts of goals allow you to explore.

If you’re confident that you’ll win, what are you really learning?

The pursuit of these goals teaches failure, persistence, grit, and the constant battle with doubt. All of which sound horrible, yet cause more growth than anything else.

This is without the profound sense of self-expansion that occurs when you do eventually win.

You battled with the nagging of questioning your worth, competence and potential, you continued to act despite the daily effort of battling your own self-limiting beliefs, only to end up victorious.

Not only is this kind of win better than any other, but it also sets up the very future that you so desperately want, as the experience of this leaves you thirsty for more, and unable to settle for anything less.

Thus you set another, and another, and another. Yes, you fail along the way, but even the failure of big goals teaches you more than the success of small ones.

So, for the reasons stated above, when you’re deciding what goal to chase, let it be the biggest one.