Dispensable Strong Beliefs
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you must know the hit song from Frozen, Let it go. The main character sings about letting go of perceived connotations about her and expresses bliss in her newfound powers which she shows off gloriously. For some background information, she was always scared about what others think and this made it hard to allow her to express herself fully.
Unfortunately, in the real world, people do not let go of their initial prejudice and beliefs that have been developed. Imagine growing up and learning that you have to be aggressive and take what you want to succeed. That’s all you know and that’s all you see. Eventually, you build a reputation for being a win-at-any-cost type of person. People start to steer clear away from you and it becomes harder to build any kind of relationship. Anywhere you go, the people talk and even before they speak to you, they know exactly what kind of person you are. Frustrated, you do what you only know, double down on the aggressiveness and force. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t work because you’re an asshole.
You might think this is a fantasy character but I’ve met people that solve problems by yelling and force. When you’ve established yourself as a hammer, everything becomes a nail. Some of the smartest people you know will not forgo their beliefs despite new evidence. They’ll die on the hill they built and will use any justification to trick themselves into what they’re doing is right.
Be ready to change your mind
I’m a big believer in changing your mind if new information and evidence arise that dispels my current beliefs. What’s also important is stress-testing that newfound evidence as much as I can so that the changes are here to stay and not just fads.
It’s not enough to just change your mind when new evidence comes up because you don’t know if these are short-term changes or long-term. One of the biggest headline news is on what to eat. You hear all the time about how a certain food group is bad for you (like red meat), and then the next year it’s fine to eat. Granted it’s tough to stress test unless you devote yourself to an all-red meat diet and take the necessary blood tests and scans to determine if there are any negative changes. But a lot of people will just go off it based on what they heard instead of experiencing it for themselves.
That’s the two key points: the willingness to change your mind and to take the action to determine if it’s worth changing. This isn’t to be confused with constantly changing your principles, which are fundamentally different than beliefs. I think it’s important to define the two. Beliefs are opinions formed through experience and interactions with the world around you. They range from thinking the world is round to this certain diet is best for you. Principles are concrete values that determine your character. They’re set in stone and are guiding pathways to who you are as a person. Some principles include humility, kindness, hard work, etc.
You can see that beliefs and principles intersect but principles make up the core while beliefs form the outer layer. Which makes beliefs more susceptible to change. What unites the two is action, and since each action is a vote toward our beliefs and principles as a person, it’s important to choose the right beliefs and principles. For example, you can be someone that’s humble and hard-working, but still, have the belief that there are people that succeed despite not working as hard or having a lack of humility. You can see that these two things conflict with each other, but provides an accurate outlook. How others succeed doesn’t change who you are and how you find success. But when your beliefs change perhaps I can be more successful if I’m less humble then things will start to go south.
Beliefs shouldn’t change how you are fundamental as a person but they should affect how you think and navigate. You can be someone that has a different political viewpoint from your friends, but that shouldn’t change the fact that you’re still friends with them. A smart way is to talk to people with different viewpoints and see how it matches up to yours. Find conflicting opinions and stress-test them so you can have a better understanding. Perhaps they know something you don’t and having a mutually meaningful conversation works better than just two people yelling at each other’s differences.
How to practice
It’s not easy to say I’ll change my mind when certain beliefs are so deeply rooted. I saw it first hand when I got a promotion onto management and saw how resistant to change it was. Just imagine you’re a top executive and you’re making top dollar. You’re comfortable doing what you’re doing. Why would you want anything to change? That’s exactly what I saw—obvious fixes to reoccuring problems being dragged out over many meetings and votes. The goal was to exhaust all options and wait until people lost the will to fight or to give them a fraction of the proposed solution.
One way is to practice humility, more particularly the thought of knowing things/yourself could be better. Instead of seeing solutions as a way to ruin your comfort, you invite it as a way for growth and development. You proactively look for ways to disprove what you know in hopes of getting a little better. There’s an urgency to improve or else you’ll stagnant. I remember talking to a friend that just made over a million dollar in sales and his reaction was “I could do better. I made a bunch of mistakes that won’t happen again”. He didn’t bask in the praises everyone sung but focused on what he could do better next time.
Another is to continue to look for ways to fail. When you think of Jeff Bezos, you think of the all the successes he has accomplished. He would tell you during his tenure at Amazon, he would fail often. His failures would cost the companies billions. The Amazon phone was a big collapse, but through that failure, they learned from it and create Alexa and Echo, which profited billions back. So it’s not enough to just fail, we need to understand why we fail so our next iteration can have success. What’s more important is the culture we should set so people around us can fail comfortably so we can learn from it as a group. The only way to do something different is keep pushing the boundaries of what we can do. That’s why we see such stagnation because failure doesn’t feel great. Failure plus social pressures and being criticized makes us not want to do anything new. People do the same thing over and over again because they know what the result is going to be. Often times, doing it over and over again won’t lead to new ideas or methods of improvement.
Change as needed
I treat beliefs like power tools —interchange and use effectively when possible. If you’ve ever tried to use the wrong tools for a project, it’ll take forever. The willingless to let go of what you know to embrace something possible better is a game changer. Sure you won’t succeed the first or fifth time, but you won’t know it’s better than the status quo unless you have the confidence to fail.
This doesn’t fail your way to lose jobs or friends, but to fail successfully where you can learn and expand your knowledge. To not stick to ideals that can change and to absorb ever changing information is a must. It’ll be tough to navigate not losing so much as you experiment so I recommend just making tiny decisions that will eventually lead to bigger successes. As you make tiny decisions, you can constantly change the path you take.
Keep on changing as things change.
*Check out my last article on anything is justifiable*
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