“You gotta believe.”

God, that sounds trite to me. Trite and cliché and the centerpiece of all sorts of crap relating to self-betterment, self-improvement, yada yada yada.

But… it’s actually essential to changing your life, getting shit done, being happy, etc. But belief doesn’t work the way you might think.

Negative Results are Easy

There’s always gravity at work. A bird stops flapping its wings and it falls out of the sky.

It isn’t very difficult to make people dislike you: Criticize them. Call them names. Talk about yourself all the time. Who can’t find something wrong with someone else? And who can’t make up a nasty name? It’s easy.

Want to be a criminal? It has a low entry bar. There’s a bunch of laws, go break some. Don’t pay your taxes. Steal things. Again, this is very easy to do.

It’s easy to wreck your health. It’s easy to fail out of school. It’s easy to screw up your career, and it’s easy to get your ass fired from a job.

Want to be an artist that is unknown? Simple: Don’t make any work, and if you do make work, don’t show it to anybody.

I don’t know about you, but I could not write or paint or make music all day without working up a sweat. I’d be depressed and feel guilty, but doing nothing requires no expenditure. I have poorly spent tons of my time getting very little done with zilch effort.

There is a propensity for things to slide to the negative. Gravity pulls down, and it’s always there. Do nothing or not enough, and a negative result is inevitable. Shit falls apart.

People Love to be Right

I have yet to meet a single person that likes being proven wrong. Yes, yes, there are those “I was sure I had cancer, and I’m so relieved I’m wrong,” moments in life, but in our normal daily journey, being wrong sorta sucks.

We like getting the right answer, having an agreed with opinion, picking out a pair of pants that fit right off the rack.

Our brains love having expectations met, even when expectations are minimal or negative.

There is a somewhat sick glee we get when we tell someone, “You’ll miss if you try to throw that cup into that garbage can across the room…” And then they miss, and we gloat. “Told ya…”

Part of us always wants to win, even if the result is detrimental to us, to our accomplishing things, to our success, to our relationships, to our happiness.

I had a high school friend brag his anxiety was so bad it required medication. The dude had to be the sickest person in the room. People insist they’re terrible at sports. People argue, in the most interesting ways, that they’re not creative. People proudly proclaim their ignorance and stupidity, and are delighted when the evidence supports them. “See? Told ya!”

People fight to be right about things they should fight to be wrong about, and there’s negative gravity even in our heads.

Belief Vs Gravity

Many things we want are hard to get. Becoming super successful as an entrepreneur isn’t easy at all, which is why many try and few succeed. Amazingly successful artists are rare, and it’s because it ain’t easy. Heights of achievement require sacrifice and dedication.

Good relationships require effort. Raising kids is work. Fluency at most skills requires effort and hours.

Yes, luck can help get you somewhere—luck is always involved — but luck doesn’t help if you’re not on the path.

Belief is what gets you on the path. Belief fights the negative gravity.

Belief won’t always make positive results happen, but a lack of belief guarantees a negative result.

Jani Lane and Hair Metal

During the ’80s, lots of young men from the Midwest flocked to the heavy metal music scene in Los Angeles. Singer/songwriter Jani Lane moved there at twenty with four guys in the hopes of making it as a rock band. They had a U-Haul full of gear, no money, slept on couches and worked their asses off.

A few years later, Lane was signed with the band Warrant to a major record label. They had some hits, lived the life, broke up. Eventually, Jani Lane died of alcoholism at forty-seven. But that isn’t the point.

The point is THOUSANDS of kids go to cultural centers every year all over the world in the hopes of “making it.” And most of them don’t. Because it is fucking hard.

But all of those thousands of kids— Jani Lane included — believed they could make it and get somewhere. And even with all that belief and faith in one’s self, most of them didn’t hit. Almost all of them failed.

The kids that didn’t even have belief? They didn’t leave home.

How could they not fail?

Shit’s hard, even with talent, drive and belief. There’s a HUGE chance you won’t get what you want. People believe their marriage will be great and wind up divorced. People work like heck, spend their days visualizing their wonderful future, and it doesn’t work out.

The negative outcome is always waiting there for you in the shadow of gravity. Belief means, at the very least, you’re going to put up a fight.

A young friend, a wonderful, darling boy, cried to me that his girlfriend broke up with him, and he confessed through tears that he didn’t think he was good enough for her. What a thing to be right about.

Gun up your belief — you’re gonna need it, and then get to work.