Fall in love. This is the first step. Doesn’t have to be a person. Anything worth loving will do. I’ve fallen in love with a road, with a bottle of whiskey, with a book. I am currently in a relationship with the vast, watery depths of the voice of Brittany Howard. It’s like a luxurious mansion from a dream. A dog is a good choice because a dog will love you back with ceaseless enthusiasm and a heart like a small, furious star. Start with a dog.
Be loved. This is the second step. And it may be the hardest one because you might not have anyone to love you back. Maybe you don’t have a dog. Maybe you don’t have someone who’s into you. Or maybe you do, but you don’t see it. Or maybe it’s one of the myriad entanglements of human hearts, wrapped up and down the scale of intimacy like a runaway rose bush. I wouldn’t for a minute try to describe the bramble of another person’s heart. I won’t attempt to encapsulate their loneliness in a paragraph. But you do have a heart. You know what it has. What it needs. If yours isn’t on fire right now from something, from someone, then find a flame and lean in close.
Passion is vital. To believe in yourself, you must be alive. I mean really alive, not merely breathing. Not just logging on. You have to be swept away by something that lights you up. Hollywood always gets this wrong. For every Maestro, there’s a sweater-vested father-of-three building hurdy-gurdys in his basement. It’s more than a hobby. It is an art, a meditation. A devotion through which he can forget himself. He disappears into it. he disappears when he’s building these ancient instruments. When he’s painting roses along the fingerboard. Carving his initials under the bridge. He knows the work is a little bit bigger than him. Not Hollywood bigger, because that’s salesmanship. It’s unsustainable. No, real passions are a long game. They smolder, instead of flaming out. A real passion steers you, not the other way around.
Step three: be somebody. Right now, you might be wondering why an article on LinkedIn is going all HAMF on love and passion. Most of the articles here are about marketing and leadership. They’re prescriptive listicles. They tell you exactly what to do to achieve a measurable goal. And ok, fine, that’s kind of what business is. It makes sense to look for a procedural post. They’re comforting because they promise success if you follow instructions.
“10 Proven Strategies for Enhancing Your Leadership Effectiveness”
“Leading by Example: How to Inspire and Motivate Your Team”
“The Art of Decision-Making: Essential Skills for Effective Leaders”
“Innovative Leadership: Techniques to Foster Creativity and Drive in Your Team”
“Navigating Change: How Effective Leaders Adapt and Thrive”
“Building Trust: The Foundation of Strong Leadership”
The instruction in those articles shoots right past a glaring and critical truth. None of it will work if you don’t believe in yourself and you can’t believe in yourself if there’s no self to believe in.
Frederick Taylor fucked us. Taylor’s book, The Principles of Scientific Management, changed everything. You can’t overstate the influence of Taylor’s method and philosophy. He was the first management consultant. He pretty much kicked off a period of insane affluence. He was the guy who made productivity the goal of business. Critics said he painted workers as drones. He claimed there’s no such thing as skilled work. He drew the map of top-down management and colored it in soulless monochromatic grays.
The result is millions of professionals envisioning themselves as elevated. This diminishes the value of the individual in favor of the value of the company. We’ve adopted this point of view completely. Even articles about work-life balance can’t come out and state: you are not your job. If you don’t believe that, you allow yourself all the agency of a desk chair. Then the answer to why should anyone listen to a single word you say becomes a meaningful glower. They shouldn’t. Neither should you. I don’t want to be managed by a piece of furniture and I sure as hell don’t want to be one.
We’ve all heard this: “Everyone you know is fighting a battle you know nothing about”. It’s attributed to everyone from Robin Williams to Philo of Alexandria. Wikipedia tells us it was John Watson in an article from an 1897 Christmas edition of The British Weekly. It’s a lovely quote meant to evoke a sense of charity toward one’s neighbor and I hate it. I hate it because it relies on the commonality of pain. Pain’s ubiquitous, sure. But empathy doesn’t have to be about pain.
I’d like to rewrite the sentiment: everyone you know is dancing to music you can’t hear. Developing a life, a reason to exist outside your billing cycle, gives you a wider perspective. It’s more fun. I’d rather follow someone obsessed with moonwalking than battling their demons. I also want to be that person. I want to moonwalk.
Learn to cook. Read the entire works of Shakespeare. Take up misinterpretive dance. Start a cover band. Be somebody.
You’ve heard this already. Your business coach talks about it all the time. She quotes Thomas Edison, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey. You’ve read articles about the lessons you learn when you run an autopsy on your failure. You re-run the whole thing from square one to see where you went wrong. But the real lesson of failure isn’t about procedure. Or failing to engage in rigorous project management. Or running a better SWAT analysis. The lesson of failure is surviving it. Keeping your shit together as you power through a catastrophe is a train wreck’s education. Owning it. Embracing it. Diving in to explore the dark depths of your best disaster is a seminar you can’t buy from any conference. Your confidence may take a hit. It might even shatter into a million pieces. You’ll have to sweep into a little pile. Maybe get some glue. Maybe spend some time sitting cross-legged on the carpet putting it back together. But that’s a good thing. That’s a real thing. Cleaning up after yourself is priceless. It will teach you more about empathy than any motivational speech.
Is to disregard everything I’ve written. Disregard everything anyone has written, except for this one rule: know yourself. This is the only true path to believing in yourself. It is also the most difficult. That’s why I’m writing this post.
Recently, I learned a hard lesson in knowing myself. It wasn’t the exposure of some dark secret. It wasn’t a useful failure. It wasn’t cinematic. It was simple and wholesome, and it broke my heart. Someone else believed in me. They didn’t say that. This wasn’t a Hallmark movie. It was just a conversation about branding. But they talked about me in a frank, matter-of-fact way no one ever had. They talked about the quality of my work. They told me how it affected them. They said nobody does what you do.
That took a minute to sort. Because what we’re talking about here, what believing in yourself means, is confidence. It’s important to get picky about word choice here. Don’t base confidence on belief. Don’t root your belief in confidence. That’s a bromance nobody wants. Confidence is not bravado. It’s not swagger
A lot of us are allergic to braggadocio. When we run into somebody who’s all flourish and bravado, we discredit them because we know it’s a front. I can tell you it’s a front because I am that guy. I deliver a lot of flourish and bravado—and bluster, and braggitude, and bombastic swagger. I am a flamboyant flauntist. I make people laugh. I’m always on stage. But it’s an act. It’s masking.
Or it was. My front was typical of comedians and humorists and class clowns—if I make fun of myself first, no one else can. No one else will notice that I’m under-qualified. They won’t notice I don’t have a degree. They won’t notice I’m blue-collar from rural Alabama. Lived in a trailer. Can’t do algebra. Didn’t know how to pronounce ennui until I was in my thirties. They won’t notice that I don’t belong here.
I have spent much of my career avoiding believing in myself. It felt fake. Delusional. Like holding up a sign with “I Believe in Myself,” on it. Or writing an entire essay about it on LinkedIn. Ugh. What a dumbass. So full of himself. Wind him up! Watch him brag!
Yet, as I mentioned in the subhead for this story, I am a recent convert. There are facts about myself and my work that prove to my doubting angel that I am good at this one thing. People who don’t owe me money have told me my work meant something to them. That it made a difference. These facts have eroded the granite façade of my allergy to self-confidence, and it has changed me. I used self-deprecation as a kind of armor, a shield. I don’t do that so much anymore. I listen to how I talk about myself and edit on the fly to tone down my self-criticism. Used to be, when qualified professionals asked me what I did for a living, I would throw up an inky cloud of jokes. I’d back into the truth as if apologizing for being a writer, and worse, a humorist.
But that friend who talked to me about my work and how it affected her called me out on my self-abasing bullshit. Why do you do that? I didn’t have an answer. She gave me one: Because you think of yourself as a professional. You don’t think you were invited to the party. You don’t believe in yourself. I had to agree. Look, she said. The people you write for are professionals, right? And they pay you actual money, I assume. And they send your work out to a long list of professionals in their industry so where in that equation are you?
That’s like believing in gravity or taxes. You don’t have to believe in gravity, it’s real. And while you may not believe in the idea of taxes, you still freak out every April. Look, here are the things that matter:
1. You know who you are.
2. You’ve already failed.
3. You’re not office furniture; you have a life beyond your log-on.
4. There’s a thing in your life you love that’s bigger than you.
5. Someone loves you for exactly who you are, even if it’s Fido.
You don’t have to believe in yourself. You’re as real as gravity. You are loved by a dog.