How To Avoid The Dangerous Trap That Belief and Hard Work Guarantee Success
How To Avoid The Dangerous Trap That Belief and Hard Work Guarantee Success
“If you work hard and believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything.”
You’ve perhaps seen this on a bumper sticker, read it in a book, or heard a video proclaiming this grand truth. If you’re a parent, you’ve likely repeated this to your kids on more than one occasion. And if you’re an athlete, you’ve tried to convince yourself of this every time you’re staring at a lofty goal you want to achieve.
Except that it’s not true. Make no mistake. We desperately want it to be true. We want it to be that simple. We want confidence that the playing field is level, that my kid has just as much chance as any other, and that we can simply overcome every obstacle if we just believe.
It makes excellent movies, bumper stickers, books, and even great T-shirts. But it’s not reality.
Of course, hard work and believing in yourself are a part of your long-term success in any part of life. However, both can be dangerous traps if you only take these two statements at face value. Here’s why.
Hard work only requires routine effort.
Belief only requires imagination.
Something still needs to be added to the equation.
Let me show what I mean by first taking a lesson from business
Lou Gerstner, the Chairman and CEO of IBM, in his book, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance,” wrote:
“It is very easy to develop visions. It is the same thing as Babe Ruth pointing at the fences. How many Babe Ruths have pointed at the fences in the last 20 years? How many do you think hit a home run within the next minute? Vision statements can create a sense of confidence and comfort that is truly dangerous.”
In business, belief is the same as vision. When a leader casts a vision for the organization, he sets the course for where the company is heading--defining goals–their belief in its potential. A company’s mission doesn’t change, but the vision evolves as time passes and they reach their goals.
But vision without action (more specifically, measurable actions) is just a hallucination, a pipe dream, an unattainable hope. We can know exactly where we want to go, but the vision will only become reality with specific, directed, and measured actions.
Now, in baseball, think of vision as belief. A company has a vision, but an athlete maintains a belief. Many players mistakenly think that believing in themselves—or the people around them (coaches and parents) believing in them—will grant them success. If you believe in yourself and work hard, you can hit the home run, play in college, or make it to the majors. This illusion can morph into delusions of grandeur by thinking that combining hard work with belief will pave the way for an athlete's dreams to come true.
We must dig deeper than just blindly believing and working hard.
But it sounds so empowering, right? To say anything is possible if you put your mind to it and work hard. Parents, we spend countless hours intentionally believing in our kids so they will believe in themselves and work hard—hopefully, exponentially increasing their chances for success. Coaches, we build our players up, hoping that with enough positive talk, we can build the self-assurance and work ethic to draw success into them. When it comes to sports, specifically baseball, we are not only lying to ourselves but destined to fail to produce the results we want if we rely solely on belief. It turns out baseball has a unique way of crushing the dreams of hard-working athletes who believe in themselves.
Because neither takes into consideration two critical facts.
- Hard work only takes into account yourself. You are not the only one working, nor the only one with talent. Many studs out there are just as good and working just as hard, if not harder than you–which we must acknowledge because we will inevitably meet them on the field. Right now, somewhere out there, there is a six-foot-six, two-hundred-pound right-hander with a lightning bolt for an arm who is intensely working his butt off with the sole intent of angrily striking everyone out in the most humiliating fashion possible each time he toes the rubber.
- Belief is subjective, requiring no objective evidence to prove it. When we believe, all we have to do is set our mind to a conclusion. Anyone can do that. My daughter believed in Santa Claus when she was little. Her belief required no real objective or measureable evidence of their existence. Once she discovered a lack of evidence for the reality of Santa, her belief faded. Likewise, in baseball, believing in yourself requires evidence to become reality. Until then, it is just imagination. It remains vision without action.
You Can’t Talk Yourself into being a Chicken
A line from the movie Fight Club sums all this up the best: "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.” In other words, telling yourself something repeatedly does not make it true. I have witnessed athletes talk themselves into a completely fanciful delusion. Yappy and excited, like puppies, they noisily pop off about how good they are because they believe in themselves. They are quickly sobered from their delusional intoxication when overwhelmed and embarrassed when we finally face that six-foot-six angry, right-handed flamethrower.
Parents, you can relate, whether you care to admit it or not. Remember the enormous amount of American Idol contestants who couldn’t sing but auditioned because, thanks to a parent or loved one, they believed they had the talent to make it on a national stage?
You can’t talk yourself into being a chicken.
You can’t talk yourself into having talent you don’t have.
Your mom can’t magically speak success into your life.
And you can’t believe yourself to be an elite baseball player unless you can turn subjective belief into objective confidence.
The goal is to turn subjective belief into objective confidence through the proof of execution.
Belief is subjective, but confidence is objective based on measurable evidence we observe by following through a specific plan of action.
Let’s revisit our business world. Remember, vision is the place you want to be. But no matter how great the vision is, it still needs a roadmap. How are you getting to where you want to be? The more detailed plans, the better. In business, we simply call this a strategic plan—and it provides two critical pieces of information. First, It gives leaders a high-level overview of the vision and a step-by-step plan for how they plan to arrive at the goal they have set forth. And second, how leaders objectively measure success.
When you utilize a plan or process that moves you closer to measured success, you can get beyond just believing in yourself to developing confidence that you can execute. We do this by incorporating a plan/process that enables the player to practice and measure his ability to execute. This is the secret to turning subjective belief into objective confidence. For our players, we use our Individual Hitting Process (IHP) to help create a high level of confidence by measuring simulated execution.
We do this by putting our players through a rigorous but tested process of training that helps them create clear goals, develop a strategy, and have the practice time to produce measurable results. The result: confident players who have reason to believe in their success and the team's success.
Turning subjective belief into objective confidence is not very complicated but does take a refined approach. For the secret sauce our hitters use to turn belief into confidence, read part two of this article, How to Move From Belief Into The Kind of Confidence That Breeds Success
For the second part of this article, click here
For a deeper dive into content like this check out my book. “BASS The Path to Elite Level Hitting.”
See ya on the field
Coach Leo
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