What is a belief?
Your beliefs are how you model reality. Reality consists of objective rules of cause and effect. A belief is an estimate of how some piece of reality works—an explicit but putative mapping between cause and effect. Each belief is a prediction of the outcomes that will result from certain actions.
Beliefs are the key to knowing how to obtain what you want in life. They are recipes for how to obtain specific outcomes. The more of reality you have mapped through beliefs, and the more accurate those beliefs are, the closer you will be to knowing how to obtain what you want most in life.
Beliefs are also crucial for determining what you want in life. The more you understand what is possible and what it costs, the more informed your appraisals of value will be. To the extent they are complete and correct, your beliefs can be used to prioritize potential action and bring anticipated joy forward to the present.
Beliefs are needed to prioritize potential action
Every decision you make is actually an exchange. You are exchanging what you could be doing for what you choose to do instead. To the extent you choose and carry out those actions that most effectively lead to what you correctly believe is most important, you will maximize the joy you experience in life.
One way to view productivity is as the practice of acting so as to maximize what you believe to be of greatest value. In order to do this, you need to know what options exist and then prioritize what generates that which you believe to be of greatest value, and your beliefs are what reveal to you what those actions are.
In order to prioritize your actions, you have to understand their cost and their benefit. If you don’t know how much time, energy, and other resources an action will require, you can’t prioritize it against other potential actions. Beliefs are how you will correctly calculate the net benefit of each potential action, which is required in order to prioritize them and select the most effective alternative.
Correct and complete beliefs are essential for correctly perceiving and believing the long-term effects of a potential action. Impact is Pareto distributed: among any set of potential actions, a few will tend to result in outcomes better than the rest combined. Among any set of choices there tends to be at least one option dramatically better than the others. The most valuable choice among a set of possibilities will almost never seem to be the most valuable choice when evaluated in normal ways by a normal person. To the extent you can properly anticipate the importance of each option for potential action and you choose what has the greatest importance, you will accomplish orders of magnitude more than anyone who does not, without any need for any additional resources over what you presently have. If that doesn’t sound like an impossible magic trick, you have not yet grasped the positive effects such an outcome would have.
Beliefs are crucial for bringing forward future joy
Joy can be categorized by the time in which it is experienced, relative to its source. Joy comes from the receipt of an outcome, on anticipation of the outcome, and on the path to the outcome. Each kind of joy has differences in how intense, enduring, and motivating it is. Joy that comes after you obtain an outcome is often what is sought by those who set and work toward goals. Goals are important motivators, but as many have correctly pointed out, exclusively focusing on completing them will lead to an uneven experience of motivation, where your drive for progress usually dips considerably as the work wears on, and especially once it is completed. While it is better to focus on the joy experienced due to the anticipation of an outcome, this will also end with the outcome, and can quickly vanish during the journey as you face obstacles that exceed what you expected in the path towards what you had hoped for. This raises the question: how do we experience joy that occurs during the path to the expected outcome?
Joy that occurs during the path to expected outcomes holds the prospect of equalizing the experience over time, maintaining the same level of value during the pursuit of a worthwhile outcome as you had when you first started, and holding onto it even after attaining it. This might seem like joy alchemy, but it’s completely possible if you have a strong enough link between the eventual goal and the daily effort needed to progress toward it. That link is precisely what your beliefs provide.
Your beliefs tie together the cause and effect in a way that your confidence in them can allow you to pull forward at least some of the joy you will feel as you complete your goals into the time during which you are working toward them.
Accurate beliefs will mitigate both main causes of diminished joy during the pursuit of hoped for outcomes. Normal excitement at the start of a path comes mostly because of unrealistically easy expectations, and the pleasure of accomplishments fades as the revealed cost grows relative to the expected benefit, but accurately described relationships of cause and effect provide a constant expectation before, during, and after attainment of outcomes.
The more confident you are in your beliefs, and the more consistently you live up to them, the more fully you will distribute your joy across the entire journey.
Beliefs describe the way and justify the cost
Reality is open to all and unbiased in the laws of cause and effect that comprise it. If you do not have what you want, it can only be because you have not found the path or not yet paid the price to obtain it.
If you do not know the path, you have not yet found the belief that describes the cause of what you seek. Don’t be quick to assume that you know the way to what you want. Some valuable things require a long list of complicated steps to obtain them. Realize that the more steps there are in a set of directions from one place to another, the less likely you are to find the way at random. The safest way to find the way to what you want is to find someone who already has it, and ask them. If you can’t find anyone who has obtained what you seek, its all the more reason to exercise humility in your confidence that you know what you’re doing.
If you have not yet walked the path to completion, you have not yet learned the value of the outcome of the path. Do not underestimate the importance of understanding the benefit of what you seek. How accurately your belief appraises the value of what you seek will determine what you are willing to do to get it; if you aren’t willing to do what it takes, you will not obtain what you seek. The better the outcome, the more it will cost and the less likely you are to encounter or obtain it without explicit planning and tenacious execution.
Where do beliefs come from?
Beliefs can come from a variety of sources. They can be selfcomposed through observation, inherited from parents, adopted from others, or emerge from subliminal biases.
Most beliefs are adopted subconsciously. When you adopt a belief without consciously choosing it, it’s highly unlikely you’ll live it fully, because you won’t possess the reasons to believe that confidence requires. Without living it fully, you will neither obtain the missing confidence nor learn the limits of the belief, and you may well stagnate in the same questionable belief for the rest of your life.
Beliefs should not be adopted for frivolous reasons, but because they describe plausible paths to obtain what you desire. Intentionally search for the beliefs you need to obtain what you desire, and choose the options that are most believable.
Odds are that no matter what you want in life, you are not the first one to want it or try to get it. A great gift is provided to you by the examples of both those who have already found what you desire and those whose attempts have failed. You can have the same results of anyone whose actions you are willing to replicate under the same conditions. If you place yourself in the same environment and do what those who were successful have done, you will obtain what they have. And if you can’t find an example of one who has what you want, at least avoid repeating the approach of those who do not have what you want.
Beliefs and the life plan
Your beliefs will help you write and update every section of your life plan to maximize your joy: they will help you specify needed qualities, list and rank the relevant values, suggest necessary goals to achieve, and enumerate required tasks.
Your beliefs also serve as a sort of interface between the why and what sections of your life plan through the links provided in the cause and effect mappings they describe.
Finally, your beliefs provide the mechanism through which the lessons you learn through living the contents of your life plan can be propagated up and down between successive sections of the plan.
In essence, beliefs help you figure out what you want, develop a plan to obtain it, and update your course as you integrate necessary changes.
Beliefs are critical for calculating long-term benefit and cost
Most good choices are particularly weighted toward long-term net benefit, and the more correctly you can perceive those effects and value them over the time horizon required, the more often you will make good choices and the better they will be.
Most people focus on short-term outcomes rather than long-term outcomes. Do the opposite. Begin paying close attention to long-term outcomes in your own life. Make the most of those around you whose past decisions are currently demonstrating their long-term consequences. Follow the examples of those who enjoy what you want to obtain, and eschew the examples of those who are suffering what you want to avoid.
As you weigh your choices, ignore the time horizon. Simply sum up all of the good and all of the bad. This will absolutely change your arithmetic. For example, consider how something that provides a little utility forever is better than anything whose benefit is time-limited, provided comparable cost.
Important decisions always seem to have long-term consequences for good or ill. Learn to see them and pay attention!
Beliefs predict the future
You can use your beliefs to obtain a better future. When you use your beliefs to extrapolate the present into the future, you can consider whether what you are headed for is what you want, as well as enumerate alternative options to obtain something better. This process is not terribly different than using what you see ahead to adjust the steering wheel while you drive. Think to yourself: “What will happen if I keep doing what I am doing in the long-term? Is that outcome what I want more than any alternative?” If you do not desire what you expect to happen, think to yourself: “What do I need to change in order to make my future closer to what I want than what I presently expect?”
Lean fully into what you predict will happen. No matter how correct and complete your beliefs are, they will do you no good unless you actually live them. As you live your beliefs, you will receive what they correctly predict while generating early warnings of their limitations.
When to modify your beliefs
You should frequently ask yourself if what you are doing is producing the effects you expected, in the same way an orienteer compares where they think they are on the map to the terrain they see around them. If there is a difference between what is happening and what you expected to happen, locate the error in your beliefs and fix it.
Having your beliefs written out will significantly increase your ability to compare your expectations to reality and know where to adjust. If you are aware of your beliefs, you’ll be able to perceive and translate any surprises, regrets, and unfulfilled desires you experience into the necessary changes you need to make.
Begin noticing deviations from or holes in your model, and fix them. If you are surprised by the results of certain actions by yourself or others, take note and fix your model to fit everything you’ve ever observed. If you don’t know how to fulfill what you desire, search for the beliefs that tell you.
When deviations from your beliefs arise that are too great to address with modifications, you should abandon the belief in question. It is dishonest to persist in a belief when the predicted outcomes do not occur. Humans have power to deceive themselves about what they believe and any evidence that controverts those beliefs, but having your beliefs written will at least make it more difficult to do so. Do not excuse yourself for holding to clearly false beliefs in the case where you don’t have anything else with which to replace those beliefs. It is better to be knowingly ignorant than it is to be knowingly dishonest. When you are knowingly ignorant, at least you will be looking for and willing to accept something better.
You are already living by your beliefs, you just haven’t noticed
It seems overwhelming to think about modeling the vastness of reality and navigating your model, constantly updating it as you learn more. But if you think so, it’s only because you haven’t realized that you are already doing it, and have been since birth!
You are constantly making decisions based on predictions from your model—just not consciously. Most of the cause and effect pairings you follow in life are not conscious. You don’t think about them, and because you don’t think about them, you don’t search for or accept more accurate versions.
Your entire life is comprised of the habits you’ve learned through trial and error. If you get hungry, you will go eat because you predict that doing so will make your hunger go away. You will go to work tomorrow because you predict that doing so will result in a paycheck. Why do you expect these things? Because at some point you learned to associate the cause and effect pair.
Your urges, cravings, and so on are actually predictions. The problem is that many—if not most—of your predictions are wrong, or at least less accurate than they could be, because you have yet to develop or apply an explicit apparatus for measuring and improving them.
Learn to pay more attention to your habits and other subconscious actions. Write out what you do and why you do it. For each one, think about whether the expected effect actually occurs, and whether or not more effective causes exist for the desired effect.
Beliefs are not just right and wrong, but better or worse
You will find that in many cases, the quality of a belief is not just a question of right or wrong, but better and worse. Just as we have a multitude of options for action, we have a multitude of options for beliefs. And just as with actions, the best may yet be unknown to us. Always have a mind open enough to believe that something better might exist, and always have eyes open enough to be looking for the same. When you find a better belief than what you hold, realize that you may struggle to adopt a belief emotionally even when it is obviously rationally superior.
Our beliefs can differ in coverage and accuracy. An accurate set of beliefs is like a treasure map toward joy. The existence of a map does not indicate its accuracy or completeness. Like a treasure map, our beliefs can fail to describe the full picture, sometimes with disastrous consequences. When our beliefs fail to include the description of parts of reality, this is an indication that they are incomplete. Similarly, some of our beliefs can be slightly mistaken or even completely wrong. When our beliefs predict something different than what occurs, this is an indication that our beliefs are incorrect.
Should everyone have different beliefs?
Since reality is composed of objective rules of cause and effect that are the same for everyone, the perfectly complete and correct set of beliefs would be the same for everyone. However, there are obviously significant differences in how closely any individual’s beliefs approach that ideal.
Even though the ideal map may be the same for all people, the ideal path differs according to each individual’s unique present place on or off of it. Those further ahead will have different ideal beliefs than those further behind, and those a little off to one side will have different ideal beliefs than those off to the other side.
We each have a different compass that indicates the way to traverse towards maximal individual joy because we all have different values. Your path to the greatest joy will be subject to what you want out of life, not just in terms of the specific experiences in which you find joy —and how much joy you find in them—but in the price you are willing to pay to obtain them. Too often, people fail to obtain what they say they want not because they don’t know how to obtain it, but because they aren’t willing to pay the price required. If you don’t want to pay what something costs, you don’t really want it! You’ll be much happier choosing the next best thing whose price you are willing to pay.
What causes strength of belief?
Confidence in the accuracy or importance of beliefs can be based on strong reason, flimsy fancy, and everything in between. Contemporary people seem to have no particular connection between the strength of their beliefs and sufficient evidence for them. It is not difficult to find a person who has far too little confidence in beliefs for which they have strong evidence nor a person who has far too much confidence in beliefs for which they have insufficient evidence. In fact, you may be an example of both.
If you have too much confidence in your beliefs, you will harm your ability to notice and accept better beliefs. It is dishonest to have strong feelings about weak beliefs. If your observations or your ability to interpret them are highly limited on a given topic, it is dishonest for you to hold strong beliefs about that topic.
Strength of belief, when accurate, comes through living what you believe and finding that the outcomes you expect follow from the causes you predicted they would, in exactly the way you expected. To the extent this occurs across more cases, you should increase the strength of your belief.
In times when it is easy for you to live according to your beliefs, the degree of confidence that you have in them is less important. It is when opposition arises that your confidence matters the most.
Enduring confidence comes through the accumulation of positive outcomes from conscientiously chosen beliefs lived fully. The more evidence you have that your actions align with what you value the most, the more confidence you will have.
You cannot grow in confidence without actually living your beliefs, because you will not gain any evidence for them without putting them into practice. You come to greater confidence through more intentionally identifying and choosing your beliefs, through living them more fully, and through accumulating experiential evidence—evidence both that they are correct in their mapping of cause and effect, and that they yield better outcomes than any alternative beliefs or actions.
Many people are smart enough to know that while living your beliefs can increase your confidence in them, it can also produce counter evidence against them. This is one reason why so few people actually live their beliefs, even if they loudly profess them and tenaciously fight to defend them. It is easy to avoid living what you claim to believe out of fear of the possibility of contradicting them, but you need to understand that there is no benefit to holding potentially false beliefs that is not dwarfed by recognizing them as false. It is better to know you know nothing than it is to think that what you believe is true when you are capable of knowing it is not.
Don’t deny your desires; direct them
The common difference between what most really believe and what they say they believe stems from a lack of honesty. The reason so many struggle to align the two is because they try to exercise honesty unevenly, and this works about as well as trying to be healthier only when you get sick. You grow more honest through being honest all the time, just as you grow healthier by being healthy all the time.
Be honest about what you desire and how much you desire it. Do not ignore how you feel. Do not ignore what you desire. You need to recognize and acknowledge desires in order to find a sufficient source for what you seek and to have a willingness to pay the adequate price to obtain it.
You have to deeply care about your life in order to be willing to invest what it takes to make it worth living. If you ignore your desires, you’ll never be willing to do what it takes to fulfill them. Pretending to want what you don’t actually want will result in failing to obtain anything better than what you already have. You won’t try very hard to obtain what you don’t really want, and few things worth having are easy to get.
Instead of suppressing your feelings and desires, direct them toward what has the greatest worth using your capacity for reason. Better choices come from better thinking, and elevating your mind from the default animalistic emotional baseline into intentional thinking requires explicit effort. It can be done, but it takes practice and dedication. The results are well worth it.
You change your desires by changing your beliefs
Our beliefs are our estimate of how to obtain what we consider has value. Value is how much you desire something. Value and beliefs are interactive in important ways.
Everything has objective value, but we can only interact with it according to our subjective perception of its value. Our subjective estimate of a thing’s cost and benefit comes from our beliefs. This is crucial to understand: our desire for something comes solely from our beliefs about it, and the value we can find in anything will be limited to the value with which our beliefs appraise it.
Many have struggled with attempts to change their desires, whether in an attempt to more fully desire what they consider good or to diminish their desire for what they consider to be bad. Those who have not succeeded in their aims have failed because they did not understand that their desire for something comes solely from their beliefs about it.
You will not encounter much success in attempts to directly modify your desires. The lever of control for your desires is not on the desire itself, but on the practical beliefs that determine it. You change your desires by changing your beliefs.
To achieve desire-shifting changes in belief, you’ll have to find convincing reasons to want something else more than what you presently want instead. With the wrong beliefs, even the very best actions will require a great deal of additional willpower or motivation. With the right beliefs, many good actions become almost automatic.
Your desires comprise a relative ranking of effects from the catalogue of your beliefs.
At all times, you have the choice to decide whether to:
- Heed or reject the thoughts, actions, and feelings suggested by your beliefs.
- Recognize evidence suggesting your beliefs, or your prioritization thereof, are lacking.
- Search for beliefs that are better supported or which bring about better outcomes.
- Treat the causes according to how you prioritize the anticipated effects.
It is your decisions with respect to your beliefs—and always your decisions only—that dictate what you do, what you think, and how you feel.
While what you do, think, and feel is always your choice, that choice can be made much easier or much harder through you obtaining more information about cause and effect—through expanding and increasing the accuracy of your beliefs.