You might not be taking a midnight train going anywhere, and you might not be a small-town girl or a city boy, but Journey’s message should still resonate with you: don’t stop believing.
Everyone talks about the meaning of life as if it’s some great mystery about what they should be doing with their lives, but in doing so they miss the fundamentals of what they need to do to live lives that they are happy with. One of those fundamentals is that your life should be generally trending upward: in plain terms, you should believe that your life in the future should be better than it is today. That is key because if you believe that your life has peaked in some way…well, there’s not really much else to do now, is there? Even the people who are the best in fields that peak earlier, such as sports stars and Olympic gold medalists, know this: when their careers are over, they move on to other things: parenthood, business ventures, coaching, or other endeavors. It’s not even close to over, even when you’ve been at the top of a field.
So whether you’re at the highest of highs, lowest of lows, or crashing hard, there is always a way to start believing again…to have the belief that you will have a new, interesting experience going forward. For championship athletes, it could be anything from securing their children’s future to enjoying life after decades of putting things off in search of professional glory. For people at rock bottom, the idea that things cannot get any worse and now things can only get better from there. For people falling, the idea that you can always get back up and succeed again. There is always something to believe in if you look for it.
The takeaway for you from this point is that you should never stop believing in your own future. Yes, you can stop believing that you were meant to do one specific thing because you can start believing that you’ll do something else instead. You can stop believing that you were destined to be with one person if for whatever reason the love is unrequited…and start believing that you will find someone new or channel that love into your children, family, or students. As long as you don’t stop believing in everything, you can change what you believe in and focus your life on anything that matters to you.
The big question for people struggling is how to build belief. This is a tough one—especially if you go into the area of practicing faith (the belief in the potential for positive outcomes without or despite evidence). Let’s start with the easier side of belief and hope. The fastest, easiest way to get your belief back is to notice positive things that support positive beliefs and counter negative beliefs with falsifying evidence. Two examples:
These approaches help you to turn around negative beliefs so you have more positive, constructive ones again.
Of course, the difficult one is faith. My years of research has found that faith is a key part of success—you have to believe before it happens, not the other way around. Not because of anything magical (although many religious and spiritual people do believe that the “believe it” comes before the “see it” and not the other way around), but simply because your belief causes you to behave in ways that will make you more likely to get it. If you don’t think you’ll pass the test, then you won’t bother to study. If you think you’ll pass it if you study, then you’ll be more likely to study because you believe that the effort is worth it. Regardless of whether you believe in the non-physical side of faith that may or may not exist, the tangible effects of faith are there.
The reason why practicing faith is difficult is that if you are either a die-hard skeptic or you’ve had a rough life, it is very difficult to believe that your belief affects reality because you think that it inherently does not or your life (and everyone else’s lives) would be better. I don’t deny it—it’s incredibly difficult for me to find (let alone explain) it myself since I had a double-whammy of both of those conditions listed (in my case, a non-religious person who was abandoned as a child). I had both thoughts that counteracted what I now know to be true:
That first thought was only finally overcome when I wrote an entire chapter on belief and found that it actually did matter—not because believing caused something to happen (no one can prove that scientifically, unfortunately) but that because no one who didn’t believe succeeded. 0. Because the people who don’t believe don’t try at all. People say, “I can’t believe it,” but they are exaggerating. You’re not buying lottery tickets if you don’t think it’s possible; you’re not running the race if you don’t think you can finish it. Even the fictional Rocky Balboa in the first movie didn’t believe he could win but believed that he had to get into the ring and go the distance to prove to himself that he wasn’t a bum. My favorite story of all time (because it’s real) about believing mattering was when the coach of the famous “Miracle on Ice” openly told his team that the opposing team was better than they were 9 times out of 10 but that they were the better team tonight. Even in near-complete disbelief was the power of belief at work.
So it took years of research and writing to finally see that. In the latter belief, I didn’t believe in anything that I didn’t know to be true…but everything I knew to be true happened to me nearly effortlessly: I graduated from high school and college with a great GPA (without ever studying except the night before a test—yeah, you can hate me for that); I got a job that I enjoyed and was good at by a complete fluke and have worked in the same career path for over 20 years; and I saved money and got a house and now live a life that my childhood self wouldn’t even dream was possible. Now, you can say that it all worked out because I took the probabilities route or am smart or whatever, but if I go back and look at the probabilities, 99/100 don’t accomplish what I did. So much for me doing what was “probabilistically the most likely way to succeed”—it’s possible that it’s that simple of a formula and 99/100 don’t have the strength and desire to do it…but that somehow seems unlikely (and self-aggrandizing, to say the least). So, if anything, it was my complete faith that if I did X, Y, and Z that everything would work out, and lo and behold: it did.
So if you want to never stop believing, you need to address those two major failure points: that belief doesn’t matter and that bad things happening to you are proof that it doesn’t. At worst, two things can be true: random bad things can happen and belief can help you through all of that. At best, your unwavering belief shapes your destiny and belief is the key through anything—heck, even believing that bad things happen to you to serve you. And—guess what—it ends up working. Fail a test? You can believe you suck, or you can believe that it’s a good sign that you need to study more so you can get an A on the final. Did your lover leave you? Maybe you suck, or maybe that person wasn’t right for you but you needed to go through it to become the person you need to be for your soulmate to arrive. Did you lose your job? Maybe you had to lose it to finally write that book or start that business you were always saying that you wanted to do but never took action. Notice the difference in those beliefs’ affect on your behavior: in the former, you sulk and do nothing, making your life worse; in the latter, you use failure as a stepping stone to success. Belief matters. Don’t listen to the non-believers—they are seeing their own self-fulfilling prophecy come to life by not believing and seeing their non-belief cause their lives to be the same.
So now you hopefully understand why it’s important to never stop believing and know the primary things to look out for you so don’t stop believing. Now, you just have to make sure you do it.
Don’t stop believing…ay-ay-ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!
Don’t stop!