Most people are familiar with the idea of “sour grapes”, which means that you put something down after you realize that you can’t get it. The term originates from Aesop’s Fables, where a fox tries to get delicious grapes only to realize that he cannot reach them. Upon this realization, he says to himself, “They were sour, anyway.” Obviously, he has no way to knowing what the grapes taste like, so he is telling himself that to assuage the pain of not being able to reach them. In psychology, this is known as cognitive dissonance, which is the idea that if your beliefs don’t match your reality, you change your beliefs to alleviate the resulting discomfort.
You may be able to think of several examples from your own life. Have you ever played a game, started losing, and then either said, “I let you win,” or, “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” in response? What about getting rejected from your preferred school and then saying, “Oh, what works out, anyway, since my secondary school is closer to home,” to cope with the loss? Any time you change your beliefs to reflect your reality, you are solving for the cognitive dissonance you’re experiencing when you can’t or don’t get what you want.
However, there is more that belief can do to your desires. The main thing that you want to be on the look for is when beliefs squelch them: “I want to get an A, but I’m horrible at studying.” “I want that job opening, but I bet there are better candidates applying.” In these examples, your beliefs are taking something you want and trying to get you to prepare for disappointment or stop wanting or even thinking about them because you believe that they’re unlikely or impossible. In the self-help world, these defeatist thoughts or comments are known as limiting beliefs. Most self-help advice focuses on breaking through the limitations in your life, and your beliefs are usually the starting point. If you don’t believe you can do something, then most people will assume you can’t, either.
But it works the other way, too. Psychology calls it confirmation bias when you look for things to support or reinforce your existing beliefs, but there is a positive side to this “bias”: you reinforce your beliefs to reinforce your desire. For example, if you want your favorite NFL team to go to the Super Bowl, you will research the strengths of each player and find reasons why they could. This builds your hope and desire for them to win. While that might be a silly example since you have no control over the outcome of an NFL game if you’re a television spectator, the same principle works for things that you do control. Examples include a product you buy, a choice of school you attend, or a company you accept a job offer from. It would be self-sabotage to make a decision and then look for all the reasons why you made a bad decision. Why do that to yourself?
A great example of this is for cookware. When you buy a new item for the kitchen, the first thing you might do is look up things you can make with it. This, in effect, increases your belief in all the great things that will come from purchasing the item, thus increasing your anticipation for opening it and trying it out. I bought a HexClad pan, for example, and I immediately got new ideas for meals that I could make with it, learning to make new things and enhancing my enjoyment of it. When I started getting advertisements on X about it, I accidentally clicked once and saw a bunch of negative feedback from customers saying that it was the “worst pan they’ve ever bought” (I highly, highly doubt that to be the case—likely, it’s exaggeration like when people say a disappointing Star Wars movie or show is the worst move/show ever made…as if it’s worse than The Room or something). Obviously, I stopped looking at those comments immediately because what good does that belief do me now that I own the pan and have no plans to buy new ones for many years?
So, the influence that beliefs have on desires is really interesting, and I talk about extensively in my book about how, in general, desire drives you toward what you want in life and belief sustains you on your journey. But this blog post is about a less-discussed relationship: beliefs can actually create new desires.
Yes, this can work both ways, too. If you belief that someone harmed your spouse, you would generate a new desire to punish that person. If you believe that something is impossible, you will want to give up. But a new belief about what is possible might spark a new desire, too. If you learn that your favorite artist is coming to your area, you will want to go. Over the last 18 months or so, I learned that I could life more weight at the gym if I ate more, so I started going to the gym and eating more and saw the weight I could life skyrocket (examples: I went from 30s to 50s on dumbbell curls, 40s to 60s on dumbbell shoulder press, and 60s to 80s on dumbbell bench press). I had been working out for decades and was always skinny, so I thought that was the way it was. When my belief changed, I suddenly wanted to see how much more I could lift again (which I hadn’t really cared about since High School).
How can you use this information? Specifically, you can use this knowledge to form new beliefs that can spur you toward new adventures in life. Find out that you didn’t get into the college you wanted? Yes, you can put it down, but you can also find something else that you learn that is better for you and then build desire for that instead. Not know what you want to do in life? Explore different careers and see which one you excel at, thus increasing your belief in your ability to do something and build desire to be great vs. wandering around aimlessly looking for “your passion”—doing what you are good at to make a good living while you think about what you love to do is a great way to develop additional skills to be ready to jump to that new path when you find it.
I’ve joked on podcasts that no one would ever buy a self-help book called, Don’t Want That (the books that are closest to that topic that sell are ones on Buddhism that teach detachment) to help them improve their emotional well-being in life. That’s why most of those books focus on limiting beliefs. But the truth is that the formula to life happiness is Desire + Belief + Experience = Emotions, and beliefs are only one part of the equation. Even with all the belief in the world, you need to seek those experiences and build your desire for whatever it is you want to be, do, or have in life to drive you toward your goal. If you are unhappy because you don’t want anything or want something that you can’t have, then you need to change your desires to be happy, which can be done either by stumbling on a new thing you want in life or by leveraging your ability to influence your desires by changing your beliefs. The latter is more immediate, as the former requires quite a bit of luck to stumble upon a new desire (e.g., your soul mate being at the bar you go to, the next great binge-worthy TV show appearing after you just finished your last obsession, your perfect job coming to you after you got downsized from your last one). That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give up on finding new things that interest you; it just means that you should use everything at your disposal.
So, if you want to always have something to strive for and to always feel good about your life and its progress, consider deliberately forming desire-generating or desire-reinforcing beliefs. Anything from the belief that there “are plenty of fish in the sea” after a definitely-over breakup to a belief that the perfect career path is out there if you just keep looking can keep you going. These beliefs can restart a fire that has been going out inside you, and they can help get you out of any life “funk” you may have.
To end this on a strangely hopeful note, there is a famous 1957 study by Curt Richter, called “On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man”, that immersed rats in jars of water and measured how long they swam before drowning. (Note: this was obviously before modern ethics were applied to laboratory research) The study found that the wild rats often died within 1-15 minutes, demonstrating panic and giving up. The ones that were removed, dried, and returned, however, swam for up to hours or even days. The difference that they could identify was that the rat believed that rescue was possible. That single belief was the difference between giving up and continuing to push for as long as physically possible. That’s what belief does to your motivation: it can cause you to give up before even trying, and it can cause you to push and push until you achieve your goal. Use your beliefs to support your goals in life, and you will continue to try until you find the path toward what you ultimately want. Those desires might evolve or change as you experience setbacks, but never give up hope that you can find something that will make you happy in life. If you give that up, you are dooming yourself and missing out on all the good things that could have been if you had just believed in the possibility. You can change your desires, beliefs, and experiences along the way, but never lose that base hope that you can find fulfillment in life even if you have to give up on what you thought you wanted in the past.