This is the response to the post
/@alexgr/positive-thinking-why-is-it-a-hit-and-miss-experience
What I am about to say is not a rebuttal. I mostly agree with your well-structured and insightful post. Rather I’d like to share some thoughts that came to mind when I read it. To me the gist of your article asserted the concept that a person who believes in their success would be successful while the one who doesn’t won’t. Essentially the expectation of eventual success or failure is substituted by two different unknowns “believing into your success” or not.
Am I giving it too much weight?
Of course, I don’t think we should go overboard here. The equation of “success” is still defined within some bell curve.
We can talk about advantages that positive thinking brings in a developed country, where a person has financial and educational advantages from birth. However, what how can a person born in a poor country like Guatemala, Niger or Liberia become successful if their only available activity is to collect bananas? And if we really want to cast the situation outside the standard deviation area, what if you go a couple of centuries ago and are born as a slave? My guess is that even being born with the greatest belief in yourself won’t suffice. Quite the contrary, if you are born into money and power you could be quite miserable inside while still maintaining a desirable social position.
What is success?
Surely, success could be defined in a variety of way. For an American businessman, it’s how much money she has in the bank while for a Maasai warrior it’s how many cows they have. “Why do we need money? You cannot eat them. For us, it only matters how many cows you have.”
Thus, the perception of what success falls under another bell curve that is orthogonal to the social environment curve.
Surely, one can claim that except for completely marginal cases, a person who believes in himself could still succeed (within her own definition of success) despite unfavorable social circumstances. That being said, the $100 question becomes “what is the chicken here and what is an egg?” Are environmental conditions determine our programming or programming determines our environment conditions? In turn, the answer to this question becomes dependent on whether our subconscious mind a read only memory ROM or random access memory RAM?
If this is ROM and its traces are etched by mother-nature then our success or failure in life is predetermined and if your ROM received a negative programming you are doomed - no amount of efforts will help. I think in your post this is the positions that you take - the state of the consciousness is rather static and its effectiveness in term of achieving success is defined by a combination of several conflicting beliefs: the less of them the better.
In a way, a suicide bomber is a manifestation of such success. He is absolutely sure that what he does is a greater good in a name of God and is not side tracked by any conflicting beliefs. Death in the name of faith while killing infidels is his definition of success. In my mind, such static condition of a subconscious mind is a rather gruesome perspective for an average mind. I’d rather want to think that our consciousness is RAM and its content could be tinkered with. Then again if this is so what are the method of accessing it and what is the technique of swapping its negative content with the positive one, erasing doubts and replacing them with hope?
Anybody?