You Cannot Borrow Someone Else’s Experience of Success

Introduction: Where the Feeling of “I Can” Comes From

Build up small experiences of success. Told this, what do most people do first? They read the accounts of people who have already succeeded, and try to trace the steps.

How to accumulate such experiences, and how to record them, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the source. Where does the feeling that you are capable of something actually come from?

Here is the conclusion first. The strongest source of that feeling is having done something yourself and found that you could. Watching someone else do it well is a far weaker source. That watching a successful person built no purchase was because the weakest source was being used the most diligently.

The Sources of Efficacy Are Not Equal

The sense that “I am capable of something” is called, in psychology, a sense of efficacy. Albert Bandura examined carefully where people obtain it [Bandura, 1977].

The conclusion is clear. The most powerful source of efficacy is the experience of performance — actually doing it yourself and finding that you could. Seeing others do well, and being told “you can do it,” are sources too, but far weaker by comparison.

Only the experience of moving your own hands and carrying something through, however small, accumulates an unshakeable sense of “I can” at the bottom of the mind.

Imitation taught the ranking upside down. Behave as a successful person behaves, think as they think, and you will start to feel you can succeed too. But a feeling obtained that way collapses the moment it meets a wall in reality. It was borrowed.

The Higher the Model, the More the Progress Is Drowned Out

Here is the decisive difference from imitation.

Imitation places, from the outset, a model standing far above. So the distance from yourself is too great, and one step forward only builds the impatience of “still nowhere near.”

Worse, watching a model too far away is not merely weak as a source of efficacy; it often works in reverse. What grows first is the helplessness of “I will never reach that.” The higher the model, the more the gap from where you now stand stands out, and the purchase of having moved one step is drowned out inside that enormous gap.

So the harder a person works at imitation, the more confidence they lose, even as they advance.

Put the comparison back to the person you were a little while ago and the world reverses. What you could not do yesterday, you can do today. That small differential fades in front of a vast model, but inside a comparison with your own past it is engraved as unmistakable progress.

Instead of standing still before the distance to a model, you check the differential from yesterday’s self. The one you compare with is no longer someone far above, but the person you were a moment ago.

▸ The ordering problem of “build confidence first” is taken up in why building confidence first has the order backwards.

Why Only a Step Towards Your Own Goal Accumulates

There is a further condition, easy to overlook: whose goal the step is heading towards.

Psychology holds that people are born with a need for the sense that they are choosing their own behaviour — a need for autonomy [Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000]. This is not a luxury but a basic requirement of the mind. And behaviour in which that need is met is behaviour people can keep up longer, and more vividly.

Borrowed goals do not last because they do not meet this need. Moving from the motive of not falling behind, or of being recognised, puts the reins of that behaviour outside rather than inside. The person may feel they chose it, and deep down they know they are being pushed from outside. So the behaviour holds only as long as the external pressure holds.

Behaviour born of your own goal runs on a different mechanism. It is not being pushed from outside; it is moving from within, towards what you hold dear. So it does not stop when nobody is watching and nobody offers praise.

Let me clear up a common misreading here. Moving from your own goal is not the same as taking the easy road. The road to your own goal has as many plain, laborious stretches as any other. The difference is one point only: that the labour can be shouldered as something you chose, rather than something imposed.

The same difficulty, imposed, wears a person down; chosen, it builds them. What autonomy supplies is not the absence of difficulty but the acceptance that this is difficulty on a road you chose.

A Circuit That Decreases, and a Circuit That Increases

Seen this way, the difference between imitation and execution can be organised as a difference in the direction of the circuit.

Imitation carried a double spin. First, the wrong cause was being copied. The model’s thinking was not the cause of wealth, so however accurately it was traced, reality did not move. The tyre never gripped the road; it spun. Second, copying the surface left the deep self-image unchanged, and it was continually pulled back to the old place. The accelerator was down while an invisible brake was pressed at the same time.

Standing up and walking from your own goal releases both at once. A step towards your own goal is not a copy of thinking reverse-engineered from someone’s result but a concrete act of working on reality. So the tyre finally grips. Small as it may be, reality begins to move.

Further, because the act is bound up with what you hold dear, it does not collide with the deep self-image. The inner murmur of “this is not like me,” present while a borrowed self-image was being performed, disappears, and the exhaustion of pressing accelerator and brake together is gone.

And the purchase of progress becomes, in itself, the fuel for the next step. While spinning, the harder you pushed the more “still not there” accumulated, until the strength ran out. Walking on your own footing, each step accumulates “definitely moved,” and that accumulation lifts the will for the next one.

The former is a circuit that decreases the more you press it; the latter increases. Put in the same labour and the two arrive at entirely different places.

Conclusion: Today’s Step May Be as Plain as It Likes

Instead of picturing each morning a distant image of producing great results like a successful person, choose one very small step you can actually take today, with your own hands, towards your own goal — and carry it through.

It does not matter how plain or how small it looks. The fact of having carried it through engraves a small conviction in the mind. Because that conviction was obtained by your own hand rather than borrowed, it does not waver.

Borrowed confidence collapses at the first wall. A sense of efficacy grown by accumulating small executions meets the wall and becomes the strength to right yourself: so what do I do next?

Copying made you confirm, endlessly, that you had not arrived. Standing makes you confirm, every day, that you moved a little.

The whole picture is gathered in why copying a millionaire mindset does not make you rich.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Bandura, A. “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change” Psychological Review, 84(2) (1977)
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being” American Psychologist, 55(1) (2000)
• Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3) (1999)