On Conviction
One ingredient to building consistency On Consistency is to have a Conviction about the importance of what you are doing.
However, conviction is more than just anengine for daily habits.
But they are tightly related
As an example, when raising you, we were consistent about giving you baths and brushing your teeth. These are small habits. That's because we held a conviction that remaining clean was healthy.
As you got older, I had a Vonction that for growing kids, the best source of high quality nutrition was from eggs because I had conviction on Protein as an essential macro.
However, there wasn't consistency in you eating eggs....argely because you eventually got bored.
But sometimes you Mom woul dmake eggs differently and either you would prefer her eggs over mine in thef uture, or you wouldn't eat eggs that day because they were different fro mmine.
Eventually, you both reached a point where if I mentioned eggs for breakfast, you would balk.
As you can see, Conviction can only drive my behavior; but it isn't always true tht will drive someone else's, in this case, yours.
But I also held Convictions about larger, broader world views, and it is here that I want to focus the rest of this essay.
Convictions can be a source of strength. They are anchors in storms.
A strong conviction will keep you moving forward and not backing down in your personal pursuits, whether career or entrepreneurial.
The search for Conviction on where you are going in life, what matters to you, is perhapsone of the most important things in life.
Without a conviction, you can be left wandering.
But a misguided Conviction can lead you awry.
Convictions should be taken lightly.
For example, right now, I have conviction about Bitcoin. Many people had Conviction in Bitcoin much earlier, like 10 years ago. Those with cconvition 10 years ago are more rewarded than those who built conviction two years ago.
Conviction is your guide in ambiguity. Beliefs in yourself, the world, in specific companies, in trends -- all of these things take understanding and insight into the world.
The best conviction is to have one that is not only durable, through youractions and consistency.
But a conviction should also be something that is different, that is non-conforming, from the herd.
It doesn't have to be. For eample, if most people aroundyou have conviction that ou shouldn't look directly at the sun, probably a good idea.
But there are many things in life that the mass population believes in, but it's not something you should. Do you not conform to the patterns of the world.
How to develop conviction
Convicion is about thinking for yourself.
Getting original ideas means exploring and testing the conventions al=round you.
This habit startswith the breadth and depth of what you read. As you read, you are doing twot hings at once: you are understanding and absorbing, this is part of the learning process; but you are also challenging the assumptions, logic, research and proof.
As you build up your principles -- ideas that you ahve come to agree are always true -- or frameworks that let you reason about those, you can start to apply tohem to higher level pieces of knowledge and domains.
This is a tough balance. At times, building conviction means engaging adversarially with certain ideas On Contrarianism
Currently, one of the more common areas f=where conviction and contrarianism plays out is in investing. The one who is willing to go all in on an investment that other people believe is bad, and yet turns out right, should be more successful.
In that marketplace of ideas, it's hard to achieve.
But this can apply to world events, to your own business, to your life.
One area that always needs conviction is your beliefs, especially in the unseen.
The ability to walk by faith needs conviction of the unseen and certainty of things yet to come.
In many ways, conviction is akin to faith.
Some will argue that faith has no reason, it;s just raw trust.
But I think faith and conviction are cut from the same cloth. There is evidence to have faith at times. We have faith in a person based on our knoweldge. We have faith in Jesus becauwe we have faith in the truth of the Bible. And we derive a faith in the truth of the Bible through scholarly evidence, self-reflection on the contents.
This is an example where conviction needs work. Blind conviction, taking something as entirely true without any basis at all, is not what I'm advocating for.