The Dual Nature of Belief

I was thinking about something or other today, I can't really remember what it was, but I ended on a strand of thought I've gone over a few times. That strand is belief. Belief is an awesome thing, it's an enabling kind of thought process. If you believe that something is so, then in your mind it becomes so. It helps you to accomplish things you may never have tried otherwise. We as humans believe in a ton of things, we can believe in ourselves, in others, in honesty, in virtues, in a purpose, all of these things helping us to better ourselves in some way or another. It's not a matter of weather something we believe is true or right, the belief can benefit us.

That's not my entire strand of thought of course, the above is pretty well accepted by just about everybody who's ever practiced it, which is most of the world's population I imagine. No, the completion of the strand was this, that belief can also work against us, though I'm not sure if people ever really think about it, perhaps if they did, they would work around it. Some examples, people can believe they can't use computers, they can believe they can't play a sport, they can believe that it's better to chew their gum with the paper wrapper still on... anyway, the point is that in the end, a lot of these things can be counter productive. A lot of the time though, I don't think that we catch them when we say it.

When we believe something negative, it more often than not comes out something like, I can't use a computer, I can't play this sport, etc. The definitive cannot, takes the place of the simple fact that we don't think we can. We can believe so many different things, we can enable ourselves in so many different areas of our life through simple belief. Why not in these areas? What keeps us back from achieving everything? From doing anything? My thought is that people simply hold themselves back through firm disbelief in their own ability, it becomes rooted, and we begin to believe that rather than being just a thought on our part, it's a fact.

There are those who look past this, who ignore what they've been told, perhaps even what others have told them, and believe that anything is possible. People can believe that if they put their mind to it, that if they try, even if it takes time, that they can do it. These are the great people, and I personally believe that we all have it in us to become great people. We can all become people who dare to do, who dare to learn, who dare to break through the impossible, be it our own disbelief, which becomes a solid I can't to us, or to breaking through scientifically, medically, or mechanically, to find something that everybody looked past.

We can be whatever we want to be, so long as we don't let anybody else, or more importantly, ourselves, hold us back from our own infinite potential.