Believe nothing. Move with the popular notions of your peers. Play it safe. Fit in.
That’s a good way to blend in without much change. It can work well as a strategy for work that is predictable and factory-oriented. In fact, most people are seeking this kind of stasis.
However, the reality of today doesn’t leave such a convenient existence as much of an option. Technology and people’s behaviors keep pushing the envelope and create new normals. And, if you are not careful, you can become disoriented, marginalized and irrelevant.
You have to have conviction.
It is the awareness, decisiveness and deeply embedded belief in what you do or value that matters most. You have to believe that it works or is true.
You need conviction to survive.
You need conviction to be valuable.
You need conviction to get results.
It’s a rare quality. And the key to getting conviction is struggle. That’s right,
Struggle = Conviction
When you struggle through work or hard problems, you gain insights that bystanders and observers simply cannot appreciate without going through the same journey.
Try doing something like building your own website on a server. You make a lot of mistakes as you learn. You understand how IT works with FTP uploads, server security, blank home pages, and all sorts of tripwires and pieces that make a site work. Albeit, it’s easier today than ever. The information and instructions are readily available. And when you experience the failure along the way, you have to keep choosing to push towards your goal until you eventually launch something.
This is true for anything that is complex. You have to struggle through the work. Along the way you give yourself a gift. You know what is true and why. You gain conviction.
So many opportunities are within reach for anyone with initiative. And getting conviction in leadership, technology, organizational behavior, selling, projects, and everything else we deem as worthy work is critical. You know that you know that you know.
