Faith is all you need

A famous line, echoing Stoic thought, says “The mind can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven”.

Underneath that phrase is the idea that it’s not really about the external situation you’re in, but the internal experience of your consciousness that really counts. Back in university, I struggled to keep up and couldn’t seem to perform the mental gymnastics required to become a good student. I even blamed myself until a professor straight-up told me, “Your grades reflect your belief in the system.”

At first I thought this was supposed to motivate me, but after a few days I realized he was right—I simply didn’t believe in the system, and that pattern kept repeating itself in my life: like, later at my dream job, I’d work weekends, grind late into Friday nights, and it felt joyful, almost like drinking from a firehose, but then one day I woke up and something inside me died, and no matter how much I tried to blame external factors like sleep or health, deep down I knew I’d lost faith. I saw a “girlboss” poster once which said “you can’t squeeze love out of a man’s heart and if he doesn’t give it freely you don’t want it”. And it clicked – the same was true for my own internal state. I felt like the man being referred in that poster. I get it, I finally get it, I can’t squeeze love out of my heart if even if I tried.

When I moved on to my next gig, though, that faith was back, and I worked harder than ever. (It was easier to work harder but harder to work less). It still felt effortless—so yeah, the Stoics (or perhaps Milton) had it right: the mind really does shape your reality, or perhaps it’s not the mind but your faith (and more precisely, the degree of faith you have in your work).

Next time I find a job, faith is literally the only thing I’m optimizing for. I’ve made enough money; I don’t care anymore. If I force myself to work on something I don’t believe in, then that’s a total waste of my time. Faith single-handedly transforms your internal experience. That’s why people willingly go barefoot on epic religious pilgrimages but take the car to a grocery store two blocks away. You can’t trick yourself into believing, so the real move is finding something worth believing in—something that genuinely pulls you instead of something you have to keep dragging yourself toward. Because that subtle shift in motivation is literally everything.