Irrational Self-Confidence and the Mid-Cingulate Cortex
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Yurui’s Summary
Writing publicly is really hard - even though I really enjoy writing.
Idea generation and writing style are what most think are the hardest parts of writing, but I think they aren’t as hard as the action of hitting post and staying consistent.
Despite external criticism, when we do things that we don’t want to do, we strengthen the mid-cingulate cortex in our brains.
Try to believability weight external criticism - don’t trust every opinion you hear, and have a rational filter for them.
Because we’re all going to die one day, it almost seems stupid to live your life based on what another person tells you.
You need irrational self-confidence to write online consistently. You need to be so self-assured that even though people will shit on you, you know inside that it’s the right thing to do and hence, maintain it for months and years to come.
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I’ve been writing online for quite a while now - nearly a year since I created this blog, and around 3-4 months of regular posting on LinkedIn and my email newsletter.
Writing publicly is pretty damn hard.
I love writing, and I do it every day for myself in my journal - I’ve found that it’s the most direct path that leads toward mental clarity, as I have to force myself to take my incongruent mess of thoughts, and march them onto a piece of paper or word processor.
I don’t think that writing is the hard part. People think that it is, because they focus on the difficulties of coming up with what to write about and the challenge of writing well - which is fair enough.
But that’s despite the thousands of ideas available online and thousands of thoughts that our internal monologues produce daily as well. I also think that writing can be trained as a skill and comes with iterative practice.
Frankly, I’ve never found idea generation to be an issue - rather, that it takes a bit of brainpower and time-blocking to find a solid hour or two where I can sit down and pump out a solid article that’s concise and succinct for short-form on LinkedIn or smooth and coherent for my blog.
Maybe that’s something I’ve been blessed (and cursed) with - that my mind doesn’t ever shut up with it’s thoughts, unless I’m in a flow state, or meditating and consciously taking a step back from life.
What’s the hard part then?
Without a doubt, the action that takes the most effort from me in the whole writing process is…
Hitting the post button.
This can interpreted in two ways. One literal, and another metaphorical.
Heh. It’s funny how the action that literally takes less than one second is the action that’s the hardest to execute on.
Literally, when I have a post all cooked up and ready to ship, I find it immensely hard to ease my inner perfectionist that worries about how I present myself to the world.
Even after I send off my articles to some friends for their feedback and review, I have a twinge of hesitation - what about that time I shipped this article that belly-flopped? What about that time someone shit on me for writing publicly? What about that time everyone disagreed with what I wrote? Am I just posting into the abyss of the internet, doomed to get no engagement?
As this string of artificially produced self-doubt hits me, I have to summon the self-confidence to bite the silver bullet, and close my laptop or throw my phone away for a minute or two to refresh myself.
In a more macro, metaphorical sense, writing consistently is incredibly challenging.
It’s all well and good to write and ship one article. But writing another the next day? And then the next week? Sustained for months on end, non-stop?
Yikes. Not easy.
There are days where I look at my calendar, see that I’ve scheduled some time for writing or that it’s about time that I work on an article - and I just don’t want to do it.
I’ve realised the importance of putting my intentionality in the right place by considering why I write in the first place - is it to get as much external validation as possible (which is volatile)? Or is it to stay true to myself in my writing, document my thoughts from over the years, and invite like-minded discussion?
I love writing, and the only thing holding me back is fear and laziness.
I know I can overcome both, and that’s why I keep writing.
External Criticism
One of my close friends told me that someone we both know actually really enjoyed reading my content, despite their friends making fun of me for it.
I think that doing the immensely difficult thing of drafting up an article, revising it multiple times, sending it to mates for feedback, and consistently hitting the post button has given me this irrational self-confidence.
The more you do hard things, the more you’re comfortable with even harder things yet. Your brain develops some sort of confidence that resists the self-doubt.
Andrew Huberman and David Goggins described the neuroscience behind this in a recent podcast - there is a part of the brain called the mid-cingulate cortex which you can only strengthen by doing things that you don’t want to do.
If you’re comfortable with doing 100 push-ups non-stop, that area of the brain won’t grow. It’s only when you consistently do things that you increasingly don’t want to do that you, as Goggins says, callous your mind.
It’s basically how progressive overload in the gym works - you gradually increase the weight resistance on an exercise as your muscles grow and adapt.
I think the mindset I’ve developed by doing the hard thing of posting online sort of reflects my current attitude to irrational criticism ‘behind my back’ - if the criticism has a logical basis, it’s quite the contrary. I love debating different ideologies on a particular topic and welcome discussion.
My mind used to produce this crazy string of self-doubt (see above), but I don’t give two shits about irrational criticism now. I think it's usually a direct manifestation of tall poppy syndrome - a phenomenon in Australia and other countries where ‘successful’ people are criticised and discredited - i.e. ‘they only accomplished ABC because of XYZ’.
Sometimes I wonder what people say irrationally about my writing.
‘You're a dick because you share knowledge that attracts like-minded peolpe'
‘Your stuff is cringe because who the hell would want to to improve their lives’
‘I hate you because you're becoming a better person’
Marcus Aurelius writes another banger here: ‘Be soft on others, but hard on yourself.'
The playwright Terence made this epic quote: ‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.’
I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.
I’m not advocating for complete disregard for other’s opinions either - but rather, rationally considering the basis and context behind someone else’s comments before taking it seriously. When we stop talking, we stop understanding each other.
A friend of mine has brought up many disagreements - and that was a great conversation. We took time to understand each other, and it turns out that we just had different life philosophies, which is perfectly normal!
Believability Weighting
I guess how I think about this is in the context that Ray Dalio terms ‘believability weighting’.
“The best decisions are made by an idea meritocracy with believability-weighted decision making, in which the most capable people work through their disagreements with other capable people who have thought independently about what is true and what to do about it.
It is far better to weight the opinions of more capable decision makers more heavily than those of less capable decision makers. This is what we mean by ‘believability weighting.’”
How I interpret this is: if a person who’s never played tennis was to tell you how to hit a forehand… you wouldn’t really value their opinion as much as the person with expertise in that area, such as an accredited tennis coach.
If someone else tells you how to live your life… you also wouldn’t value their opinion as much as your self-perception, because you’re living your own life.
A great quote to live by here is: “the people who don’t mind matter, and the people who mind don’t matter.”
Another, by Steve Jobs: “Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
Because we’re all going to die one day, it almost seems stupid to live your life based on what another person tells you. I think the path to a fulfilled, well-lived life is comprised of consideration of the principles that you always want to live by, and never abating from them no matter what (unless it is you that adapts your principles).
My friend Sizhe Pan who read a draft of this article said that this ‘begs the question of whether ur principles are truly yours or a product of your environment’
The free will argument. Is there a true self, or is our judgement determined by our upbringing (which we very much can’t control)? I’ve written two articles on free will before, but I think I’ll have to write a third. I’ll write my next article on this - in a nutshell, I think that it’s a sliding scale between personal autonomy and determinism.
How do I write with the knowledge that someone will be reading my writing?
When I journal, I know in my mind that no one will ever read this stuff but me.
When I blog or write on LinkedIn, I try my best to maintain those unaltered thoughts and write my opinion more succinctly. And give up all thought of others judging me, trying my best to stay true to myself.
Almost being apathetic and detaching from the external validation. Easy to say but so hard to do.
Most of all, realising that at the end of the day, we’re all gonna die and that I shouldn’t let the opinions of others dictate how I’m going to live my life.
If my writing can help me meet just one like minded person, that’s a huge win for me.
Even if not, getting over the mental barrier is proof to myself that I can do really hard things.
As a good friend said, “Forfeiting a piece of yourself into the universe and being at peace with whatever happens after.”
I think this sums up 99% of every Stoic philosophy book I’ve read.
Irrational Self-Confidence
You need irrational self-confidence to write online consistently. Obsession.
You need to be so self-assured that even though people will shit on you, you know inside that it’s the right thing to do and hence, maintain it for months and years to come.
I hope I can sustain that inner intentionality.
Yurui
