Something useful I’ve learned in the last few months is that you should learn to be strategically irrational. This has benefited me in two particularly helpful ways and I’ve incorporated these into absolutes in my life:

1) You should never have a reason to be happy.

2) You should never have a reason to be confident.

It’s useful for a person to be happy, right? People should be happy. They shouldn’t have to live in misery or be unhappy, ever. People function better when they’re happy and they get more done.

Likewise, it’s beneficial to be confident in yourself. If you doubt yourself, you don’t try as hard and you can’t get nearly as much done. It’s also harder to be a leader if you’re not confident in yourself, because people can’t see the ideal in you that makes them want to follow you. Who would follow someone that doesn’t know where they’re going?

You don’t need a reason to breathe to keep doing it, do you? So why do you need a reason to be happy or confident? If they’re critical to your survival, why do you need a reason to do them?

If you can accept those two ideas, then you’ll agree that being happy and being confident are pretty instrumental to success. So it’s pretty simple when you get down to it and accept the possiblity of suspending logic and reason. 🙂
Now that leads to the question: What can you do to safeguard those ideas and ensure that you’ll always be happy and confident?

Don’t have a reason for being that way.

Sure, it’d be nice if you could know objectively that you are a big freakin’ badass, that you have 1.5 billion compelling reasons to be happy and every reason in the universe to be confident in your abilities. But that makes them fallible.

The root of it is the fact that for every REASON for being that you can comprehend, there is an objection that can arise that will counter it.

It’s easier not being happy and not being confident, and your mind will conjure up whatever reason it can to subvert you and make you doubt yourself. For every reason you have, you will find one more objection to squash it.

If you can accept the freaky ideal of not having a reason for being happy, you can stop those objections dead in their tracks.

Think about it — if you’re happy and confident, and you have absolutely no reason for it, and it’s not based in reality at all, but you cling to it nevertheless — what on earth could possibly dislodge that belief? What could make you stop being happy? What outer or inner force could convince you to stop being confident? You can be impervious to reasoning yourself out of good habits.

It’s a vitally useful stronghold of the mind to

1) Define what qualities are important to you in order to succeed, and

2) Adopt what measures are necessary to safeguard those against any potential adversary, including yourself.

I’m the biggest fan of logic and reason that you could possibly imagine, and coming to understand this entire message that I’ve given involved turning my entire world upside down and doubting everything I’d come to know in my whole life… but it was one of the most important things I’ve ever done, and it’s so goddamned important that I needed to tell other people about it.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

If you need a reason to be happy or confident, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.