Dan Djurdjevic

Introduction I was going to title this essay "In defence of faith". But as you'll soon see, the mindset I am going to defend falls a bit short of "faith" in the strict sense of that word. Rather, I will be talking about the importance of "banishing self-doubt" . My reasons for this subtle, though important, distinction will become clear later on. Regardless of what we call it, I think this mindset is nothing short of critical to your "success" and general happiness – whether in martial arts (as depicted in the adjacent meme) or life in general . I hope to explain and evidence exactly how and why I think so in this essay. But first, let me first discuss "faith" more generally. Faith: is it the "antithesis of reason"? "Faith" cops a lot of bad press from modern skeptical thinkers. And, to a large extent, I can see why. Faith is, after all, "blind": it is the belief in something without (...

I'm not entirely sure whether people actually "believe" in things when they say they do. I think often enough people WANT something to be true and then block from their mind any critical analysis of it. So it's not so much a "belief mechanism" so much as it is a "suspension of critical analysis" mechanism. Such a mechanism is, I believe, very much rooted in our biological make-up; if we were to keep confronting certain uncomfortable truths on an hourly basis we would not be able to function as a species. Blocking them out is useful from a evolutionary perspective. I've been confronted many times with: "why don't you believe in X - don't you like the idea of...?". My answer is: "wishing don't make it so". Hence I don't "believe" in the theory of evolution, for example. It is merely a theory that makes inductive sense to me. I incline towards it on a strong balance of probabilities - like the theory o...