You Have To Believe You Can Win
Here’s a fact about human nature: you act according to what you believe is possible. If you don’t think you could ever really reach your fitness goals, you won’t make time to hit the gym. Why bother with an exercise in futility? If you think there’s no way you could get hired for that job, maybe you’ll still submit an application — but you won’t take the time to give it your best effort. Everyone practices that kind of daily, small-scale triage. You assign your limited resources not where they’re necessarily most needed, but rather where they can accomplish the most good — the maximum bang for your buck.
Most of the time, that’s sensible. You don’t want to waste your energy on something that won’t work out anyway. But it sets you up to inadvertently sabotage your own efforts. If you don’t stick to an exercise regimen, then your initial assumption that you’ll never get fit will come true. Unfortunately for you, that’ll be because you created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who knows how it might have gone if you took your own efforts seriously? Maybe you would have failed anyway, but maybe not. Either way, the prophecy wants to protect itself. So, it makes sure you’ll never get the chance to find out.
That applies to individual daily life, but it also holds true for politics. A candidate who doesn’t think she stands a serious chance won’t bother to recruit volunteers…