“Believe you can and you’re halfway there,” Theodore Roosevelt.  In all that we do, we need to believe if we are ever going to succeed. Not only believing that we can, but embodying that we can.  It is one thing to say we believe and will do something, it’s another thing to do what we say.  If we merely believe and take no action on it, we will stay right where we are.  Here’s the thing: words are motivating and they can make us feel all sorts of things.  They inspire joy, hope, rage, envy, love, anger—all of those emotions.  Words can also inspire action, and yes, belief.  So I pause here to say that words in themselves are powerful.  Now, when we have a vision, we need to move beyond words and the truth is many people don’t even start.  They let fear take over, things get in the way, we don’t prioritize the beliefs we adhere to or follow so we rarely start.  The most difficult part of starting any journey is the start—it takes more energy to start moving the train than it does to keep it moving so the reality is half of getting there is taking the first step.    

I want to talk about the other side of belief and that is allowing ourselves to get stuck in it or to adhere to it so rigidly that we hold ourselves back.  There’s a line in the movie Dogma where Rufus says that he feels it’s better for people to have ideas than beliefs because beliefs are harder to change—people will die for beliefs.  This is a real implication/reminder of the power of belief: the fact that beliefs are things people do in fact put their lives down for says something to the nature of a belief.  This doesn’t have to be negative by any means—some people have enough faith in their belief that it inspires them to start that big project, it inspires them to help people, to meet people and create something new.  So this is an example of what happens when we take such a powerful force and apply it to our own belief and path: movements can form even if it is just moving ourselves.

And that is the key to this entire thing: when we believe enough we have to take action and move otherwise we will always stay where we are at hoping for things to change, waiting for that moment, that vision to fall into our laps.  We need to have that balance of understanding what the goal is and the belief that we can do it and then we need to take it further and have enough belief to actually get started and take that action.  Belief is truly a powerful thing.  It can be tricky because sometimes there are projects we start that we may never see the results of.  There’s a proverb/saying about how the man who plants a tree knowing he will never sit in its shade truly understands life.  There are several variations of this in Greek proverb and from Tagore.  It is only belief in our idea, in ourselves that allows us to start projects like that.  Live like that, flexible enough to adapt, but strong enough to start something we may never see the end of knowing we can.  Allow that belief to guide us and be shaped by the ideas that feed into it—that is the secret of life.