The Roman poet Virgil once wrote that “they can because they think they can.”

Sentimental, maybe.

Also, possibly, a statement of neurological fact.

When you trace the root of action in humans, you don’t begin with motivation, discipline, talent, or will. You begin with belief: an implicit permission slip signed somewhere in the murky bureaucracy of the psyche, filed under the heading this is possible for me.

Standards are the invisible lines we draw, declaring what we will tolerate from ourselves, what we will pursue, and what we expect to happen if we try. But these lines are meaningless without belief. You can raise your standards until they scrape the ceiling, but if you don’t actually believe you can reach them, you won’t even try. Or worse: you’ll try in a way designed to fail, and tell yourself the standard was the problem, not the belief.

This is why so many self-improvement regimes collapse under their own weight. People set grand new standards - wake up at five, write a thousand words, run ten kilometers, launch a startup, quit sugar, say no to meetings - and fail within a week. The failure isn’t because the standard was unreasonable. It’s because there was a silent, unspoken belief that none of it would really stick. That this is just another phase, another cycle, another notebook filled with goals that will gather dust.

We are not consistent with our goals. We are consistent with our identities. And if your identity says you’re inconsistent, undisciplined, doomed to flake or drift or binge or relapse, then the moment you raise your standards, your subconscious files an objection. You “forget” your commitments. You postpone things “just for today.” You start researching better productivity tools instead of doing the actual work. All of it in the service of returning to your known baseline - the set of standards you believe you can meet.

There is no more powerful force in human psychology than the drive to remain consistent with our own self-image. William James understood this. He wrote that the greatest revolution of his generation was the discovery that by changing the inner attitudes of the mind, people could change the outer aspects of their lives. But he also knew that belief isn’t simply a decision. It’s a construct. And like all constructs, it can be undermined.

Beliefs act as unconscious commands. Call them system-level prompts for the human mind.

“You’re not the kind of person who follows through.” Or: “You’ve never been good at this, so why would now be any different?” These commands rarely show up as full sentences. They appear as feelings, hesitations, aversions. You find yourself avoiding the very thing you swore you wanted. You find yourself rationalizing delay. You convince yourself that raising your standards is self-abuse - because you’re secretly convinced you’ll fail.

We’ve all seen this play out in people who keep setting the same goals over and over again. It’s not that the goals themselves are flawed, or impossible to reach - but the belief structure underneath remains untouched. They raise the bar with one hand and pull themselves back down with the other. The standard becomes a site of inner conflict. Eventually they stop trying, and tell themselves a soothing story about how maybe their ambitions were unrealistic. Or maybe the fault lies with a a conspiracy. Or trauma. Or their parents. Or the weather. Anything except their own conviction that the new self they imagined might never be real.

And to be fair: that conviction may not be conscious. We’re not talking about rational pessimism. We’re talking about unconscious certainty - the certainty formed by childhood experiences, social reinforcement, past failures, and a dozen other inputs the mind no longer catalogs. As Freud put it, “a man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” But more insidiously, a man with a hidden conviction is a man who doesn’t even know what’s driving him.

The trick that most people don’t want to admit works: in order to meet a higher standard, you have to believe - with absolute certainty - that you will meet it before there’s any evidence. That’s what makes it hard. You have to flip the usual script. Not: I’ll believe I can do it once I’ve done it. But: I’ll believe I can do it so that I can do it.

This is an idea that Nietzsche would have found sympathetic - he said that we are artists of our own lives, and that art requires illusion. The illusion here is preemptive belief: the ability to act from a place of imagined inevitability, to say, “I will meet this standard,” and to let that belief shape your behavior as if it were already true. Because once it feels true, your brain recruits different resources. You make decisions with more finality. You interpret obstacles as expected parts of the process instead of proof that the game is rigged.

Compare this to someone who is “trying.” Trying is a liminal state. It signals that you haven’t yet committed. You’re waiting for proof. But change doesn’t work that way. You don’t get proof until after you’ve committed. Until after you’ve aligned your behavior, your time, your attention, and your emotion with the standard you claim to hold.

Which means certainty has to come first.

You don’t wait to feel better before acting differently. You act differently in order to feel better.

Belief is a lagging indicator of action.

Why do we expect personal change to feel like a lightning strike?

Maybe because that’s how it’s sold. Transformation in the modern self-help economy is aesthetic: a glow-up, a breakthrough, a montage. Rarely is it presented as a slog of repeating things you don’t yet believe in, until they become real.

But that’s how real change tends to happen. Slowly, then suddenly. First as pretense, then as belief, then as identity. You pretend to be someone who holds a higher standard. You behave like that person. Eventually, the pretense calcifies. Your identity catches up. The belief, once fake, becomes real.

We live in an era that treats belief in self as a suspect category. To talk about raising your standards and believing in yourself is to risk being seen as naive, individualistic, maybe even reactionary. But there’s a reason every revolution begins in consciousness before it manifests in society. Beliefs shape action. And action shapes the world.

The Stoics knew this. Marcus Aurelius wrote that “the things you think about determine the quality of your mind.” But he also warned: if you don’t train your thoughts, someone else will. That might be an advertiser. It might be your parents. It might be the lingering voice of a middle-school teacher who told you you weren’t cut out for more than mediocrity.

Belief is often inherited. But it can be edited. The moment you realize your standards are low because your beliefs are low - and your beliefs are low because you’ve never been taught otherwise - the game changes. You are no longer playing by rules you didn’t write.

A useful metaphor: belief is scaffolding. It doesn’t guarantee the building will stand forever, but without it, the work never begins. And if you sabotage the scaffolding before you start - by doubting, hedging, second-guessing - you guarantee the building will collapse.

What does it mean to raise your standards and believe you can meet them?

You begin treating belief as a responsibility. You track your thoughts. You identify the silent commands that tell you to aim lower, stay quiet, delay action. You challenge them. You act in defiance of them.

You fake it, to a degree, because faking (imitation) is how humans learn.

You signal to your mind: this is what we do now. You repeat until belief follows.

Eventually, it will. Because belief is plastic. And identity is just a scar tissue of repeated behavior.

If you want to change your life, raise your standards. But if you want those standards to stick, start by building belief. Train it. Act as if. Make certainty a practice, not a prerequisite. And then do it again, and again, until one day, you stop acting.