You cannot simply 'change your beliefs' to become successful.

Nir Eyal, international bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life is promoting a new book Beyond Belief: Change Your Mind. Change Your Life. I attended a short zoom session via Ali Abdaal today, and honestly I just couldn’t stand it: if the zoom session is anything to go by, this book will be unconvincing. (However, this didn’t stop me from pre-ordering and, likely, hate reading the book).

The thesis of the book is: what stands between you and success is your beliefs. Change your beliefs and success will soon follow. Beliefs are like a pair of tinted glasses you wear, and most importantly change. Instead of the blinkered and limiting glasses you currently wear, why not try on a more optimistic pair to see how it feels? Surely then there will be some kind of lift-off, you will suddenly lose weight, have amazing sex, become enlightened, happy, and financially free.

Here beliefs are in your head acting as some pre-perceptual filter altering and organising your experiences. However, success isn’t just about changing your beliefs. You live in a society where outcomes depend on others’ actions, attitudes, and structural constraints. Changing your beliefs without the work of changing other’s beliefs about you is just a recipe for disappointment.

There are two reasons. Firstly, the thesis doesn’t account for scarcity. The kinds of positions in society that are desirable are fewer than the people who want them. If you want to become a bestselling author, you must not only write a fantastic book but also persuade a sizable number of people to read it instead of other books. It will have nothing to do with your beliefs. In other words, you have to change other people’s attitude to you, even if it is in some small way.

Even if we grant that there are many good and successful lives that do not involve being super-rich playboys who drive sports cars and live in mansions, the thesis is still a bad one. You do not exist separately; you live in a community. The community I mean is a specific philosophical one. It’s not some cosy village, but a highly specific community of subjects who give and accept reasons. We give reasons for behaviours such as eating certain foods or pursuing certain goals.

That is, we must justify ourselves to each other.

It is not just a case of changing behaviour and sticking to a diet. You must also change the attitudes of everyone in your life, because the weight you are is a structural part of the lives that are intertwined with yours. I have a friend who wants to lose weight, but his partner expresses her love through baking. If he cuts back, his marriage suffers. His weight isn’t merely a belief he has, but something which is the outcome of a process he isn’t in control of. The beliefs he has about his body are a structural part of his way of life. He will have to change much more than just his beliefs.

As a result of living in these communities, people will treat you in certain ways because of what they think of you. There will be some actions you cannot take and some lives will be completely foreclosed from you. What you can achieve depends heavily on how others perceive and treat you.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that you simply cannot change your beliefs to create the outcome in the world that you want. If it were that simple there would be no need for the mass political movements we have seen over the past 50 years or so.

Instead you have to bring other people along with you—you must change other people’s minds to achieve different things. Changing your mind is easy, changing other people’s minds about you is much harder. Often much harder than just living your current life.

Gay people, for instance, had to convince wider society that they were not mad, and then that they were not diseased. Now that they are an integrated part of society, they are no longer subject to the sort of discrimination that left them careerless and penniless, as many found themselves in previous generations. (Or they just ended up dead because wider society felt that death was the best outcome for them.)

Want to start a business? You have to persuade other people to give you their money. Want to write? You have to persuade others to read you.

There is no action in a vacuum.