On conviction

The last couple of days have been quite interesting, in and outside of work. A common theme that has struck me is the importance of conviction and more weirdly how illogical it can be most of the time.

By definition: a firmly held belief or opinion

Now the thing with conviction is it can often disguise itself as delusion at times and while I’m not writing this to determine at what point it stops being conviction and starts being delusion I do acknowledge there is a fine line… somewhere.

I’m fortunate to be around individuals who have strong convictions about what they want out of life and a certain endeavor, and when they speak about their plans or how they achieved a certain thing, there are parts where I have to ask, how did you know? Where was the data to support this?

For such logical people, it seems counterintuitive that they would go all in on something they believe in with what seems like not enough data.

Some of this can also be summed up to risk taking, to which I say you need conviction to take risk. Else you’d be stuck on “what if” for a very long time.

So where does this leave me? Well I think a lot of this is rubbing off on me, more importantly I think the big lesson here is no one would be willing to take a chance on you if you do not have a reasonable sense of conviction towards your ideas.