Conviction: When Your Mind Stops Negotiating WSLT#7

August 30, 2026

Conviction: When Your Mind Stops Negotiating WSLT#7

In the last WSLT posts, we saw about how to grow confidence and how to use our internal calculator. In this post we will see what psychological trait helps us achieve what we want. This post will have more stories and examples to make it easy to understand.

What psychological trait all winners have?

Most successful people have a common trait which makes them more successful than average people. It is called conviction, believing in oneself that one can achieve things one wants.

Let's see about it through a story first before jumping into more theory.

Darby’s Story: Learning from Failure

I borrowed this story from Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's the story of R.U. Darby, one of the famous insurance salesperson of the 1900s.

If we have to know how he became successful, we have to visit his devastating failure before he became a successful person.

During the Colorado Gold Rush, his uncle saw an opportunity in finding a gold mine and sought help from Darby. Darby spent his entire fortune to help his uncle, supporting him both financially and physically.

What seemed an opportunity suddenly disappeared and they weren't able to trace the gold further. They both accepted their defeat. They sold the equipment to a local junkman and returned.

The junkman consulted with an engineer and found out that the gold they were desperately looking for was just three feet below where they were digging. But Darby and his uncle gave up on it without checking further. The junkman made a fortune of it.

Knowing about this later, instead of accepting it as a fate, Darby learned from this failure. He realized, his lack of knowledge and lack of conviction caused this misfortune, so he took an oath to himself that he would never give up at the first sign of an obstacle.

Later when he became an insurance agent, he always remembered that the "No" from his clients was always the first obstacle.

He never wanted to lose the gold under three feet so he never took that No as a final answer. He became one of the elite insurance agents at that time who sold more than $1,000,000 life insurance annually.

There are so many lessons we can learn from his story. How to learn from failure, how to have a strong conviction, and so on. For this post, we are going to see about his conviction, which is one of the traits we have to develop.

Conviction Defined

Conviction is a strong belief one has that can't be shattered by fear or failure. It is not just a belief which can be changed easily.

Our WSLT5 and WSLT6 posts were on how to fortify the mind to have this kind of conviction about our goal. Let's see more about conviction and strong belief, how it may change our course of action.

Three Ways to Build Conviction

From the rich historical events, we could see there are multiple ways one can attain this conviction.

Some of them are,

By training the mind
Through a devastating failure
In a do-or-die situations

By training the mind:

We have already seen about it in earlier posts. so let me just give a short story and then move on,

In one of the greatest Indian epics Mahabharata, Arjuna was considered as one of the best Archers. There is a side story in the Mahabharata about his quest to become the best Archer.

He had an elder brother Bheema who was one of the physically strongest persons and a big foodie. One night, when everyone was asleep, Arjuna saw Bheema eating without lights.

Curious Arjuna asked Bheema how he was able to eat in pitch black, how he found food each time. Bheema responded by saying, by practice he knew where the food and how to eat and so why the need for lights.

This simple answer enlightened Arjuna and from that moment, he started training at night without lights. It's a small glimpse of how hard he trained and through that training how hard he fortified his mind. These trainings and mindset shaped his conviction. Because of his strong conviction, he even fought against valiant warriors in the war.

Through a devastating failure:

We already saw the story of Darby which is a perfect example of creating conviction from a devastating failure. Another such example is, Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motors. When he submitted his proposals to Toyota for piston rings, his initial designs were rejected and everyone laughed at him. At the age of 31, he joined the school again to learn about metallurgy and got a contract from Toyota.

But his factory was first destroyed in WWII by US bombers in 1944 and in 1945 by an earthquake. Even after all these struggles, he was able to set up a small motor company. He had zero capital to manufacture his own motors, so he contacted around 18,000 bicycle shop owners. 3,000 shop owners responded, stating they were ready to fund him. This eventually became the Honda Motors, one of the leading vehicle manufacturers and now competing with Toyota.

These stories from history give us the conviction of people who failed but succeeded using the failure as an experience instead of an ultimatum.

In a do-or-die situations:

Some pressurized scenarios may give a boost to our confidence. This is similar to the athlete story we saw in WSLT5. The pressure and the adrenaline rush will remove our mental barrier if the mind suspects that we are in danger. Similar to the internal calculator, this is also a safety mechanism developed by our body to safeguard ourselves.

In normal situations, our brain will limit our capacity to an extent that it won't damage our body or our emotions. But in some special scenarios, like a do-or-die scenario, it will let us use all our might without any restrictions.

Burn the Ships: No Retreat Psychology

Let me explain it through a story.

Upon arriving in the enemy kingdom, a king asked his army to sink all their ships. Then he told his army that the only way to return to their country is to win against the enemy.

The army fought fearlessly and conquered.

In various historical accounts, same event is believed to be done by different leaders in different timelines, Hernan Cortes of Spain / Umayyad commander Tariq ibn Ziyad / Chinese military general Xiang Yu.

In all three events, the victory was astounding. Xiang Yu won against an army of 400,000 with 50,000 soldiers. Tariq ibn Ziyad, with his 12,000 soldiers, not only won against the larger visigothic army, but believed to mark a new era of 800 years of Muslim rule. Hernan Cortes, with just 600 persons in the beginning, strategically aligned himself with the native allies and overthrew the Aztec Empire of Mexico.

The common point is, in all three scenarios, it's a do-or-die mission and there is no space for retreat. These kinds of scenarios breaks our mental barrier and give a boost to our conviction. As I told earlier, our mind may limit our potential in normal situations, but same mind will let us unleash our full potential if it senses a dangerous situation.

This do-or-die push is not always a good way to strengthen our conviction but still it's one of the effective way throughout mankind.

These are just three ways I can think of, and there may be various other ways one can develop conviction. As we saw in earlier articles, all kinds are not the same and so no single rule to make it work.

When to use which method to strengthen our conviction?

In the methods we discussed so far, I wouldn't wait for a devastating failure to occur, nor would I want to put myself in a do-or-die situation just to boost my conviction.

The safest bet is to train the mind day by day to have a strong conviction. If a situation arises, we can use other methods to make mind work towards our goals, but always train your mind to keep it in the best shape.

When retreat is logically the best option to survive (or at least that's what the mind tries to portray us), taking a step against that takes a lot of courage and commitment. The only way to get that commitment and conviction is through the daily training of our mind to eliminate the emotional and psychological limits.

When the commitment becomes absolute, our actions change and retreat won't be an option anymore.

So let's train our mind as a daily process, but if encountered, embrace failure as a retrospect point and proceed with the change of action but not to retreat. Let's keep do-or-die as an option whenever we need to push our mind.