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Nurture self-doubt
“If you believe you can, you can. If you believe you can’t, you’re right.”
– Henry Ford
A cast-iron sense of self-belief is a valuable ally in building a business. It’ll help you through the dark hours before dawn when all available evidence seems to point to you being a bone-headed numpty.
But over time, it can become a great hindrance. You start to believe the reports of your personal infallibility.
A number of experiments have demonstrated the effect of ‘confirmation bias’. This is a tendency to view neutral findings as supporting your particular set of beliefs (researchers are not immune, setting up experiments that are biased from the start).
This is then backed by ‘communal reinforcement’. Nobel laureate Daniel ...
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