Anyone who has ever accomplished anything had to first believe in themselves.

You have to believe you can do something before you would ever even consider doing it.  Why would you attempt to go out for the team if you didn’t think you could make it?  What does this tell us?  It tells us that beliefs always precede our actions – and more importantly it’s the beliefs about ourselves and our abilities that have the greatest impact on our outcomes.
Sooner or later, those who succeed are those who think they can.
Stephen J. Cannell failed the first, fourth, and tenth grades.  He couldn’t read and comprehend like the other kids in his class.  He would spend five hours studying for a test, then fail it.  Then he talked to a friend later who got an ‘A’ and asked him how long he had studied, and the friend said “I didn’t study at all”.  He could have come to the conclusion that he just wasn’t intelligent.

“But I simply decided, as an act of will, to put it out of my mind,” he told me.  “I simply focused my energies on what I was good at, and that was football.  If it hadn’t been for football, which I excelled at, I don’t know what would have happened to me.  I got my self-esteem from playing sports.”

Athletics taught him that if he tried hard enough at something, he could achieve anything.  Later on in his life he used this belief to start writing scripts for television.  Over time, he opened his own production studio where he created, produced, and wrote more than 350 scripts for 38 different shows.  Before long, he had over 2,000 people on his payroll. After he sold his studio several years later, he went on to write seven best-selling novels!

Just goes to show what you can do if you believe in yourself.  The choice of what to believe is entirely up to you.

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