How the self-esteem craze took over America (2017)
&quot;‘Believe in yourself and anything is possible’? Nope, it’s just not true.&quot;<p>This is such a great quote.  I honestly hate people that spout nonsense like anything is possible if you just believe, and that if you don&#x27;t, it&#x27;s that you obviously don&#x27;t believe enough.  It&#x27;s almost the same as the prosperity gospel nonsense.<p>And later on in the article, talking about grit, I feel like this is the swing the other way.  And now we&#x27;re getting messages like &quot;nothing is impossible if you work hard enough at it&quot;, which also shift the burden back to you.  If you fail, it&#x27;s not the world that&#x27;s hard or unfair (it naturally is both), but again it&#x27;s a personal failing on your part for not trying hard enough (or believing you are good enough). Everyday I see blog posts with the same kind of thing about how they have accomplished so much before most people have breakfast.  Yet that seems to be mostly writing posts about how to get stuff done.<p>Obviously many things in life are hard, and you have to believe that you can do them to put the hard effort in believing you can accomplish them.  But leaning so hard one way or the other that you will get some magic power is the kind of nonsense people love to buy, and therefore sell.