on not living a paper-thin life
notes on implicit and explicit conviction
Life lately has been a series of repeatable motions. I head to work and read on the way. When I reach home, I cook dinner, stretching my cramped limbs while the veggies roast in the oven’s sweltering heat. Some evenings I meet M and friends, other evenings I take a walk, call my mother. I sit cross-legged on the balcony to feel the cool air that contrasts with the warmth of my duvet I later burrow into. In the mornings, I make coffee. Rinse and repeat. I am a creature of habit, and my routines bring me stability.
Sometime in the last few months, I said yes to a new work opportunity. I told myself I needed to be more ambitious; I reminded myself that I had a lot more room to grow. As for my routine, not much changed; it was just a matter of heading east in the mornings instead of north.
And yet, something feels markedly different this time around. I can’t name it, but I can feel its absence. “Sometimes, the things corporates do to make workplaces feel meaningful are paper-thin replacements for genuine conviction”, M says to me, in a voice note punctuated by crunching leaves and merry birdsong. I listen to it in the pantry of an air-conditioned office surrounded by squat concrete buildings and no trees. I think of Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle, who grows dimmer and weaker the farther away Howl strays from his conviction. I think, perhaps, so have I.
Conviction is the distinct thrumming energy that flows through things—people, software, art, music—that make you sit up and take notice. I’ve seen it go by different labels: authenticity, belief, clarity, agency, intuition. To my mind, they are all tributaries of the surefire, ever-onward river that is conviction.
I think a lot about the idea that conviction is the union of conscience and will. There's real power in having no gap between what you value and what you do, between what you deeply want and how you take action. Sometimes, this bridge is engineered by governments, media, influencers, teachers… Anyone we see in a position of authority. Something on a graph, email or letter wills us to keep moving. In echo chambers like the internet, ideas can amplify and rebound enough to make them feel like they were always ours. Familiarity masquerades as truth. It takes just a quick look at the headlines to know why this is dangerous.
Implicit conviction, on the other hand, is felt rather than believed. It doesn’t ride on forecasts and speculations so much as align with what is right. It doesn’t extol the values of goodness, but recognises it when it sees it. I like to think Yvon Chouinard had this sort of fire burning in his chest when he donated Patagonia to charity. It wasn’t a calculated CSR move, but a gut decision about what felt inexplicably right to him.
The two exist in tension. For many of us, genuine conviction is buried deep under layers of societal expectations and self-doubt. It feels almost impossible to find the faint signal ringing within us amidst all the external noise. To do so requires courage: you need to hold off the forces trying to beat down the door of your mind while you try to set things straight inside.
Conviction is an extension of self-knowledge. It emerges from your experiences and prior conditions. To know that is to know yourself. Being someone with conviction is really just living with clarity, and everything else is downstream of this self-knowledge. Like your taste, which is only strong when it reflects the choices and discoveries you’ve made consciously. Or your idea of greatness, which lends direction to your ambition.
On the other hand, having self-knowledge but lacking the will to act on it feels like a cosmic trap. Ira Glass talks about the Gap: “your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you”. Many people never bridge this gap because they lack will.
It could be because something else holds them back. For some it’s money, comfort, familiarity, or familial expectations. For yet others, it could be trauma, a desperation for prestige, trauma, or an old identity that’s hard to shake off. We might even delude ourselves into thinking these are convictions we should have. But, to borrow what Paul Graham said about prestige, these external convictions are actually “powerful magnets that warp even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.” They’re paper over cracks. Sooner or later, they rip, and true conviction makes itself felt.
I’ve seen that manifest a few different ways through my life: I lose faith in systems and can’t give myself wholly over to anything without doubt. I can’t decide how much I’m willing to sacrifice, and what. I don’t know what is important (only what’s urgent), and so utter dedication feels laughably impossible. And so it goes, ad nauseam. The stories I tell myself start to peel away over time, like old paint on wood furniture.
Self-doubt and a lack of conviction make more people abandon a vision than competition ever will. But when there's no distance between value and action, and if will is as strong as (if not stronger than) skill, paths emerge where once there were only dead ends.
This conviction is magnetic, even contagious, because it's rare. In a world where many people say one thing and do another, someone with conviction stands out because it's visible in every choice they make. Their authenticity resonates. It's how great ideas snowball along the way. It makes you want to support them of your own volition, learn from them, work with them—even more so because they're not looking for admiration. They just want to keep on keeping on.
True conviction, in my eyes, doesn’t just attract followers; it brings collaborators. Great movements, companies, and cultural shifts often start this way: with one person whose actions and beliefs are so tightly bound that they inspire others to rally around the flag. People with conviction are catalysts; not because they’re special, but because their conviction is.
This is part one of my series on conviction. In part two, I will talk about how conviction is intimately tied to agency. To get that in your inbox, make sure you’ve signed up: