I Did

Here is the whole idea in one sentence, so you can stop reading now if you already understand it: if you don't believe in yourself, it won't matter that everyone else does; and if you do believe in yourself, it won't matter that no one else does. Your belief in your own potential is responsible for roughly one hundred percent of what you will ever accomplish. Today I want to illustrate that with a story from my own life. And along the way I'll explain something that confuses a lot of people — why other human beings can be cold, dismissive, and even a little cruel to you for no reason you can identify. It comes down to a single thing: the gap between where they think they stand and where they think you stand.

Let's get to it.

The year nobody could place me

Years ago I joined a small, ferociously competitive studio — the kind of place people move across the country to get into. Like most human environments, it had a status hierarchy, and everybody could feel it even though nobody printed it on the wall. The people whose work got chosen were higher status than the people whose work got noticed, who were higher status than the people whose work got ignored entirely. In a place like that, your social position is more or less assigned to you by those outcomes.

But there was a catch. In your first year you weren't allowed to compete. You weren't allowed to put your work forward at all. You were just expected to show up, absorb, and train. Which meant that for that entire first year, nobody — including me — actually knew where anyone fell in the pecking order. It's hard to know who's fastest before the race has been run.

So there I was, unranked. And to be honest, I was struggling. I didn't have money, I didn't have connections, I didn't have a single person in that building who would have vouched for me. I spent most of that year just trying to get through the day without drowning. I was, by every visible measure, a nobody.

But I was there for a reason. I believed in myself. I was struggling and broke and invisible, and I still knew, somewhere underneath all of it, that I had the thing. Honestly, I was a little puzzled that it wasn't obvious to everyone else too.

I had none of the usual signifiers of status, and I hadn't yet been allowed to earn any. All I had was a private conviction about what I was capable of.

Why people are cold to you for no reason

That year I ran into something that has confused millions of people, and it left me scratching my head too. There were people in that building — people I admired, people who were already a rung or two "above" me in everyone's mental map — who treated me with a dismissiveness that felt out of all proportion. I hadn't done anything to them. I wasn't pushy or rude. I would simply express admiration, or ask to be included, or offer to collaborate, and I'd get back this frost. Sometimes in front of others it curdled into something close to contempt. And I remember thinking: why? What did I do to deserve that?

Here's the explanation, and once you see it you can't unsee it. It has nothing to do with cruelty for its own sake. It has to do with perceived status.

It's not a coincidence that I started this story by telling you I was unranked and invisible. Picture the map in the other person's head. In their mind, they are up here, and I am down there. Now a person who is placed in that dynamic — who feels a lower-status person reaching up toward them — instinctively wants to end the interaction quickly. And there's a logic to it.

People associate upward. They want to be linked with those at or above their level, because status is largely a function of what other people can see. So when someone they've filed under "below me" approaches with warmth or ambition, they deduce one of two things:

Higher-status people tend to receive a lower-status person's enthusiasm as a subtle demotion. That's why they don't want to be publicly associated with it. And the fastest, most efficient way to make an unwanted association go away is to make it uncomfortable. Colder people reach for that tool faster and more sharply than others do — but almost anyone will reach for it eventually if the softer signals don't work.

I've been on the other side of it too

Now, it would be easy for me to sit here nursing the memory and ask, who did those people think they were? But if I'm honest, I understand them completely — because I've since been placed on the other side of the exact same dynamic.

I've spent years building something of my own. Pouring in the hours, the reputation, the accumulated experience, slowly turning it into something with real weight. And that work has paid off in ways I'm genuinely grateful for. But here's the flip side: now I get approached, constantly, by people who started something last week, who have almost nothing built yet, and who want to partner as though we're standing on level ground.

I'm not easily insulted. But I can see clearly how someone could be. Because the proposal carries one of those same two messages: either the person doesn't understand the gap, or they're quietly asserting that we're equivalent. And a partnership like that wouldn't be an exchange — it would be a transfer, almost entirely in their favor.

Relationships only form when unequal goods of comparable value are exchanged. When the values are too lopsided, the transaction — if it happens at all — isn't a relationship. It's charity.

So how do I respond? Not with cruelty — I'd never do to someone what was done to me. Usually I just don't respond at all. And that, right there, is the same underlying machinery that produced the coldness I couldn't understand as a beginner. It was never personal. It was arithmetic. Shoot your shot, absolutely — but don't be shocked or wounded if it goes nowhere. That silence is data. It's feedback about your perceived value, your positioning, or both.

The race, finally run

Let's get back to my story. My second year came, and the gate finally opened — I was allowed to compete. And I started to win. Small things at first, then bigger ones, then the kind of thing that makes people turn their heads. Doors that had been sealed shut swung open. One result led to the next, and it eventually culminated in the single most prominent thing that studio had to offer — the equivalent of playing first chair.

And as the news traveled, one of the people who had been coldest to me back when I was invisible came up to me. Same person. And they said:

"Wow. You got that? Who would've thought you'd get this far."

I looked that person dead in the eye. And I said:

I did.

And I walked away.

Besides being one of the more satisfying moments of my life, it makes the whole point for me. I believed in myself. I knew what I could do back when the visible evidence said I was nothing — back when I was unranked, broke, and treated like an interruption. And that is exactly how it's supposed to go.

Nobody can see your potential

Listen to me carefully, because this is the part that actually changes lives.

No one can see your potential. It is completely invisible to the outside world. The rest of humanity can only see your results.

That's not a complaint — it's just the physics of it. Potential is internal. It produces no light. Nobody can validate it for you in advance, because there is nothing yet for them to look at. Which means you have to be the one who can see it, because you're the only one who can, and because you'll need that private conviction to survive the long, unglamorous, unrewarded stretch of actually generating the results that finally make it visible to everyone else.

This is also why you have to be brutally honest with yourself about who you are, where your talent genuinely lies, and what you can and cannot do. That honesty is not the enemy of self-belief — it's the engine of it. It lets you go all in on the races you can actually win, instead of burning yourself out as an also-ran in races you were never built for.

And here's the hard truth underneath all of it: you will have to believe in yourself, because for a very long time nobody else will. When I was starting out, I put out work constantly to near-total silence — a handful of eyes, one lukewarm reaction, the occasional comment telling me I wasn't good enough yet. My friends and family were not calling me up to say hang in there, I believe in you. If anything, some of them quietly preferred I didn't succeed, because a peer's success is an affront to a certain kind of vanity.

So don't wait for the encouragement. It isn't coming, and it doesn't need to. The reason you're not succeeding yet is not that other people don't believe in you. No one believes in you. And that wouldn't matter in the slightest — if you did.

So let me ask you the only question that counts. Do you believe in yourself? Not out loud, not for anyone else's benefit. Just honestly, to yourself, right now.

Because one day someone who overlooked you is going to turn around, a little surprised, and ask how you ever got this far. And on that day, I want you to be able to look them in the eye and give the only answer that was ever true.

I did.