Overview:
The article “How to Believe You Can Do Anything” by Brian Kim acts as a motivational guide for reaching the peak of true belief in the goals you’ve set for yourself. Our mothers, fathers, and teachers tell us all the time that we just have to believe in ourselves in order to accomplish something, but they never tell us how. This is the exact issue the article addresses. It dives in with rudimentary quotes we’ve heard our entire lives and boldly asks the question ‘How do you believe?’ The article answers this question with seven in-depth steps. From stating what your specific goal is to surround yourself with people who want to attain the same goal, these steps conquer every aspect of truly believing and succeeding.
Diction:
Readers get to enjoy a step-by-step model without the boring rigidness of a How-to guide. I found this article very easy to read because it felt personal and freely structured. It wasn’t doused in fancy, ostentatious words or phrases. The tone was overall down-to-earth and enjoyable. It does contain some content that may be sensitive for readers like religion and profanity but nothing of the extreme. There are a lot of lines in bold that contain ideas being repeated throughout the article. The author uses repetition to attempt to drill the most important aspects of each step into the reader’s brain.
Potential Turn-off:
This article contains a lot of repetition, which didn’t deter me from reading. If you’re the type of reader who just loathes repetition, use caution in choosing to read this article. There’s also a metaphorical touch to this article. Self-belief is implicated a lot. That being said, if you don’t like or necessarily agree with the basic idea of believing is the key to success, you may have a hard time leveling with this piece because that belief is the floor plan of the article.
Appealing Aspects:
What I found most interesting about this article was the thorough explanations of each step. They all contained supporting evidence, factual and opinionated. I think that is what made the article feel more personal. The author chose to include his inputs on certain things, specifically stating how he feels about the subject. A great idea this article mentions is that our beliefs are not our own. They’ve been passed down through books, oral storytelling, or environment. However, the author provides a way to counteract that, which is specification of your goal—meaning getting down to the very core of it. This article also stirs a lot of questions in the readers—mainly reflective ones. Throughout the article, I found myself questioning my own process of achieving goals. The question ‘why?’ resonated with me the most. If anything makes me question myself, I consider it a good read.
So, that leaves me to ask. What is your main goal you’re struggling to achieve? Do you wholeheartedly believe you can achieve it? If you hesitated to answer either of those questions, give “How to Believe You Can Do Anything” a read. I bet you’ll be able to answer those questions afterwards. If you would like to read the article, click here.