You’ve heard this before just as often as I have, but earlier this week someone again told me that thing about acting as if you already have the job you want. Fake it till you make it, they said, act and dress and behave as if you are what you want to be, whatever that is.

The argument is that total immersion and a concomitant total self-belief will get you where you long to go.

I can buy the immersion side. I know when I’m with other writers it doesn’t matter how different we are, for instance, we all somehow get it. Whatever it is. There is something fulfilling about that, and if I’m about to mix a metaphor up, let me: a rising tide lifts all boats and does so until the cows come home.

What I can’t get behind is the total self-belief part. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have it, but for some reason this time when it was said to me, I was reminded of every time I’ve heard it.

And I realised that I am never told this by someone who has got where they want to go. Most of the time the person telling me is currently striving toward that, and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of good old striving, but there is something wrong with this picture. The person who told me it this week had read it in an autobiography of a man who’d done this self-belief business. Actually, it had worked out for the autobiography guy, so I must be wrong, yet I can ignore that like a man and instead keep coming back to this same thing.

I am never told that self-belief works by someone who has self-belief.

Honestly, I think I prefer people who don’t.

But as well as the person telling me about self-belief being usually so far away from self-belief, maybe what I think I’m seeing is a similar disconnection between describing work and actually doing it.

It’s like the way — you’ve heard this, too — if you spend 10,000 hours on something, you will become good at it, or an expert, or something.

No one, not one single soul, who says that is currently anywhere but at the start of the 10,000 hours. For speed, I just nod and ask them to make sure to look me up when they’re on 9,999.

There isn’t a number of hours. There isn’t a manifestation of success that comes from nothing but total self-belief.

All there is, all there ever is, is the work and the effort and the striving. I have no clue why anyone would want to be any other way.

Mind you, total self-belief. Complete confidence, complete certainty. Oh, it would be good to have that. Just for an hour or two, just once in a while.