There was a night last October when I sat on my kitchen floor for a long time.
I won’t dress it up. I was out of work. The relationship was gone. The identity I had built around being someone who produces and provides had been stripped down to nothing. I didn’t know who I was without those things attached to my name.
I got up eventually. Not because I felt better. Because I made a decision — even then, even in that, there was a sliver of something unreasonable in me that said: this isn’t it.
I couldn’t prove it. Nothing around me supported it. But the belief was there. Quiet. Stubborn. Irrational. Real.
I started calling it unreasonable belief. The belief you carry before the evidence arrives. The kind that gets you up on the days when nothing external would justify it.
This past week, I won my first autocross event — in a stock car I’d never raced before, first try. The same week, someone I care about told me she loves me. I closed a major project milestone at work. I played tennis matches I had no business winning and won them anyway.
None of it was luck. All of it was compounding.
Here’s what I’ve learned about unreasonable belief: it doesn’t make the hard things easier. It just makes you stay in the room longer than anyone who’s only motivated by evidence.
Evidence people quit when the scoreboard says quit. They wait for proof before they invest. They need external confirmation before they move.
Unreasonable belief people keep going when the scoreboard says stop. Not because they’re delusional — because they decided something true about themselves before the world confirmed it. And then they did the work, quietly, until the world had no choice but to catch up.
The kitchen floor moment didn’t destroy me. It clarified me.
If you’re on your own version of that floor right now — the diagnosis, the loss, the career collapse, the identity crisis — I want you to know this:
The sliver of belief that refuses to die when everything else says it should? That’s not stubbornness. That’s not denial. That’s the most honest part of you telling you who you actually are.
Don’t let circumstances talk you out of it.
The evidence comes later. First comes the unreasonable belief.
Just. Keep. Moving.