Belief is a mechanism too
Sometimes belief is the mechanism of success. Effort matters, but it is one mechanism among several, and it is not always the deciding one.
Belief tends to get filed under woo: ideology, philosophy, mysticism. We privilege mathematics and deterministic systems as the only serious kind of system. From a behavioral perspective, though, belief does real work, and it is worth understanding how.
Hard goals are hard for a reason
When you set a goal that is very difficult to achieve, there is probably a reason it is difficult, and probably a reason you chose it. The goals we set for ourselves usually place us in positions of power, privilege, or advantage relative to others.
That is what makes them worth pursuing. Most people are unwilling to pay the price, and paying it means doing things that are not well documented. If the path were well documented, it could be automated to some degree, the bar would be lower, and the outcome would be accessible to everyone.
Two responses to the unknown
On any path with a worthwhile outcome, you will run into problems you do not know how to overcome. At that point you have two options.
The first is to get frustrated, exercise low frustration tolerance, and quit. Plenty of people take that option. The second is to believe you can overcome challenges you do not yet understand, and that you can solve problems that have no prefabricated solution.
Double down on method
Reaching that level of self-belief requires doubling down on method rather than strategy. The core idea is a belief in your capacity to exert your will, or more precisely a heuristic: go discover and explore the unknown, and practice adaptability, inventiveness, and creativity once you are there.
Believing you can do those things is what lets you choose challenges, paths, and goals that carry a lot of ambiguity and missing information. If you can choose those goals and commit to them, you can choose success.
Reduce the path to one repeatable action
In practice, you put yourself in uncomfortable situations and reduce the goal path to the simplest possible actions. Ideally you find one action you can repeat over time to reach a specific goal, with as few steps as possible, and a single step if you can manage it.
That action should be easy to turn into an automatic habit and close at hand in your environment, so you can do it consistently. Discovering what the action is may require you to gain knowledge or build skills. That discovery is part of the work.
The reps are the research
Self-belief, in this sense, is a disposition: a willingness to step into situations that require more from you than you currently know how to give. You build it by practicing exactly that.
If your goal is to build a personal brand and create content, you press record. You accept content that is less than perfect so you can do the reps and discover how to do it better. Some things can only be learned through experience. You cannot research your way to them, and the tasks that feel like preparation are often pseudo-tasks. You cannot let them block you.
The more you do the thing, the more you believe, the more you understand, and the stronger your instinct to do it again. You become heuristic-minded. You build your own methods, frameworks, and toolbox, and you build the muscle that says, I can figure this out.
The takeaway
That muscle compounds. The more you use it, the more likely you are to set goals that are satisfying, and the more likely you are to achieve them. Paradoxically, your willingness to do things you do not currently believe you can do is the determining factor in how many satisfying things you will achieve in your life. Pick the goal, find the one repeatable action, and step in.