To Have Faith Is To Have Wings

Most people know Peter Pan from the Disney movie, but the story began with the Scottish writer J.M. Barrie, first as a play in 1904 and then as a novel, Peter and Wendy, in 1911. In it, Peter flies into the nursery window of the Darling family and invites Wendy and her brothers, John and Michael, to come with him to Neverland. The problem is that the children can't fly.

Peter tries to teach them. "You just think lovely wonderful thoughts," he explains, "and they lift you up in the air." The children try. They jump from the floor, then from the beds, and they keep falling down. Barrie admits Peter had been teasing them a little, because no one can fly unless fairy dust has been blown on them.

So Peter blows some of Tinker Bell's fairy dust on each of them, and tells them to wriggle their shoulders and let go. Michael goes first, and suddenly he's floating across the room. Then the others follow, and the three children fly out the window after Peter.

Barrie wrote about flying in an earlier book too, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, published in 1906. In it, he gave his own explanation of why people can't fly. "The reason birds can fly and we can't," he wrote, "is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings." And he warned about what happens the moment that faith slips: "The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it."

The best-known moment about belief in the story comes later. Tinker Bell drinks poison meant for Peter, and her light starts to fade. Peter learns she could get well again if children believed in fairies. In the play, he turns to the audience and asks them directly. In the novel, he calls out to every child who might be dreaming of Neverland: "If you believe, clap your hands; don't let Tink die." The children clap, and Tinker Bell lives.

It's a children's story, but Barrie's point applies to adults too. In his world, belief is what gets you off the ground, and doubt is what brings you back down. It's worth asking whether there's any truth in that outside of Neverland.

Around 1990, Jim Carrey was a struggling comedian in Los Angeles. He had grown up in Canada in a family that, for a time, couldn't afford a home. As a teenager he worked night shifts as a janitor at a factory with his brother, and he dropped out of school at 16. He'd moved to Los Angeles to make it in comedy and acting, and it wasn't happening yet.

In a 1997 interview with Oprah Winfrey, he described what he did during those years. He would picture directors being interested in him and people he respected saying they liked his work, even though he had nothing at the time.

Then he went further. He wrote himself a check for $10 million "for acting services rendered," dated it Thanksgiving 1995, about five years away, and kept it in his wallet until it was falling apart. Just before Thanksgiving 1995, he said, he found out he was going to be paid $10 million for Dumb and Dumber.

It's easy to tell this story as magic: write it down, believe it, and it comes true. But Carrey himself didn't tell it that way. When Oprah suggested that visualizing works if you work hard, he agreed, and added that you can't just visualize and then go eat a sandwich.

During those five years, he kept performing, auditioning, and working on his craft, including several seasons on the TV comedy show In Living Color. The check kept him believing long enough to keep doing the work. That's the same thing Barrie was describing. Even with the fairy dust, the children still had to wriggle their shoulders and let go. But without it, they couldn't get off the ground.

Last week, I took an Uber, and the driver and I ended up talking about belief. I was struggling with something at the time, and it came up in the conversation.

He told me he has so much faith and belief that everything will work out in his favor. And because he believes that, he said, he naturally takes action. And then things do work out in his favor.

Then he said something that stuck with me. He said the difference between him and me was that he believes more than I do.

What struck me most was the order he described. He believes, so he acts, and because he acts, things work out. The belief came first, and the action followed from it naturally. For him, acting was simply what believing looked like.

It made me think about how many of us, when we're struggling, run that order the other way. We wait for some sign that it's going to work before we put everything into it. We hold back a little, in case it doesn't. And holding back makes it less likely to work, which gives us even more reason to doubt.

In 1948, the sociologist Robert Merton gave a name to something people had noticed for a long time. He called it the self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that's false at first, but that leads people to act in ways that make it come true. His best-known example was a bank.

A bank can be perfectly healthy, but if a rumor spreads that it's about to fail, worried customers rush to pull out their money. Enough withdrawals, and the bank really does fail. The belief caused the very thing it predicted.

Merton's example was about fear, but the same process works in the other direction. If you believe something you're attempting will work, you're more likely to put real effort into it, keep going after a setback, and take the next step. Those actions make it more likely to work. That's the order the Uber driver described: belief, then action, then results.

One of the clearest real-world examples comes from selling insurance, a job where most calls end in rejection. In the 1980s, the psychologist Martin Seligman and Peter Schulman studied life insurance agents at Metropolitan Life.

They measured each agent's explanatory style, meaning how they tend to explain bad things that happen to them. People with a pessimistic style tend to see a setback as permanent, as affecting everything, and as their own fault. People with an optimistic style tend to see it as temporary, limited to that situation, and something they can change.

In one of their studies, agents in the more optimistic half sold 37 percent more insurance in their first two years than agents in the less optimistic half. In another, the more pessimistic agents were more likely to quit. Both groups faced the same kind of rejection. What differed was what they believed those rejections meant, and that shaped whether they kept picking up the phone.

There's an important limit, and it's the reason Carrey's sandwich line matters. Some positive thinking leads to action, and some takes its place.

In 2011, the psychologists Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen published four experiments on what happens when people imagine their ideal future in vivid, positive detail. Earlier research had found that people who spontaneously fantasized about things going perfectly tended to achieve less. Kappes and Oettingen found one reason why.

After people imagined an ideal outcome, they had less energy, measured both by their own reports and by their bodies, including lower blood pressure, than people who imagined something less ideal, like a future with problems in it or an ordinary, neutral scene.

The researchers suggested that picturing the outcome as already achieved lets people feel some of the satisfaction of reaching it, so their bodies don't gear up to go after it.

That's the difference between the kind of belief the Uber driver described and the kind that just feels good. His belief made him move. Daydreaming about a perfect outcome can make you feel like you've already arrived. Belief that works is belief that things will work out if you act, followed by acting, including when things get hard.

Putting it together, the answer is yes, but not on its own and not every time. Belief makes good outcomes more likely, mainly by changing what you do: you try, you put in more effort, and you keep going after setbacks instead of quitting. It doesn't guarantee anything. Some people believe, work hard, and still don't get what they were after, because of timing, luck, or things outside their control.

It's also worth remembering that stories like Carrey's and the Uber driver's are the ones we tend to hear. People who believed just as strongly and didn't make it rarely get interviewed about it. Researchers call this survivorship bias: drawing conclusions only from the people who succeeded, without counting the ones who didn't.

None of that makes belief less worth having. Without it, you're much less likely to act at all, and not acting gives you almost no chance. Belief is what gets you to try, and you have to try for anything to work out.

It's tempting to think belief is easy when things are going well and close to impossible when they're not. But the more I thought about what the driver said, the more I think he had the order right. Belief can come before things start working, and it's part of what makes them work.

The hard part is that belief tends to be weakest right when you need it most. When you're struggling, every setback seems like proof that it won't work. That's the moment Barrie described, when you doubt whether you can fly and start to fall. It's also the moment Seligman's optimistic agents handled differently: they treated a rejection as one bad call, not a sign that they'd never sell anything.

I also think belief comes from somewhere. Some of it comes from evidence, the times things have worked out before. Some of it comes from other people. Tinker Bell lived because a whole room of children clapped for her, and a lot of us are carried at some point by someone else who believed in us before we did. And some of it is a choice you make again each day, the way Carrey kept a worn-out check in his wallet for five years.

Believing more means expecting that if you keep acting, things can work out, and letting that expectation keep you moving, without pretending things are fine or ignoring real problems. The fairy dust worked that way in Barrie's story: it gave the children enough faith to let go, and then they did the flying.