We live in a biological illusion, and that illusion is costing you your goals.
Every second, your senses gather millions of fragments of information. Your conscious mind only processes a tiny fraction — the rest, your brain discards before you’re even aware of it. What decides what survives that filter, believe it or not, is your beliefs. If you wake up convinced you have nothing valuable to offer, that idea becomes your predisposition for every interaction, glance, and opportunity of the day, turning them into confirmations.
Psychologist Nir Eyal, of Stanford University, documents this in his book Beyond Belief (2026): we don’t experience the world — we consume a biased map, designed by what we already expect to find.
This is even crueler among those who aspire to live off their art: writers, designers, painters, musicians, creators of anything. They reject themselves over and over, before giving anyone else the chance to do so, saying they’re “not good enough” or that “the market is saturated,” without ever having taken themselves seriously.
I got tired of it. Let’s dismantle this psychological bias once and for all.
The chessboard that tricks your brain
Eyal uses a classic analogy to dismantle our naive trust in perception: Adelson’s checker-shadow illusion.
If you look at two squares marked A and B, your eyes will swear that one is dark gray and the other nearly white. Yet if you isolate them from their context, you discover they’re exactly the same shade. Your brain isn’t registering the actual light — it’s actually correcting the image based on what it knows about how shadows fall on a chessboard.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Squares A and B aren’t the same color. Actually, if you use image-editing software like Photoshop, you’ll see they are the same color. This example questions how accurate your interpretation of the world really is — and there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, like it. It’s that stark.
You don’t see reality.
You see your interpretation of it.
In psychology this is called selective attention — the tool your brain uses to avoid overload by filtering stimuli. According to Nir Eyal, this affects us more or less depending on our experiences, beliefs, and acquired knowledge, so the effect gets reduced or magnified.
That’s where the danger lies.
Your vision is your cage
Take this premise into the territory of your personal beliefs.
- That task you’ve been putting off for months.
- That project you don’t dare start.
- The draft you keep hidden out of fear of others’ judgment.
If your starting narrative is “I’m not going to make it,” your brain is already predisposed to filter reality, giving more weight to whatever reinforces that belief. In other words, you’ve fallen into confirmation bias — the deadliest bias of all.
- A neutral comment gets processed as outright rejection.
- A golden opportunity gets waved off as “this isn’t for me.”
- Constructive advice sounds like a forgettable anecdote.
Your brain, conditioned by its previous fears, is distorting reality. You’re mistaking the gray square for black and the white one for gray, just because you’re thinking about shadows. And while most people will wait years to “feel ready” or for their “beliefs to change,” you can flip the order of the factors starting today.
- Don’t wait for something to change before you act.
- Act so that something changes.
Publish that clumsy article and launch the first version of the project. Your brain will take the hit of real evidence, and your perception will shift radically. Even if the initial experience is negative, that was already part of the game — the path to any goal is a challenge, but that doesn’t mean it’s unreachable.
Do you know what I thought when I started writing two years ago?
“Nobody’s going to read what I write.” “This has no future.” “I’m embarrassed by this.”
The beginning reinforced the belief — nothing I did seemed to make sense, but I did understand I was living under this ongoing bias of dark squares. Once you understand the mechanism that distorts your reality, the illusion loses its power. My mind told me every morning to give up. I never listened to it.
Your knowledge, references, the content you consume, and your experiences define you until they become the lens through which you see reality. Remember that.
Stay creative.
— Álvaro