17 | Chapter 17 The True Source of Success

Chapter 17 | The True Source of Success: Belief, Flexibility, and the Loosening of the Ego

Why "Action at Full Strength" Is Still Not Enough to Guarantee Success

In the previous chapter, we clarified a fundamental point: Divine Success is never about "praying to Jesus, believing you have received, and then sitting around waiting for the result."

Quite the opposite. We’ve hammered home that Action at Full Strength is the non-negotiable prerequisite. Being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, putting first things first—the principles validated in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People remain true here. They must be executed.

But a new question arises: If I have prayed, if I have believed, if I have given, and if I have worked with every ounce of my strength—am I then guaranteed success?

The answer is still NO.

In this chapter, we must confront a deeper, more brutal reality: Not all effort leads to success.

1. A Real Question: Why Does the Same Effort Yield Such Different Results?

Let’s look at some real stories.

Jack Ma has often talked about the early days of Alibaba. During their startup phase, their business model was actually used in university classrooms as a "Case Study in Failure." Professors would systematically demonstrate why their model could never succeed.

And Jack Ma himself was sitting in the back of those classrooms, listening to people prove his inevitable doom. Almost everyone believed: This is a foolish, impossible model. But Jack Ma believed he would succeed. He believed Alibaba could become a top-five global internet company.

The decision to launch Alipay was even more extreme. At that time in China:

There was no mature credit card system.
There was no high-efficiency logistics.
There was no foundation of social trust.

Alibaba was forced to invent a guaranteed payment tool—Alipay. At the time, this was considered a "stupid idea" with massive legal risks. From any rational analysis, the decision to build Alipay was a high-risk, low-probability gamble.

But Jack Ma did it anyway. He said:

"We made mistakes every day, but we learned from every single one and kept moving forward."

The same story happened with Elon Musk. In the early days of Tesla and SpaceX, he wagered everything. He sold every asset he owned and ended up sleeping on friends' couches. After consecutive failures, he kept going.

Most people interpret these stories as "persistence." But that’s just the surface. The real question is: Why can some people persist while others collapse in the dark? And even more importantly: Does persisting until the end actually guarantee a win?

2. The First Element of Success: Belief—But Not the Logical Kind

Almost all successful people share one common trait: They believe in the thing before it has been proven.

Jack Ma believed in Alibaba; Musk believed rockets and electric cars would change the world. But their "belief" was not the result of a rigorous logical deduction. In fact, most of the time, it was anti-logical.

If they had relied purely on logic, Alibaba, Alipay, and SpaceX would not exist today. This kind of belief is more like a capacity that was hard-coded into their subconscious early in life. This is why I called them: "Destiny-Type Successful People."

They usually share certain characteristics: