On faith that isn’t cool, hope that feels risky, and why you should hold onto both anyway.
Faith is not cool right now. Hope feels like the worst strategy on the table. I know. I want to urge you anyway: keep believing. Keep hoping.
Belief matters more than you think. It is the placebo of life. It doesn’t need to arrive clean or certain, it can be wrapped in doubt, in fear, in skepticism, and it is still belief. That is the whole point of a placebo: it doesn’t require your full conviction to start working. It just requires you to take it.
I was reminded of this recently while listening to an Oprah podcast episode with Shawn Achor, built around his work on the psychology of belief. His argument, stripped down: shift seven core beliefs, and you shift the entire trajectory of your success, your health, your happiness.
Belief begins even when wrapped in doubt, fear, or skepticism. It is still belief.
The Seven Core Beliefs
My behaviour matters. My actions can change outcomes; I am not helpless.
I am not alone. I belong to a community, not an isolation.
I matter. My existence carries value to the people around me.
My work is meaningful. There is purpose in what I do daily, not futility.
I have something to give. I carry strengths and assets others can use.
I have something to be grateful for. Abundance, not scarcity, is the honest picture.
There is something greater than myself. A higher purpose, a faith, a collective humanity I belong to.
These aren’t affirmations you recite and forget. Achor’s point is that they are load-bearing. Shift them, even slightly, and the whole structure of how you meet a hard day changes with them.
Mother Tererai
The book and the podcast pulled up a story I’ve carried with me for years, one I could listen to on repeat and never tire of. I spent weeks in the presence of Dr. Tererai Trent, shared a stage with her at the EVE programme in Senegal, and heard her tell it herself.
She was born in a rural village in Zimbabwe, in a place and time where girls were not sent to school. She was married off as a teenager and had four children by eighteen. She lived in poverty. She survived severe domestic abuse. And in secret, using her brother’s old schoolbooks, she taught herself to read. In 1991, a woman named Jo Luck, from the humanitarian organisation Heifer International, visited her village and asked the local women a question nobody had ever asked them: what are your greatest dreams? Tererai said hers out loud, to go to America, to get an education, dreams that, on paper, had no right to be possible. Jo Luck looked at her and told her simply that if she believed in her dreams, they were achievable.
Her mother gave her the piece of wisdom that turned belief into ritual: write the dreams down. In their language, the word for “bury” and the word for “plant” are the same word. So burying a dream was never burial, it was planting. Mother Tererai wrote down four plus 1 goals:
Goal 1: go to America,
Goal 2: earn a Bachelor’s degree,
Goal 3: a Master’s degree,
Goal 4: a PhD and her mother added a fifth,
Goal 5: come back, and improve the lives of the women and girls in her community.
She sealed the paper in a tin can and buried it beneath a rock in the pasture where she herded cattle. What followed reads like fiction. In 1998 she moved to Oklahoma with her children, cleaning houses and scrubbing floors by day, studying deep into the night. In 2001, her Bachelor’s. In 2003, her Master’s. Each time, she flew back to Zimbabwe, dug up the tin, and checked off the goal. In December 2009, she completed her PhD at Western Michigan University.
When Oprah Winfrey heard the story, she brought Tererai onto her show and later gave $1.5 million toward the fifth dream, the one that was never about her. Through her foundation, Tererai Trent International, she rebuilt her childhood elementary school and has since built more, giving thousands of girls the education she was once denied. Her mantra, to this day, is Tinogona. It is achievable.
The word for “bury” and the word for “plant” are the same word. Burying a dream was never burial. It was planting.
What the story is asking of you: Six things to carry with you
Reframe burial into planting. What feels like being buried by debt, grief, or circumstance may be exactly the dark, hidden conditions a seed needs to grow. Try the sentence again: not “I am being buried by life,” but “I am being planted for a harvest I can’t see yet.”
Document and anchor your vision. A dream kept only in your head is easy to abandon the moment things get hard. Write it down. Seal it somewhere physical. Let the act itself be a contract with the person you are becoming.
Couple belief with radical action. Dr.Tererai didn’t kneel at her rock and wait. She worked exhausting jobs on almost no sleep while raising children and studying at night. Belief sets the direction; action is what actually moves you.
Tie your success to something bigger than yourself. Her fifth dream, to give back, was the engine that kept running when the other four felt impossible. Purely selfish goals are easy to abandon. Goals tied to the people you love rarely are.
Adopt Tinogona as a default setting. Poverty and trauma both try to convince you that your current situation is your permanent identity. Reject that. Meet every setback with the same certainty Mother Tererai did: it is achievable.
Pray for courage, not just wisdom. Solomon asked for wisdom and, as the saying goes, too much wisdom brings its own grief. Courage is the harder, more useful ask: courage to be a fool for five minutes and wise for a lifetime; to ask for help; to say “I don’t know, please teach me”; to stand tall through humiliation; to keep sight of your North Star on the days that feel gloomiest. Ask for it and remember every strength has a shadow; even courage, overused, can sabotage the very thing it’s meant to protect.
In case you need it today,
Faith isn’t always cool. Hope can feel like a risky strategy. But belief, even fragile, even doubting belief, changes behaviour, unlocks grit, and reorients what feels possible. It is the quiet engine behind every comeback that looked impossible from the outside.
Keep going. Tinogona. It is achievable.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito
Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.
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