mrpink essays

In Defense of Secular Faith

Standing on a ramp, I learned that sometimes the most rational thing is to stop thinking.

I recently started skateboarding lessons with one specific goal: to lose my fear of the drop-in, the moment you launch yourself from the edge of a curved ramp. A few years ago, when I was just starting out, a fall on that same move ended with me in an operating room. Standing on that edge again was not a technical problem.

There isn’t much to the drop-in, really. You shift your weight decisively onto your front foot and let physics do the rest. It’s one of the first things kids learn.

That’s no coincidence. Kids don’t think that much: they watch, copy, and go. They don’t worry about balance, friction, or angles, let alone the risk of going headfirst.

Adults, on the other hand, sometimes have the misfortune of being too rational.

I had watched every video and understood perfectly the physics at play. But it wasn’t enough. Facing the slope, the body wants to lean back to protect itself. The paradox is that this is exactly what makes you fall: the board shoots forward and you’re left with no ground beneath you. The safe move is to lean into the void, and that is unnatural and counterintuitive.

It took something more than confidence.

Confidence and Faith

William James described this more than a century ago with an almost identical image. A climber is trapped on a ledge from which the only escape is a terrible leap. If he trusts that he can make it, that trust steadies his legs. If he doubts, he hesitates, and in hesitating he is lost.

James’s argument is more interesting than “believing helps.” He says there are situations in which belief doesn’t merely interpret reality: it also takes part in producing it. The climber who believes he can make the jump isn’t predicting the outcome: he’s participating in it.

The funny thing is that James used the example to defend religious faith. I’m using it to defend a different kind.

It has to be read carefully, though. The climber’s faith works because the jump depends on his legs. In a startup, a founder’s conviction changes how they execute, how hard they push, whom they persuade, how long they hold on. But it doesn’t change what the market needs. Customers don’t care how much faith you have. Faith may be a necessary condition for something hard to work out. It’s never a sufficient one.

Borrowed Faith

Even though I understood everything, I couldn’t bring myself to do it on my own. What changed things was the instructor.

He didn’t explain anything I hadn’t seen in the videos. What he did was be there and, above all, believe I could do it before I did. He had watched dozens of people stand on that same edge with the same fear, and he knew how it ended. His confidence rested on facts I didn’t have. For me it was faith; for him, statistics.

So I borrowed his faith. And it worked. After a couple of runs, I could barely recognize myself in the Hernán of just a few days earlier, who couldn’t bring himself to go.

I think a good part of the value of a good mentor, a good partner, or a good board lies right there. They rarely have information the founder couldn’t get on their own. Their advantage is having watched the jump many times from the outside. When a founder hesitates in front of their own ramp, someone who has already seen how it ends can lend them the faith they don’t have yet.

Reason, Faith, Reason

What the ramp taught me is that faith doesn’t replace reason. They take turns.

First, reason decides. In cold blood, with the risks on the table: resources, odds, consequences. Is it worth trying?

Then faith executes. We suspend evaluation. We stop negotiating with fear and put all our attention into doing what we decided to do. While you’re dropping into the ramp, you can’t be assessing whether you’ll fall. Evaluation belongs to another moment. In that sense, faith isn’t optimism: it’s a condition for being fully present.

Finally, reason returns. We review the evidence and decide whether to continue, change course, or let go.

Reason is good at evaluating, but bad at executing under pressure. Faith is good at executing, but dangerous when it becomes the one evaluating reality.

On the ramp, the cycle lasts seconds. In a company, it can last months. Think about entering a new market. You know the risks, the stories of startups that failed trying, the complexities you’ll face. You can trust your skills, but it would be foolish to take that as a guarantee. Still, what good does it do to spend all our time thinking it’ll go wrong? Faith lets us pause the judgments that drain our energy and focus on doing everything within our reach to make it work.

Knowing When to Let Go

The line between faith and denial is razor-thin, and from the inside it’s almost impossible to see. The founder who perseveres and the one who refuses to see reality feel exactly the same. Both are convinced. That’s why telling yourself “I’ll know when to let go” isn’t enough: in the moment, faith will defend itself.

The way out is to write down, before you start, when reason gets to speak again. It helps to distinguish between two things.

The first is what evidence forces us to revisit the decision: if in nine months we have no paying customers, we sit down and take a serious look. Maybe we discover the original segment doesn’t work but there’s a better one. Maybe not. Revisiting isn’t abandoning, but it does mean we stop jumping blind.

The second is what forces us to stop, and there it’s best to have a single line, hard and simple: the resources we’re willing to burn. Not one dollar more. It’s the only condition that doesn’t allow for creative reinterpretation, because it’s the one that protects the possibility of trying again.

You write it down when there’s still nothing to defend, and you show it to someone who will hold you to it.

Weight on the Back Foot

Back to the ramp.

What surprised me most about the drop-in is that the stance that feels prudent is the dangerous one. Leaning back feels like protecting yourself, and it’s exactly what throws you to the ground.

Not every partial commitment is fear. Some markets are worth testing with a small pilot rather than the whole team, and some decisions are best made gradually. But prudence lies in choosing the ramp, not in how you drop into it. A kid learning to skate doesn’t start on the tallest ramp: they start on one that’s knee-high. And on that small ramp, they drop in with their weight forward, just like on the big one.

The problem isn’t choosing a small experiment. It’s doing it halfway, without daring to lean in, and then concluding it didn’t work. That in-between stance is what makes the board slip away.

Secular faith isn’t believing you won’t fall. It’s choosing when to think and when not to.

Secular faith isn’t believing you won’t fall. It’s choosing when to think and when not to.

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