Forget the Commonwealth Bank slogan, self-doubt is a superpower

The latest advertising campaign for the Commonwealth Bank features an older couple getting married with the slogan “Doubt Never Did”. Apparently, the campaign is “designed to empower Australians to overcome self-doubt and take action towards their personal and business goals”.

There are other people featured in the campaign – sports stars and business owners – but always with the same message. If you have an inkling you want to do something, you should shoulder aside doubt and get on with it. The slogan, according to the bank’s head of marketing, is meant to help us “move past uncertainty”.

It’s terrible advice, of course, particularly from a financial institution. “I doubt I can afford that new pair of shoes, or a holiday in Tuscany, or a big renovation of my business premises.” Well, tut-tuts the bank, Doubt Never Did. Just sign here for your new line of credit. And, of course, if the bank really believed in always choosing hope over doubt, they’d approve every loan application, so they are selling a message they don’t really share.

Personally, I’m a big fan of self-doubt. I think there should be more of it. If I were a bank, my slogan would be: “Why Don’t You Have Another Think?”

This may be a product of my disastrous first career, straight out of school, trying to be an actor. “You an actor,” I hear you cry. “You’ve got to be joking”. Well, said 17-year-old me, Doubt Never Did. So, I joined a travelling troupe of actors playing to school children in the western districts of Queensland. Most of the students had never seen a play before, which was just as well, as it prevented them from knowing just how terrible I was.

After a year of offending sensibilities up north, I signed up with a company offering lunchtime theatre in Canberra. Jocasta, at the time a prospective girlfriend, came to see the show. “You were terrible,” she chirpily observed.

She had a particular issue with a line in the play that ended with an ellipsis: “And the shadows at the back of your eyes…”

“Oh boy,” said Jocasta, “I could hear every one of those dots.”

All the same, I cracked on with my dream, mumbling some version of Doubt Never Did, before realising I’d wasted two years of my life in an unannounced competition to be awarded World’s Worst Actor. Oh, for a modicum of self-doubt.

It wasn’t just the theatre. There were relationships I should have exited earlier, and purchases I regretted as soon as I walked from the store. Even today, as I pass by a Merrivale hotel, I reflect on my part in funding their empire, via the 1975 purchase of a pinstriped Zoot suit that made me look like Elvis if Elvis had fallen on hard times and found work as a clown.

The Commonwealth Bank’s campaign is straight from the American motivational circuit. “You can do anything,” chants the speaker to an audience of the hopeful, each of whom has paid $2000 to be misled about how life works. The speech ends, of course, with some version of “Dream big”.

The world is also full of people who stuck at things too long, whose courage took the form of foolishness.

Aspiration is a good thing. Courage can be useful too. And, often, it’s good to stick at something when at first you don’t succeed. But the world is also full of people who stuck at things too long, whose courage took the form of foolishness, or who aspired to something beyond reach.

One example is the Australian actor who moves to Hollywood – and is inspired to keep going, despite rejection over decades, because of that one success story in which such endurance was rewarded. We love that story, so we hear it amplified. But what about the other lives, the ones that never took off because of a dream that should have been replaced with something more achievable?

It’s not only the arts. “Dream big,” sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. Do you open a second retail outlet because the first one is going well? The only sensible answer is: “Maybe”. Make a list of your doubts, add a list of the positives, seek wise counsel, and then make your move.

To reduce that process to “Doubt Never Did” is a version of magical thinking called “manifesting” – the nutty idea that, through self-belief, we can “think” a goal into reality.

In reality, many of history’s great failures – Hitler is the obvious example – invited disaster through self-belief, in his case, the belief he could win while fighting on two fronts. More successful, to continue the military example, are the leaders who know when to press on, and when to fall back.

In the Commonwealth Bank’s poster, the just-married couple look deliriously happy. Their real-life counterparts, I’m sure, are similarly delighted after electing for some late-onset happiness.

But here’s the truth: sometimes a marriage works, sometimes it doesn’t, and you can increase your chance of success by thinking through what’s on offer. It’s a process that admits the possibility of both pleasure and pain, success and failure, and always includes consideration of your own limitations.

Best of all, it’s a process that, sometimes, tells you to choose another dream. “So, how did you avoid disaster in this particular case?” “Oh, Doubt Did It”.

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