What happens when your lived truth threatens someone else’s learned identity? In a world that idolises facts and borrowed knowledge, living with certainty can make you a mirror others are not ready to face. This piece explores why real experience speaks louder than memorised belief—and why so many are afraid of it.
By Silo Rhodes
The Trigger of Certainty
When you live your life with a deep sense of definiteness, you start to trigger people. Especially those who rely on facts, history, or data as their only source of truth. You are not trying to be confrontational, instead your presence challenges the very structure of how they have come to understand the world. You move from intuition, and speak from alignment. They speak only from what they have been taught.
For someone whose identity is rooted in what they know rather than who they are, it’s unsettling.
The Divide: Lived Truth vs Borrowed Belief
This is not a critique of anyone’s intelligence or knowledge, it’s a recognition of the difference between lived truth and borrowed belief. Facts have their place. So do science, history, and data. But when these are weaponized as proof of superiority or rightness—especially against someone who is simply speaking from experience—the result is not clarity, it’s hierarchy. Regrettably where hierarchy creeps in, so does control.
People who build their identity around information are often unaware of the trap. They are praised for their logic and citations, but what they often lack is trust in their own knowing. The kind that comes from living it, not just studying it.
Why It Hits So Hard: Fear at the Root
Beneath the reaction to definiteness is something deeper. Fear.
Fear is the real reason most people lean on learned experiences rather than lived ones. It is safer to memorise someone else’s truth than to risk discovering your own. It is safer to follow the script than to improvise from the heart. When you live what you believe, you take full responsibility for the outcome. That level of accountability is terrifying for those conditioned to outsource their authority.
So instead, they cling to institutions. They rely on the past. They quote what others have said, believing that borrowed wisdom will hold up under pressure. But it never truly does.
The Machinery of Repetition and Control
This is why so many systems—religious, academic, even spiritual—build entire cultures around memorisation and reinforcement. People quote scriptures and ideologies passed down by strangers. They repeat words that sound like truth but have never been tested in the fire of real life.
They mistake intellectual emotion for embodied understanding. The foundation of their belief is external, it must constantly be maintained through propaganda, performance, and peer pressure.
Definiteness Disrupts the Cycle
Your certainty isn’t arrogance, it’s alignment. You are not trying to convert anyone. You are simply living what is real for you. And that disrupts systems that rely on insecurity and dependence.
Sometimes we quote others not because we need their words, but because we recognise resonance. Their voice may open a door ours cannot—yet. That is strategy, not submission. But the moment we stop trusting ourselves and start hiding behind citations, we lose our sovereignty.
To stay sovereign is to stay rooted in your own knowing. To respect every path, even if it looks different from yours. And to never confuse agreement with validation.
From Drifting to Defining
Napoleon Hill captured this distinction in Outwitting the Devil:
“The one quality which one must possess to win is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”
Hill speaks about drifters—those who move aimlessly, controlled by external forces—and definiteness as the antidote. Drifters live through borrowed truths. The definite live from within. They are not easy to manipulate. They are not easy to silence.
Final Word: Be the Witness, Not the Expert
This world does not need more experts. It needs more witnesses. People who have walked through the fire, stood in their truth, and emerged with something real to share.
So if you are one of them, keep going.
You may not be easily understood, but your presence is felt. You may not fit the mold, but your life will ripple beyond generations. And it begins by trusting that what you have lived is already enough.
Big thanks to Silo Rhodes for sharing this piece. It’s not easy to put words to the kind of truth that’s intuitively felt more than it’s taught. Your writing reminds us that our own lived experiences really do count, even when they don’t match what we've been told.
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