What Octavia Butler's Notebook Knew About Self-Efficacy

The popular explanation for who succeeds in demanding fields is grit. Angela Duckworth and colleagues defined it in 2007 as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and found that it predicted achievement independently of IQ. It's an appealing idea, and I've found it motivating.

It hasn't held up as well as its popularity would suggest. A 2017 meta-analysis by Credé, Tynan and Harms found that grit is very highly correlated with conscientiousness, a personality trait psychologists have studied for decades. It also found that grit's predictive power for performance was modest, and weaker than the early claims. The perseverance facet did most of the work, and the passion facet contributed little.

There's a more basic problem for anyone designing communities. Grit describes a disposition. It tells you who persists, but not why people disengage, and it gives an organization almost nothing to act on. You can't configure grit. So if we want to understand why capable people leave open source, and how to keep them, we need a variable that responds to the environment.

Albert Bandura introduced self-efficacy in 1977, in "Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change." Self-efficacy is a person's belief in their ability to carry out the actions a specific task requires. It isn't self-esteem, and it isn't general confidence. It's specific to the task: can I get this patch merged, give this talk, chair this meeting?

The evidence base is large. Stajkovic and Luthans' 1998 meta-analysis of 114 studies found a significant positive relationship between self-efficacy and work performance. Across the literature, people with higher self-efficacy choose harder goals, put in more effort, persist longer after failure and recover faster. Bandura called it the foundation of human agency: people's capacity to shape the course of their own lives rather than just react to circumstances.

Bandura also identified where self-efficacy comes from, and this is what makes it useful to organizations. There are four sources:

1. Mastery experiences. Succeeding at the task yourself. This is consistently the strongest source.
2. Vicarious experiences. Watching someone you see as similar to you succeed. The closer the resemblance, the stronger the effect.
3. Verbal persuasion. Credible people telling you that you're capable. It's weaker by itself, but it matters a lot for getting someone to try at all.
4. Physiological and affective states. How you read your own stress, fatigue and arousal while doing the task.

All four depend on the environment. That's the key point. Self-efficacy isn't a fixed trait someone brings to a community. It's produced in part by the community. Other research points the same way. Steele and Aronson's work on stereotype threat showed that just making a negative stereotype salient can drag down performance, and one way it does that is through the fourth source: anxiety that people read as evidence they don't belong.

Mark Dery coined "Afrofuturism" in 1993. Ytasha Womack's working definition starts with a claim that sounds simple: there are Black people in the future. Scholars like Alondra Nelson have gone further. They argue that Afrofuturism pushes back on the "digital divide" narrative, which casts Blackness as always behind technological progress rather than part of it.

Read that through Bandura, and Afrofuturism is doing something specific. It supplies vicarious experience in advance. Vicarious experience needs a model who resembles the observer. When the present doesn't offer enough models in a field, speculative fiction can build them. A Black captain on the bridge of a starship. A Black woman astronaut who is also a dancer. That's not just representation for its own sake. It's the second source of self-efficacy, delivered to people the present was failing to reach.

For me it wasn't abstract. My parents pointed me toward Dr. Mae Jemison and took us to space museums. That's a textbook vicarious-experience intervention, and it worked.

Octavia E. Butler's papers are held at The Huntington Library. They include handwritten notes on her goals, some ordinary and some audacious. They're usually shared as inspiration. I think they're more interesting as evidence of a deliberate self-regulation practice, one that lines up closely with what the research recommends.

Three things stand out.

She made her goals specific. In one note she adapts Émile Coué's well-known autosuggestion formula, "every day, in every way," but not to "getting better" in general. She commits to becoming a better, more successful, selling writer. That matches how self-efficacy works: it's specific to a task, and statements tied to a specific domain do more than general ones.

She supplied her own verbal persuasion. On the back of a 1988 notebook, she wrote that she would be a bestselling writer, that millions of people would read her books, and she closed it with:

"So be it! See to it!"

Those notes look like verbal persuasion from herself. A Black woman writing science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s had few external sources of it. Butler didn't wait for them. She built the source herself and put it where she'd see it every day.

She turned wishes into instructions. "So be it" is a statement of intent. "See to it" is a directive, and she paired it with a commitment to find a way. That distinction has a name in the research. Peter Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions (1999) shows that people who pair a goal with a concrete plan for acting on it reach the goal far more often than people who hold the goal alone. "See to it" is the grammar of an implementation intention.

The results are well documented. Butler received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, the first science fiction writer to do so. In 2020, Parable of the Sower reached the New York Times bestseller list, fulfilling the note decades after she wrote it.

Butler did this on her own. The more important question for a community is how to make it systemic, so that nobody has to be Octavia Butler to get there.

Bandura extended his theory to groups as collective efficacy: a group's shared belief that it can achieve its goals together. Groups with higher collective efficacy set more ambitious goals and keep going through setbacks, just as individuals do. For open source projects, the practical implication is that each of the four sources can be designed into the project:

• Mastery: issues that are truly scoped for newcomers, and review times measured in days, not months. A merged first contribution is a mastery experience. An ignored one is data too, and it teaches the opposite lesson.
• Vicarious experience: who is visible in leadership, on stage, on core teams and in governance. People calibrate what's possible for them by who already holds a role.
• Verbal persuasion: public, specific recognition from credible community members. It's cheap and it works, and in most projects it's rare.
• Affective state: accommodations, quiet spaces and trauma-informed norms that ask "what do you need?" instead of "what's wrong?" Anxiety that people read as not belonging undermines self-efficacy directly.

Those four sources are the practical levers. Here are three questions to ask about your project:

1. Which of the four sources is your project weakest at supplying?
2. Who in your community is only getting verbal persuasion from themselves, because nobody else is providing it?
3. What would a public, specific "see to it" look like for your community's goals, written down, where everyone can see it?

In Part 2 I take the four tiles from the keynote, agency, context, experimentation and crew, and show that they're also a working spec for AI agents. Where the comparison breaks down says a lot about how we treat human contributors.

So be it. See to it.

This post is part of Boldly Go, a series based on my DjangoCon US 2026 keynote, "Boldly Go, Building Worlds." Slides and sources: dawnwages.info/dcus-26.

Header image: Carina Nebula “Treasure Chest”. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Reiter; acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç. CC BY 4.0. Via NASA Webb Telescope on Flickr.

References - Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. - Bandura, A. (2000). Exercise of human agency through collective efficacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(3), 75–78. - Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511. - Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101. - Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. - Stajkovic, A. D., & Luthans, F. (1998). Self-efficacy and work-related performance: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 240–261. - Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811. - Womack, Y. L. (2013). Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books. - Octavia E. Butler Papers, The Huntington Library (incl. OEB 3218, "Average Goals," 1978; notes on the back of a 1988 notebook).