I was always the quietest kid in the room. I would keep things for myself back in school, even if I knew the correct answer to the teacher’s math problem, fearing of being judged by my other classmates and of couse, the internal fear of failure.
We all get that type of fear: to fail in public. Yet, that makes us not being authentic, not being ourselves and not to risk by pushing our boundaries of what’s estabilished or of what’s expected from you at work or in your personal life.
I’ve been going through this mentality change since I entered the corporate workforce 3 years ago (which for me feels like ages).
In class, I would embrace perfection and avoid failure because that’s how you progress in the traditional education system. In there you would:
- Study things you’re not fully invested in.
- Get heavily punished from slightly incorrect answers.
- Constantly memorize topics that you’d forget after the exam.
But things are very different once you step out and working on meaningful projects. I noticed this when I started my 6 year music production career and my solo-entrepeneur SEO business.
You will fail, and you will fail hard. Yet, why should I go hard on myself with that? Every failure is new opportunity to learn, evolve and to keep iterating.
- Everytime a music label would reject my music, I would jump into Youtube and improve my production skills.
- Everytime my keywords wouldn’t rank as high in Google Search I would re-analyze my strategy and re-do my content.
- Everytime my AI agent would mess up in a live demo, I would immediatly go back after the call to change the prompt.
This website wipes out the last bit of fear of failure I had in myself.
I seek to be authentic, and avoid what other people may think as a result of that.
I would like to end up this post with a quote of one of my favorite personalities out there. Naval Ravikant has made me question a lot of things for the past year, and keeps me inspired in my new endeavours.
Escape competition through authenticity.
Naval Ravikant