For a long time I’ve put off writing on my blog because I thought that no-one could possibly be interested in reading something I wrote. I couldn’t get rid of that feeling of “who am I to write?”. But yesterday, after watching way too many TED talks under the guise of productivity, I realized that every person on this planet has something to contribute, so why not me too. Per this realization, I’m going to try to keep up a routine of writing one post every week. It’s my last year of high-school so it will be nice to document some of my thoughts over the course of the next year.
My main motivator for starting to write again is a common thread I noticed in so many self-help articles or videos:
the value of the present moment.
We spend so much time worrying about the past and future that we easily forget that the only thing we have is the present. As I was reading Dale Carnegie’s book “Stop worrying and start living”, I realized how many things I haven’t done just because I was worried about the consequences. For instance, I’ve been putting off writing this blog post because I’m worried that the commas will all be wrong or that it won’t be interesting enough. Perfectionism can hold us back more than it helps us.
In Part One Chapter Two, Carnegie describes the value of considering the worst possible outcome of a situation. At first this was a weird concept for me to understand because I assumed that would make you worry more. Here’s his justification: if you can consider the worst outcome and come to accept it, you have nothing to worry about, even if your worst fears do come true. Boiling the situation down in a realistic way takes away its power as a nebulous worry floating in your head.
For me to start writing without fear, that meant accepting my worst case scenario – that people don’t like what I’m writing or more likely they just don’t read it all. Once I acknowledged that, it didn’t seem like such a risky endeavour after all. It’s not like we don’t already make ourselves open to criticism every time we step outside the front door.
If we consider and accept a risk logically and stop negative self-talk from keeping us in our comfort zone, we can make decisions that help us instead of hurt us.
I found another insight in a TED talk I watched called “The skill of self-confidence” by Dr. Ivan Joseph.
You need to be your own biggest fan. If you feel passionately about something, you can’t always rely on other people for external motivation. Acting with conviction and confidence that you know what’s right for you, will help you reach the goals that seem so far away. In the end, you are the one who will live with your choices, so who better to make them than yourself.
With Carnegie and Joseph’s ideas as inspiration, this week I will stop procrastinating my life away, and start cultivating a better mindset, one moment at a time. I refuse to wake up one day and think, “if only I had started sooner”.
After all, there’s no time like the present.