“Learning to Believe in Myself”

I recently came across this wonderful podcast which came out as a super insightful one. I’ve noted down the insights and shared what changes I think I must make in my life based on the insights mentioned below.

You can listen to the Podcast Here.

Insights from the Podcast

1. Things to nail in your 20’s:
   • Integrity
   • Work Ethic
   • Saying ‘Yes’ to opportunities. Stumble upon enough things, be embarrassed, learn from the good ones. Without this you might be working smart, but on the wrong thing.
2. You can’t expect people to believe in you. You need to generate evidence. One must focus on generating evidence.
3. Never believe someone who sells answers.
4. Observe. Don’t Judge.
5. Comparing yourself with others creates unnecessary timelines which only makes you unhappy about where you are today.
6. When you do something negative, it feels great instantly. When you do something positive, it feels great in the long term.
7. People who Delay Gratification, Win. The ones who Play Long Term games with Long Term people.
8. Falling in love and having a great relationship is all about giving up you innate selfishness that you’ve developed your entire life. Are you willing give up your natural selfishness to this person?
9. The glamourous life portrayed by people on Instagram is actually very little of life. The vast majority of life is doing, nothing(boring). When you find a person you are happy doing nothing with, they’re the one. They are your person.
10. The feeling of ‘wanting to be right’ and the feeling of ‘you are right’ are two completely different things. He gave a very good example of a how often the most unimportant things in life lead to fall-off of any relationship. You can read it here.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

1. When Breath becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
2. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
3. Barbarian Days – William Finnegan

How I plan to work on it: (the above mentioned points)

Being a student who commutes 2 hrs a day to attend college, I feel I have fairly worked on the work ethic part. I can balance my studies with the work that I do on a day to day basis. I tend to be lazy and over-relax, sometimes but I feel that’s alright unless and until it doesn’t become a habit and it also prevents me from Burnouts.

Saying ‘Yes’ to opportunities is important, no matter how small the opportunity. Every opportunity that we come across in our lifetime is the door to the next opportunity or experience that we’re about to come across.

“No one will believe in you unless, you do.”
This I feel is a very generic quote which is, incomplete. There might be instances wherein you are in your lowest lows and the only ray of hope that you get is from seeing someone believing in you more than you do yourself and that is empowering. Believing in yourself is basically, you having the motivation and the fearlessness to achieve what you want. The point of generating evidence is something that I’m really trying to do. I read this book called Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, in which the author mentions readers to put your work out on the internet, more of which I’ve tried to implement.

There’s no single solution for a problem. Same problem may be differ for different people and one cannot give out a generalised answers to such problems. Earlier, even I fell into the trap of optimising for one general opinion. People are free to put out their opinions on social media but one must be mindful as to who to follow and not falling into the trap of blindly trusting anyone without thorough understanding the motive of that person.

Comparing yourself to others: this is the one thing which I’m still struggling with right now. It is also true that it creates unnecessary deadlines in our own mind. This is the one thing that is a bit difficult to tackle because of social media. I believe its also important to compare, because it helps introspect and gives us a reality check as to how we are performing and how one must be moving forward.

Delayed Gratification: I can delay gratification if I’m working. But, I especially find it difficult to do so when I’m studying or have assignments to be submitted the next day.

Glamorous life portrayed on social media is much little of what life is: I’m still learning to do nothing. It’s easier said than done. But, I know for a fact that learning to do nothing is just achieving the state of mind where no external influence can get to your head and you are at peace with yourself. That’s exciting, definitely. but needs work from my side.

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