He sees you when you’re sleeping | He knows when you’re awake | He knows if you’ve been bad or good | So be good for goodness sake!
– Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
We all have doubt, creeping in ever so slightly, growing little by little until it’s exponential, and ending up crippling us before we can stop its takeover.
Similar to perfectionism crippling your productivity, doubt cripples progress, harms creativity, and holds us back from achievement or even taking the steps to grow, improve, and get things done.
It begins with a tiny and potentially insignificant thought introduced on its own, by a friend, a colleague, a parent, a TV show, whatever – and it grows and grows with no bounds to a feeling that cripples and holds us from making any movement at all.
While some may still be able to make some sort of progress, doubt itself sabotages our belief that the direction may be worth taking or have some potential at success; we start defending the tiny thought and its right to exist, assuring we shouldn’t take the chance cause it won’t work anyways – we should just let it go and revisit once we have something real going for ourselves.
Unfortunately, there is no quick antidote or remedy for doubt, and that is why it is a silent killer. But knowing of doubt and being aware of its ramification may be sufficient for us to try and battle its expansion and takeover.
As we feel doubt creeping in, and we feel it gaining strength, and our minds begin to defend it with various arguments why it is correct in thinking so…that’s when we ignore it. It isn’t easy, cause it is so strong and uses our own experiences and previous failures as facts and figures to prove ourselves wrong, but we continue to work hard and ignore it.
By no chance is this a full-proof way, so we stay focused on the task at hand and complete it as planned, and as soon as possible. Get it going, push harder, and try with all our might to complete, ship, and check off that task before doubt grows too much and stops us in our tracks.
Notice, should we not even ship our work, then not only doubt has killed the initiative, but it guaranteed our failure before we’ve even had a chance to try.
And that is even worst, cause we want to try, even if it means to fail fast, learn something new, and move on to bigger and better things.
Don’t let doubt kill off ideas before you’ve even had a chance to try and make mistakes and fail…even that has its benefits.