Ever had a hobby you wanted to start? A competition you wished to join? Perhaps a promotion/raise you wanted to ask for?
In almost every case, thought never transformed into action. You never ‘found the time’, ‘did not have the skills’ or ‘you had one more performance review to complete’.
In the worst cases, you’ve probably never even had the thought. Not until a colleague, friend or a family member asked the question.
If you ever believed you were alone in this, know that you were not.
You have kindred spirits who have faced similar struggles in various facets of our life.
And I’m one of them.
In the thirty years spent on this planet, I have avoided dozens of opportunities every year.
I’ve avoided competitions with ‘I’m busy that day’, because I was terrified everyone would realize I’m mediocre. In the meantime, my friends attended multiple competitions, improved their skills, developed relationships and were sought after for their skillsets
Hobbies started and ended in the span of hours or days. All because my initial work was nowhere near the masterpieces found on the internet. In the same years, I’ve followed authors who started their first work with one follower and rose to heights I only ever dreamed of.
High-paying jobs were avoided like the plague because I believed interviews would reveal me for the fraud I was.
I kept that opinion even as I held my own against colleagues with twice my experience. I believed I was ‘unskilled’ as I built applications from scratch, fixed spaghetti code in half the expected time and built products currently in use by famous brands.
I knew I sucked at my hobbies, even as my friends and acquaintances told me I was good and even fellow hobbyists loved the work.
Holding onto the ‘truth of my mediocrity’ was easy. Hiding behind the fears was effortless. Hell, I enjoyed my quiet, peaceful, underpaid and boring life in between moments where opportunities popped up to terrify the life out of me.
And all I had to show for it was a great deal of professional appreciation of my work and becoming invisible to family and friends. Oh, also looking back and finding my life empty of anything I could truly talk about with energy and passion and “That was an amazing day, bro!”
I did finally break out of the spiral but it was not easy. It took fifteen years of missed opportunities, abandoned hobbies and a small circle of friends who looked at my foolish mistakes and told me to “Get up, man. We’ve got stuff to do!”
Even then, it took drastic changes in my environment before I started accepting the objective truth. The simple truth that I was neither mediocre, foolish nor the idea that embarrassment was the end of my life.
I started signing up for competitions. I lost every one of them, and still signed up for the next competition.
I picked up my hobbies and started sharing my work with fellow hobbyists and friends. My work is still not the best but I am enjoying the time spent and I met some amazing people along the way and had days I could point to and say, “THAT WAS AWESOME!”
As for my promotion from underpaid grunt to a properly compensated professional, that is a work in progress. I’m expecting about six months of effort will get me what I want.
As you can see from the short and haphazard summary of my life, I spent a great deal of time, effort and money not doing anything. In fact, I spent more effort on doing things that I quickly became a master class procrastinator.
And it was not until I started taking up all the opportunities and hobbies did I realize the so-called ‘truths’ about myself were just my fears working very hard to keep me safe and sound and stuck in place.
Taking action did not turn me into the best in my field or became famous overnight. I was certainly not recognized at every event nor did I become the go-to-guy when they needed something.
But I am happy. By stepping out of my comfort zone, I found new opportunities. By pushing my fears aside, I found them to be far too delusional compared to the reality of my life.
I have found myself liking this new version of me.
I might not succeed and everything. I might fail a hundred times. It’s very likely I will never become anything more than a simple grunt.
But I will not spend another night staring into the dark, wondering and regretting about the event I skipped or the hand I did not take.
And let me tell you, my friends, that the ability to sleep without regrets is one of the best experiences in life.