Self-confidence is
Most entrepreneur-minded content coats itself in a layer of irrational self-confidence. How else, they might ask, can someone shake off all of the rejections before their breakthrough?
As someone with an often debilitating fear of rejection, I’m working to convince myself that there exists a way to success that doesn’t require self-confidence. As the same someone with an unrealistic sense of honesty and fairness, the path also can’t wander past any signs reading “Fake it until you make it.”
So what does it take? Damn, that’s mostly rhetorical as I type this, but for all the cynicism that will pour out of HRPSA, I know the answer to success isn’t cynicism. You have to believe in something enough to put in effort, and that’s one of the worst motivational tools in the bag. Sure, it can help to laugh off our absurd existence in late stage capitalism, and might help you find like-minded people, but it’s unlikely to get a job done well.
Let’s try this in place of self-confidence - detach yourself from your ideas. Detach from your beliefs, whether they’re good or bad, helpful or unhelpful. Detach from your feelings, be they positive or negative, inward or outward. Reject self-confidence by rejecting the idea that ‘self’ is necessary to complete your goal. Your goal is a project, and a project is a series of tasks. Tasks can be broken down into their elemental form, almost all of which require no faith in oneself to execute. They simply require effort.
To that end, detach yourself from the thought that you don’t have time to do a task; detach from believing that the output of the effort will be good or bad. If you can accept that something objectively needs to be done, then you can bypass all of the subjective, including the notion of requiring confidence to do the thing.
Out of habit, I would normally close with “Good Luck,” but if you’re struggling with self-belief, you might be better off taking credit for anything that you’d normally attribute to chance. You did the work, after all. In other words, maybe we can thread the needle of cynical-but-positive encouragement to wish someone:
Fuck Luck.
