“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt,” once wrote William Shakespeare. Fear of the outcome leads to automatic rejection from every opportunity we want. Years, decades will pass and you will look back and torturously wonder “what if.” The culprit? Anxiety — it rejects yourself before people, opportunities, and life does. Living in self-doubt is often the only thing blocking you from reaching your goals and leading a satisfying life. Because the only certainty in life is that if you live in fear and don’t shamelessly seek goals by having the courage to be vulnerable, to be fearful and do it anyway, you will always end up dissatisfied. Only when can you start achieving goals when you separate yourself from the outcome and focus all your energy on putting in your best effort. All the time spent doubting outcomes and worthiness is 100% better served harnessing it towards goal. It’s the only way you even have a chance. Don’t let doubt reject you before opportunities do. You’re not an imposter. Success, skills, achievements come through practice and learning, no one is born being able to lift two-hundred pounds.
The trite adage, “the only thing standing between you and your goals is yourself,” has surprisingly proven true time after time in my life when I ignored my self-doubts. Before coming to this realization, I spent more time doubting whether I was worthy of something instead of putting in the effort required to obtain it. I was convinced certain things were just naturally meant for some people, and then there was me. Resigned to this passive mentality, my reality became something that didn’t reflect my hopes, goals, or who I was at all. This cognitive dissonance reached a breaking point when I was confronted by the path I was going down because of my inability to claim a goal for myself. If you live in self-doubt, much of life just happens to you.
Doubts have undoubtedly altered the course of my life but I have reclaimed my autonomy through the realization that success isn’t innate — it takes hard practice that can only be driven by passion. No one is born writing like a best-selling author, bench pressing 200 pounds, being talented at programming, understanding astrophysics, etc. Everyone starts looking completely out of place relative to one’s inspirations and lofty goals — it’s through failure and relentless practice that one exercises the brain, our social skills, our muscles to master goals.
It wasn’t my lack of natural ability that blocked me from goals I dreamed of, it was my self-doubt. One of the first times I rejected myself before others did was during the college application process where I took myself out of the competition before even trying. Despite being top 1% of a class of over 700, holding a 4.85 GPA, and as many AP credits as possible, a below 25th% SAT for top colleges convinced me not to bother applying to many out-of-state schools because everyone else surely had a perfect math section score. I complacently stuck to large research state universities that offered me generous scholarships and put my dreams of the east coast behind me before even trying. In reality, some old acquaintances got into “prestigious” schools with around the same SAT score as me. It was a holistic evaluation process that I took myself out of. When the waitlist letter came from the one Ivy I applied to, I had no idea what to do — so I did nothing. A self-assured person in pursuit of their goals would have sent a continued interest letter, spoken with the dean, and done everything possible to express interest. I doubted I even had an equal chance as anyone else on the list, so I did nothing. My sense of unworthiness resulted in idle actions that lacked the effort necessary to obtain those goals — thereby, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Self-doubt made me initially choose the wrong major out of conventionality even when I knew since high school my interest lay in law and economics. I stuck through Chemistry courses that made zero sense to me, my passion, or career goals until I hit a wall. I thought I could fake it all through undergrad and dental school because that was a nice, stable career path. I listened to stupid stories about liberal arts’ employment prospects that weren’t based around work experience, effort, and skills. Until I realized that success required a work ethic that only passion could produce. Then I switched from Chemistry to quantitative Economics. I stopped doubting my gut feeling in 2018, and since graduating in May, my degree has paid off. Much better than a Chemistry bachelor’s alone does. I’m actively using my degree and skills in a field that pays off before heading to law school. But doubting my true passions, abilities, and succumbing to conventional STEM pressures ruined my first-year GPA.
Moreover, self-doubt put my law school goal on hold for 3.5 years throughout undergrad because I succumbed to horror stories about graduate debt, dissatisfaction, and unemployment when in reality, those aspects are all choices. Those who truly pursue law school out of love and not just out of a post-graduate lack of career direction or the wrong motives will be the ones that work harder and get involved in experiential opportunities that will ultimately help secure them a job. I spent 3.5 years not even thinking about the LSAT because I ruled myself out — I was too risk-averse, too introverted, and too ordinary for a law school of my choice. But natural ability has little to do with score improvement — rather, top scorers spend hundreds of hours drilling practice sets and taking all 86 practice tests. All the time I spent doubting possible outcomes and worthiness could have been best spent working towards my law school goal instead of dental school. Doubting yourself is a misleading time-waster.
“The world will accept the judgment you place on yourself.” Negative feelings about oneself makes you fear vulnerability, opportunities, being known —which manifests in negative behavior that signals to others to stay away. This is a vicious negative feedback loop created by the false narrator in your mind that sabotages everything you want out of fear. To stop self-sabotaging we must not act out of fear but out of love. Out of love for our goals. By fearing and pursuing them anyway. By detaching oneself from the outcome. Stop fearing rejection or others’ reactions — what is not in your control. Instead, put all your energy into taking the necessary steps to get to where you want to be. Not trying is an automatic rejection. Be fearful and relentlessly pursue your goals anyway paying no mind to the outcome of your efforts. Don’t look back in years and think “what if.”
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