ANDY YE

Ever wanted to do something? And then didn’t do it? Well there are two things that caused you to not do it. Skill issue and will issue. We will define them now:

Skill issue is literally not being able to do the thing. Like you have no idea how to even start working on it, you don’t know the craft, you don’t know how to make music, don’t have the opportunities, etc.

Will issue is not doing the thing because you don’t have the willpower. You are scared of the thing not going as planned, or something going off. Or maybe you are scared of the difficulty that it comes with, the work you’ll have to do, making mistakes, anything negative that can come out of trying something.

“Oh, it’s too hard!”, “Oh but I’ve tried doing this other thing that’s similar and it didn’t work out so there’s no point”, “Agh but I just don’t have the time right now..”, “I just feel like now isn’t the right time”, “I’ll start it right after this other thing that I’m working on”, “I just don’t have a reason to do it”

Will issue is the main culprit. Having a skill issue feeds a will issue even more. Here’s the thing; skill issue is really easy to solve. We have endless resources online, collegiate courses or videos explaining anything can be found with just a few moments. The only difficult thing is actually learning it for the skill issue.

So what’s up with the will issue? We are really scared of being wrong, so we spin webs of half-truths to justify our inaction. It’s very self serving, really, the frontier of defense against change. Huge consequences are waiting for me if I do this! Though ‘it just doesn’t work out’ seems to be the main consequence. Think about it as the guy who wants to ask out the hot girl. He wants her number. He’s worried about asking and then getting rejected, not getting her phone number. So he tells himself it’s not worth it and does not get up to ask for her phone number. It’s not a 100% chance of rejection if he asks, but if he doesn’t ask, then he 100% does not get her number.

My interpretation of this fear of being wrong is that it is evolutionary, because back in the hunter gatherer days if we were wrong then there were real big consequences. We wouldn’t be wrong about how to hit on a girl, we would probably be wrong on how to hunt and track game, or wrong about clean water, and if we were wrong, it was devastating. Maybe this is too pretty of an answer, but either way, what we need to realize is that today, being wrong doesn’t actually cost us very much. Say the girl rejects the guy, so what? The girl doesn’t matter to him, and the guy doesn’t matter to her. The nearby people might see it, but they don’t care at all. No one will make fun of him, no one would want to spend the time to anyway. Her shaming him, people calling him out, those are just half truths he spins to protect himself from action.

So the first half of the solution is to just be cocky. Think you can do anything in the world, and give everything a shot with a mindset that you will ace it. Because you really might ace it. Just like if you convince yourself that you’re a professional pool player you actually play better pool, if you convince yourself you can do everything well, then you will be doing more things well. At least more than before, because guess what? Trying something by definition has a higher success rate than not trying it. So what’s the point?

The second half of the solution is to not take losses incorrectly. If you’re cocky all the time, you’re going to try something, and you’ll feel like damn, maybe I’m actually shit at pool. Maybe I’m not the best at everything. And here is where you need to understand that being bad at one thing does not mean that you are bad at everything else. Being bad at one thing does not mean that you will always be bad at that thing. The cocky mindset also has to come with a vigor to improve, to maintain the cockiness that you harbor. The only way to maintain it? To get good.

Get so good at pool that you never lose again. Taunt your opponent, swear you’ll win, and if you lose, you’ll feel it more. You must crave to win, to keep your cockiness afloat. Obviously there are caveats, don’t try to do open heart surgery with a butter knife, don’t lean into the cockiness if there is a dire consequence. You get the idea.