Tricks to Overcome Self-Doubt, Part II
Put Success and Failure In Their Proper Places
Welcome back to Shelf Life, where we are conquering our self-doubt, once and for all. I’m just kidding, conquering your self-doubt is a lifelong practice, at least for those who have self-doubt. I think everybody probably has self-doubt about something. I’ve known people who appear to be super-confident and believe they can take on anything that comes their way.
Like I have a friend who has literally no apprehension at doing anything handy around the house. You just say a thing and she’s like “oh yeah we can do that.” It doesn’t matter if she’s never done it before, she’ll just watch a YouTube tutorial and then do the thing with total confidence. Meanwhile I am calling my dad to find out if I should turn the circuit breaker off to change a lightbulb. I’m really impressed by this friend’s self-assurance in the face of anything handy. She allows no room for doubt that she cannot do the handy thing, and this self-assurance is continually bolstered by the successful completion of new and different handy tasks.
But anyway I later found out there was a completely unrelated aspect of her life in which she had a lot of self-doubt and it was an area of life in which I had none at all. So this single experience is what I am basing my assumption upon (that everyone has some self-doubt stashed away somewhere).
If your self-doubt cannot be cured by a YouTube tutorial on how to replace an electrical outlet, read on.
Last Thursday's Shelf Life introduced the first two tricks: Shutting up your critical inner voice and choosing where to get your validation. Today’s Shelf Life wraps up the idea with three more tricks, which, frankly, contain some of my favorite all-time advice for writing or for any other endeavor.
Third: Define your success criteria.
Before you can know whether you are—or have been—successful at anything, you have to know what your criteria for success are. Success is an amorphous concept without a specific definition until you give it one. Success looks like a different things to different people. One person could think of “being successful” in life as having enough money to live comfortably while another person thinks of “successful” as having a vibrant social circle. They might look at one another and each think the other is “not successful” while each finds themself “very successful”—because each prioritized what they valued while living their life.
We can probably all name a “successful writer.” Stephen King is a successful writer. Danielle Steel is a successful writer. No doubt. They both have a tremendous back catalog of critically acclaimed bestsellers and are two of the best-known writers alive on the planet right now. By any measure I can think of, they are extremely successful writers.
But when you think of what it would mean for you to be a successful writer: What would that look like for you? What would it mean? Would you have to reach a Stephen King– or Danielle Steel–level of fame, fortune, and productivity to be successful? Probably not. If that were the success criteria, only a very few people could ever attain it.
On the other hand, building a constant writing habit or completing a manuscript may not be enough for you to feel successful as a writer. Those might be more like milestones on the way to success. Maybe success looks like a traditional publishing contract, or a printed copy of your published book that you can hold in your hand, or a W2 job as a writer that pays all the bills.
But until and unless you define what those success criteria are, you can never meet them and become a success. If you don’t set a definition of success, the goal post will keep moving and every victory will just be a milestone on the way to a destination you can’t actually reach.
Think about what it would mean for you to be a success in your creative endeavor and write it down somewhere so you can know success when you achieve it.
Fourth: Get comfortable with failure.
On the B side of success is failure. If you are younger than me you may not know what a B side is and that’s okay, I will explain it. Back in my day, and all the days before that, when you wanted to buy a hit song to listen to at home you had to go to the record store and buy the single. Today you can just dial them up on Spotify but back in the day your choices were:
Go to the mall, to the record store in the mall, and buy the single.
Record the song off the radio with the tape deck in your boom box.
Borrow the tape from one of your friends and make a copy using the double tape deck in your boom box.
Cassette tapes were around for most of my youth but records were also still a thing. When you bought a single at the store, whether on a 45 (a small vinyl record, just big enough for one song) or a cassette, the song you wanted was on the “A side,” or main side of the vinyl or tape, and then some other song was on the “B side” or the reverse side. So you could flip your tape or record over and listen to the other song which was probably not popular yet but the record company was hoping, which is why they put it on the flip side of the single for free.
Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is the less-popular-but-possibly-still-good B side of success. When you went to the record store, it probably wasn’t because you wanted to buy the B side song. You wanted the A side, popular hit song. The B side came along for the ride, and it wasn’t what you were looking for necessarily, but it’s a bonus and it’s not bad.
Failure is like this because failure is usually a prerequisite for success. Very few people are Mozart and fall face first into a piano the first time they see one and write an opera that stays famous for hundreds of years. Most people are not even Salieri, who require some practice and hard work to let their genius see the light of day. Most of the people who do a thing are not natural-born geniuses. Most people ultimately get to success through hard work, study, practice, and trial-and-error.
When you undertake a creative venture, you can’t know whether it will succeed or fail. You can’t know till you’re done, or until you scrap it midway through as “never going to work.” If you are not willing to produce a creative work that could be a failure, then you can never produce a success either. You have to be willing to fail in order to attempt something creative. You have to attempt something creative to produce a creative success.
All this is to say, if you have doubt about your ability to succeed in your creative work and you’re worried you will fail: Stop worrying, because you will fail, and that’s expected and normal. Not every sentence comes out of your brain perfect. Not every story idea pans out. Not every story you write is good enough to pitch. Not every story you pitch will sell. Not everything you publish will make money.
My mentor, who is in IT, has told me to “fail fast and try again.” The idea is that the sooner you fail, the sooner you can learn from that failure and iterate to produce a better attempt. Don’t let the possibility of failure hold you back. Let the potential of failure drive you forward.
Fifth: Do the thing anyway.
At the end of the day my best advice for the things that make you doubt yourself are to just suck it up and do them. Important: If you are not comfortable rewiring an electrical outlet maybe don’t push yourself to do that, because electricity is dangerous. But there are like zero negative consequences to trying something creative and maybe failing. All you have to lose is some time and the cost of materials, which, if your creative attempt is writing the materials are really cheap. All these letters and words are free.
The most effective, long-term antidote to self-doubt is to do the thing you doubted you could do, and do it successfully. Once you have done the thing, you know you can do it. If you doubt you can write a whole novel—just sit down and try. The worst thing that happens is you don’t finish your novel. That doesn’t mean you cannot finish a novel—it only means you did not finish that novel. But if you do finish you novel, that proves you can finish a novel. Proof that you can do something is an absolute defense against self-doubt.
Self-doubt (maybe any kind of doubt actually) relies on your fear of the unknown. It’s not always easy, or possible, to eliminate your fear of the unknown but sometimes you can eliminate your unknown. When you do that, self-doubt loses a foothold. I mean, sure, doubt will try to tell you “Okay but surely you cannot do it two times” but to that you just ask, “Why not?”
By the time you’ve done the thing twice and doubt is like, “Alright but you definitely can’t do it three times,” it becomes difficult to see doubt as anything other than the clown it is.
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