Doubt Is a Silent Killer
He sees you when you're sleeping | He knows when you're awake | He knows if you've been bad or good | So be good for goodness sake!
-- Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
We all have doubt, creeping in ever so slightly, growing little by little until it's exponential, and ending up crippling us before we can stop its takeover.
Similar to perfectionism crippling your productivity, doubt cripples progress, harms creativity, and holds us back from achievement, or even from taking the first steps to grow, improve, and get things done.
It begins with a tiny and potentially insignificant thought, introduced on its own, by a friend, a colleague, a parent, a TV show, whatever. And it grows with no bounds, to a feeling that cripples and holds us from making any movement at all.
While some may still manage to make progress, doubt sabotages our belief that the direction is worth taking or has any potential for success. We start defending the tiny thought and its right to exist, convincing ourselves we shouldn't take the chance cause it won't work anyway. We should just let it go and revisit once we have something real going.
Unfortunately, there is no quick antidote for doubt, and that is why it is a silent killer. But knowing about it and being aware of its effects may be enough to try and battle its expansion.
As we feel doubt creeping in, gaining strength, and our minds begin defending it with various arguments why it is correct: that's when we ignore it. It isn't easy, cause it uses our own experiences and previous failures as evidence to prove us wrong. But we continue to work hard and ignore it.
There is no foolproof method here, so we stay focused on the task at hand and complete it as planned, as quickly as possible. Get it going, push harder, and try with everything to complete, ship, and check off that task before doubt grows too much and stops us in our tracks.
If we don't even ship our work, doubt hasn't just killed the initiative. It guaranteed our failure before we ever had a chance to try.
And that is even worse, cause we want to try. Even if it means to fail fast, learn something new, and move on to bigger and better things.
Don't let doubt kill off ideas before you've even had a chance to try, make mistakes, and fail. Even that has its benefits.