People Don’t Care About You! And That’s A Good Thing!

We all have dreams! We all want to be amazing and awesome individuals who do great things. But we never do anything that makes us amazing and awesome!

Why?

Because we are scared! Scared that we are not good enough. Scared that we are dreaming beyond our limits. Scared of going down the wrong path. Scared that we may never amount to anything and might die an inconsequential death.

But, there’s a bigger fear hidden underneath all the above fears — “The fear of being judged by others”.

Climbing up — CC licensed by Carl A

Logic dictates that if we can fuck this particular fear which in turn gives rise to a myriad of other fears, we should make tremendous progress. But to do that, you need to understand this fear.

Man is and has always been a social animal. We owe our evolutionary success and our rise to the top of the food chain to this ability to band together and co-operate with other human beings. In the hunter-gatherer world, ostracization meant death, literally.

So, it's only rational that we have a deep-seated fear of being judged negatively by others. We should first accept this fear as logical and necessary. Without it, you may end up doing something crazy and having to pay a dear price for it. See what happened to Kevin Spacey! Multiple allegations of sexual assault and his career is literally over.

But as the saying goes, “Anything in excess is bad!”, when this fear goes unchecked, it stifles your dreams and cripples your ambitions.

There are a lot of irrational assumptions we make that leads to this paralyzing fear-

1. Others are always thinking about me — Most of them only give you and your life probably anywhere between 10 seconds to 5 minutes in a month and in many cases probably a year. And this, if you are lucky if you are even on their radar.
2. People will laugh at me when I fail — A few of your frenemies might feel good when you fail. But even they don’t display their schadenfreude so openly. Social decency dictates that they too act politely and be concerned about your wellbeing. All the others don’t care whether you fail or succeed.
3. People will hate me for drawing attention towards me — Some people might but they’ll subconsciously respect you for trying things out. If you don’t do anything out of fear, they’ll anyway call you a pussy.
4. People will think that I am an idiot/not capable enough- The number and the kind of factors we take into account before forming an image of someone in our minds are complex. There’s no guarantee that people haven’t already assumed you are an idiot. But if you try something, they might reassess their assumption and give you the benefit of the doubt.
5. I am 100% sure people will hate me for trying to succeed — Okay, if you are cocksure about this, remember that the person that has hate in his heart is the one burning. Not you. If someone wants to firmly hold on to burning charcoal, what can you do?

People really don’t care much about you. So, you shouldn’t care much about whether they care about you.

A key ingredient to growth lies in the act of trying things out in spite of the fear of looking silly and incapable. We humans are not very good at predicting the outcomes of events in our life. But we can be practical scientists. Experiment, Verify, Refine, Experiment, Verify and so on.

Just do it!