Don’t do what you love. Seems contradictory? I know.
I have been doing what I love for the past 10 years, and it led me nowhere.
I love to eat, it made me overweight.
I love to watch movies, it made me waste my time.
I love to do different things, it made me hop from one thing to another, without ever building anything worthwhile.
See, doing what you love is good advice but if we keep on doing that we tend to go into our comfort zones.
I believe we shouldn’t do what we love, but always do what we are afraid of. That metric never fails.
In life, what we love may be easy or it may be difficult but what we are afraid of will most likely be hard.
If we set this evaluation criteria for any decision in our life, we will climb that personal growth ladder really quickly.
Now think, what are you afraid of?
Are you afraid of public speaking? Good.
Enroll in a public speaking class.
Are you afraid of traveling alone? Good.
Reserve a train ticket out of the city and visit someplace, entirely alone.
Are you afraid of voicing your opinion? Good.
Next time don’t remain silent, speak up, even if that means 2-3 words only.
Are you afraid of ______?
Start doing ______
You can fill in whatever you are afraid of here, and just start doing it.
The key here is to start doing that in small doses. Familiarise yourself with that thing in small quantities, so that the level of stress that you face is manageable. In time you will see that you no longer feel afraid of it, and you have grown way past your comfort zone.
Let me give you an example.
I know how to drive a car but just haven’t gotten that much time behind the wheel so I am always underconfident about it. Whenever I see the chance that I might be given the responsibility to drive I avoided it. It happened subconsciously. This made my confidence go down even further.
But recently, I vowed that I won’t let it happen any longer. Whenever any such chance shall appear, I will embrace that enthusiastically.
Just when I decided that I felt my confidence rise.
So, now whenever I see that I can drive, I drive. This has increased my skills and helped me able to believe in myself.
Similarly, in your life that can be anything. Driving, public speaking, cooking, etc.
Whatever you fear, go straight to it. Unless it is a ghost, then you need to run in the opposite direction. Alright, that was my attempt at cheap humor. Pardon me, please.
Anyhow, doing what you fear will always yield much more valuable growth than doing what you love. We can get comfortable doing the latter but never in the former.
Eventually, you will see that you have demolished all your fears.
What will happen then?
Will you become fearless?
Hopefully yes.
Wouldn’t that be a state that we all would want ourselves to be in?
I know I would love to be in it. To feel that surety about myself.
Also, what will happen is you would be ready to face the next level of fears.
You will become stronger and stronger and keep on doing that for life.
I write daily here on my blog. There is no limit to the word count. I am not focusing on any topic here. I want to build a daily writing habit. This is Day 60 of the Daily Writing Challenge in 2022.