Stop Settling for Less | Overcome Your Self-Doubt

Most of you entrepreneurs are screwing yourselves over, and I'm gonna share today how to fix it. So I got a great question from one of my super loyal YouTube viewers— love you guys— Tommy Oliver, who wrote in to say, "My big problem that I've always faced is that because of my self-confidence issues, I've never loved any of my ideas. I've always been like, at best. I've considered tons of mediums and nothing has ever really sparked my passion in a way others seem to have. When something comes from myself, I always perceive it as less quality, less real than something that comes from outside of myself. I know that I want to create and be a storyteller, but I've never been able to get hype on my own work because I don't have 100% faith in myself and my abilities. Guess I'll just have to settle for limited success. This is one of the most important questions I think I've ever been asked on my channel, and it's holding a lot of entrepreneurs back. See, what you have to understand is there's a gap. There's a huge gap between your taste and your abilities. So here's what's happening. You love storytelling, so as a result, you're studying storytelling, right? You're learning storytelling. Chances are it's something that you love so much and you don't really even have to put effort into it. You're— you gravitate towards it naturally. You're reading about Martin Luther King or Todd McFarlane or Matt Groening and studying how they storytell because it's something that excites you. So as a result, your taste is up here, right? You know what makes a really good story and how to differentiate between the good and the great and of course the really bad ones. The problem is your ability to tell the stories and create something is down here. Your abilities are nowhere close to your taste, so everything that you create sucks. Even though you could create something way better than the average person could, because your abilities do not match up with your taste, you're never going to be happy. You're always going to be self-conscious and and you're not going to release anything important. What you have to understand is that to narrow that gap, to make your abilities match your taste, it comes through practice. It comes through repetition. It comes from being consistent. You gotta practice your storytelling and spend just as much time on it doing it yourself as you did researching it to develop your taste. You can look at new YouTubers as an example. A lot of new YouTubers, they look at other channels and say, "Oh, I really want to be like that person. Look at how much success they're having. Look at how much growth they're having." And then they say, "I could do that too. I want to do that." I can do that. And they turn on the camera and they put it on themselves and they make their first video and it sucks. And then they realize because there's that huge gap, right, between their abilities and their tastes that they're not going to release it and they're not going to have success and so they shut it down, right? If you have low abilities and low taste, you don't care, right? You thought what you did was great because you don't have any good taste so you're going to release it. If you have high abilities and high taste, then you're going to put it out as well. But how do you get those abilities? From practicing. So I've said a couple times on my channel that it took me 700 to 800 videos before I wasn't embarrassed by my own content. 700 to 800 videos before I could watch one of my own videos and not be embarrassed by it. Other people were loving it, people were leaving comments, people were subscribing, liking it, sharing it, but I couldn't watch my own video because I was too embarrassed by it. And then it took me 1,400 videos until I found a video that I made that I loved. 1400 videos until a video came out that I made that I was inspired and moved by. 1400 videos, man! Would you go out and create 1400 stories and be willing to put in that time and effort and commitment? It took me 1400 videos for my abilities to come up and match my taste. That's what you need to do with your business as well. If you love storytelling, you gotta commit to it, you gotta practice it, and know that your over time gonna bridge that gap, and you're not happy right now because your abilities don't match up with the taste, but it's coming. The only way, like anything else, to get better at an ability is to practice it and study it and learn it and over and over and over again be consistent with it. The second part to this that's really a mind game is that a lot of us may have this deep passion and wanna be successful at something, but because there's that big gap again that I talked about, failure for you is soul-crushing. Right? If Tommy feels like he loves storytelling, it's who he is, it's the only thing he's ever been passionate about, now failing at storytelling, if he fails at that, he's got nothing. And a lot of us have that. We feel like if we fail at this one thing that we're excited by, then we're so afraid of failure that it's going to be soul-crushing to us, and so we're not going to try. And it's better to go and do other things and try and fail at those things because You know, I wasn't excited about that anyway, so it's okay if I fail. And all the meantime, not being willing to bet on the big thing that you want to go after. What you have to understand is that failure is normal. You're going to fail. It's okay. Your stuff will suck. Just like any other skill that you're trying to learn, you're trying to learn how to ride a bike, you're trying to learn how to program, you're trying to learn a new language, you're going to suck at the beginning. You're going to make a ton of mistakes at the beginning. And through practice and dedication and hard work, you'll get better. So Tommy, I'm feeling the pain. I'm trying to send some love. And my best advice for you is: don't worry about the failure and just start doing. Every day, put out a new story, get better, practice, continue learning, and eventually you'll close that gap, your abilities will match your taste, and you'll be a much more happy and more successful, more fulfilled entrepreneur. Believe. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know what you think about this concept, about that gap between your skills and your taste. Leave it in the comments below. I'm really curious to see what you think. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.