Todd Polke on dealing with self-doubt: fear doesn't disappear, but you learn to manage it. His method: assess what can go wrong, weigh the outcome against the risk, then take small steps forward.
Did you have self-doubt and how'd you get over it? Yeah, the answer is absolutely. Do you think I still have self-doubt with things at times? Of course, it's not going away. Get over this illusion that fear is going away. It's not. It's just how we deal with fear and how we respond to it. And so, um, at the time, to me, I was just, you know, I'm gonna do it anyway. I had no commitments, so I'm just going, if I lose it all, I've got nothing to lose anyway. Whee! And let's see what happens. So that's what I was doing at the time, but I was 20 years old with nothing to lose. Does that make sense? So my approach now is different, right? And what I do now when it comes to these things, the first thing I always do is, OK, understand what can go wrong. And I go, is the outcome worth the potential risk? And if I'm really shitting my pants, I just go, what's the first baby step I can do? And then I take that baby step.
