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Afraid to Fail: I’m Always Afraid of Not Being Good Enough

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image credit: worldwithcolor.tumblr.com

One More Confession in 2011

I have always been afraid to fail.  I have let other people’s expectations, assumptions and opinions carry too much weight.  Instead of learning to plan, making connections with new people and being a student of the world, I applied the brakes of self-doubt and second-guessing at every turn.  I knew I was fairly smart, I grasped ideas quickly and I was always formulating theories and stories in my head, but putting it all together is an entirely different matter.  Seeing a project to completion and sticking to your goals requires commitment and belief in yourself.  If I had been awake from the very beginning of my journey, I would have been able to say, “Your expectations are your own.  I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but my life is my own to live and I am the one to determine its course.  I am not here to impress people or catch a rich husband and live a life of display and material wealth and outward achievements like degrees and titles.  And if you try to push me down that path then I will end up in debt over my head and will need to take several years to figure my life out in my late twenties.”

Instead, I was always too polite.  I never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings.  I am very sensitive to the way people interact, and because I was so attuned to how things might be perceived, I went out of my way to never say what I really thought, never discuss what I really wanted and instead spent a lot of time listening and never disagreeing.   Those are two important ideas: listening and never disagreeing.  Listening is a powerful skill to have.  I’m an adept listener because I am genuinely interested in what others have to say.  But I take listening too far.  I internalize too much of what I hear and what other people think.  So I’m moving on from that.  I’ll always listen and I’ll always want to know more, but I am not going to take what other people think to be any more important than my own ideas.  And then there is the second idea of never disagreeing.  Arguing is a waste of time, so I don’t like to spend time pointing out how others are wrong.  You won’t change their minds and they won’t change yours.  So it’s easier to just listen to someone’s opinion and then thank them for it politely and move on.

You know what it’s like to be buried under the weight of your own and other people’s expectations of you.  There is too much great stuff in this life and too many great people in this world to spend even one minute of it drowning in someone else’s arguments and finding yourself angry, annoyed and exasperated.  How can you be creative if you spend all your time arguing or trying to live up to other people’s expectations?  How can you do what you want in life if you are trying to do what other people want you to do?

Part of the reason this blog started out anonymously is because I was afraid it would fail.  I didn’t want to announce myself to the world only to abandon this project, casting it aside like one hundred other failed ideas.  I’ve also always been afraid to associate my ideas and beliefs with myself.  Maybe because I am afraid of criticism and rejection.  But I am coming to understand how immature that is.  So what if people don’t like it?  So what if people laugh and point?  It’s nice that I want everyone to love and get along and play nicely, but life and a life’s work is not that simple.  If I did it and I stand behind it, then one million critics won’t bring me down or make me stop. 

I am no longer afraid to fail.  I will be OK with failing.  In fact, I will welcome it.  Failing is an opportunity to learn and come back ten times stronger.  I will be OK with doing my best and seeing what happens.  I will not hide who I am.  I will set goals for 2012 and keep track of them right here on this site.

Repeat after me:

I do not have to spend time with people I don’t want to spend my time with.

Other people are free to live their lives as they please and I will not force my ideas upon them.

In return, no one can dictate the direction of my life but me.

Don’t Forget to be a Friend

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Friends for Life! Right Guys?

In the midst of the debt-reduction path, setting goals and being focused on being a creator, a visionary, a better writer and an entrepreneur, I have to remind myself why I am who I am.  It’s simple: it’s because of the family and friends I have been so blessed with.  Not surprisingly, these people are always there for me and I think I have lost sight of that a little bit especially as I am getting so close to achieving some milestones.  But they haven’t forgotten about me and instead they continue to surprise me.  If you’ve been on your computer for more than an hour right now, take this moment to log off and go make some eye contact and give a hug to someone close to you.  It’s really all that matters, anyway.

Book Review: Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

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sway the irresistible pull of irrational behavior

Sway is one of the first books I’ve read on human behavior from our modern era (not Freud or Kierkegaard or a classical philosopher like Boethius).  It’s a mainstream, pop culture look at why people behave in irrational and illogical ways so often in life.  The ideas in this book ranged from the common (unwillingness to sell a stock that is plummeting in price) to the rare and tragic (the worst aviation crash in history that killed 583 passengers in Tenerife).  The authors, Ori and Rom Brafman apply several theories to each situation in order to shed light on it.  Here are just a couple examples:

Loss Aversion

You may not have heard of the Tenerife crash (or did you just watch Breaking Bad?), but it remains the worst crash in aviation history, with 583 deaths.  The unexpected part, as the Brafmans explain, is that the pilot who caused the crash was highly experienced and head of KLM’s safety program.  He even appeared in KLM advertisements thanks to his good looks and excellent flying record.  It seems unthinkable that someone like Captain Van Zanten would take off without takeoff clearance, but he did.  And it was the powerful momentum of loss aversion (he wanted to avoid a potential loss – which was a certain overnight stay on Tenerife if he could not takeoff before his mandated rest period began) along with several other factors that the authors explore that swayed Van Zanten into making such a dangerous decision.  As the first story in Sway, it is linked back to often as other ideas like commitment (we are committed to ideas and strategies we have always taken before), and greater perceived losses, can make us even more loss-averse.

Value Attribution and Diagnosis Bias

Another powerful idea in the book that is relevant to all of us changing the way we spend our money is value attribution.  It’s defined as “the tendency to imbue someone or something with certain qualities based on perceived value, rather than on objective data.”  Think of it as the Groupon effect.  Have you ever noticed that when you get something for an incredible discount, you start to doubt it?  Maybe it wasn’t worth that much after all or there’s something wrong with it!  There are several examples given in the book, from anthropologists rejecting important discoveries to Joshua Bell performing on the steps of a DC Metro station that will surprise you, but not by much.  We’re all guilty of it.

Diagnosis bias is a derivative of value attribution and refers to the phenomenon where we continue to use our initial value judgement of someone or something long after we made them.  The most haunting example in the book was of an ER room that continued to send a mother with a sick child home because they perceived her to be a prototypical over-worrier.  You want to think that ER doctors and nurses would not allow their judgments to get in the way of their duties, but that is exactly what happened.  This can happen often in our daily life- the way we view the people we are closest to, the activities that we think are beneficial or important but in fact may not be (like using a credit card for emergencies) and this chapter can help you reconsider some of your most ingrained approaches to life.

Recommendation

I recommend this book for anyone who wants an entertaining, informative read on human behavior.  The book discusses psychology, social phenomenons as well as culture and economics with ease.  Besides the ideas discussed above, there are chapters that consider what our ideas of fairness and equal compensation are and how those change in different cultures.  Some examples were not as in-depth as they could have been, the ideas of the book will stay with you and you may find you are able to ask yourself “What exactly am I thinking here?  Maybe I should reconsider before I jump into this.”  It’s infotainment at its best.  I approach books like Sway not with the idea of “Oh, look at us people, we’re so screwed up” but more of a “People are so fascinating, we think alike a lot more than it would appear at first glance”.

Let me know if you get a chance to read it!

I Lost Lots of Money Investing: How I Lost $5,200

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When I started this blog, I was talking a big game about investing.  I was all “we the people have to grab investing by the balls!” and “here’s how you gotta do your stock research” as if I knew something.  Well, I have a confession to make: I don’t know SHIT about investing.  Yes, I majored in business and I have a background in management consulting.  I read business news daily and I know some fancy Excel tricks.  But my work never had much to to do with securities markets besides the occasional basic look at the fundamentals of public companies.  Trading was simply never a part of my professional career.  And I am going to stop pretending I know what I’m talking about.  Remember how I said you should write down your regrets to get over them?  Here is one of my biggest mistakes and I’m ready to get over it.

What should I do with this bag of money? Who likes roulette?

My $5,200 Mistake

I have a retirement account from my first job out of college.  At one point it had about $10,000 (my contributions, not the company’s) in it, but then the 2008 crises tanked the value of the mutual funds I was invested in and when I finally rolled it over to another firm to actively manage it, it was around $6,000.  Beginning in May 2009, I began buying and selling call options on tech stocks to slowly increase the value of my account.  A friend of mine who is very careful and deliberate in his investing advised me on this.  And we were successful.  There was a stock that he believed to be undervalued and using a variety of call and put option strategies, I made over $3,000 on trading only one stock’s options from 2009 to mid-2011.  Around May 2011, I bought several call options for that same stock when the stock was sitting lower than it normally did.  The call options expired in July, which meant I had 2 months for the stock to move above what I had bought it at for me to make a profit.  Well, it didn’t go back up once in those two months.  If you were watching the markets in the summer, we experienced a market correction and it had nothing to do with the individual stock.  But because I wasn’t holding the actual stock and only the options, I stood to be wiped out on what I had bought the calls for.  So right before the July options expired, I sold them and bought the equivalent amount for August, plus even more call options for August, making my potential losses even larger!  The only way I can explain this irrational behavior is that it had consistently made me money for over two years.  Even though the price of the stock was very volatile, I was looking at the fundamentals and truly couldn’t believe how low the stock was falling.  However, if the calls fell below what I bought them for and stayed below on the August options expiration date (the third Friday of the month), then I would be wiped out.

So I waited.  And I watched.  I checked Yahoo! Finance fanatically.  I kept waiting for the stock price to at least go above the value of the call option (so I wouldn’t be wiped out).  About one week before the options expired, the stock price went above the call option I had purchased.  Not close to what I had paid for the option, but enough for me to sell my options and recover about $2,000.  What did I do?  NOTHING.  I was paralyzed.  Selling at that point meant losing over three thousand dollars.  It was the one day in nearly two months that I had a chance to recover any of my money and all I did was just sit there.  Crazy, right?

Well, not that crazy.  One of my favorite books, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, talks about a behavior phenomenon found in trading, one where people find themselves unable or unwilling to sell a stock that is plummeting in price and cut their losses.  People simply do not want to accept their losses.  In my case, options are even more risky because they have an expiration date.  If I had been holding the stock, I would have been able to simply ride out the summer (the stock is now back where it was in May 2011).

It was a good chunk of money and part of what I was hoping to use for a condo down payment, but I learned some valuable lessons from it.  Here’s what I can say:

1. Regret accomplishes nothing: I already accepted this loss and focused on rebuilding my retirement savings back in August.  But writing about it was the last step to getting over it.  Thank you, affordable blog therapy!

2. In the long run, it’s not a lot of money: Now, if I lost $5,200 every year and took lots chances with my retirement and didn’t learn anything, then that would be a lot of money lost over time.  But I won’t make this mistake again.  And I’m ambitious, driven and ready to focus.  I won’t let this set me back.

3. Investing takes time and always has risk: Even though my friend’s strategy worked for me for two years, this loss made me realize that that wasn’t the right strategy to take.  I think if you are going to invest actively, you have to develop your own strategy.  You have to be able to understand what you’re getting into.  And it’s a lot harder to follow Warren Buffet’s Rule #1 than you think.

4. Consider other investments before securities: Even though I am interested in the finance news and follow it daily, I have many other interests which could be developed into businesses.  I love selling stuff on eBay.  I have products I want to develop.  I am researching investing in real estate after I purchase a place for myself.  These are investments in my future as well.  And being a small business owner is a challenge I definitely want to take on and one that I am much more interested in than just trading daily.  I may get there someday, but I think paying off debt, buying a place and beginning a business are things I need to take care of first, before I try to get in over my head with securities trading.

Since I made my $5,200 mistake, I don’t worry about what I could be investing in and have focused all my energy on paying off debt and increasing my income.

What do you guys think?  Should I bother to get back into investing or is it just too soon, with so much debt to pay off?

25 Activities That Are Better Than Shopping

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After having spent so many years being consumed by consumer culture (watch the Story of Stuff), it’s a strange feeling to find yourself with lots of time on your hands because going shopping has become a lot less important.  It feels great, but I also don’t want to fill all my new free time with watching TV.  Good news: not spending money doesn’t have to be boring!  Here are 25 things that can be developed into new activities for your new “life of austerity”.  Most of these are things I’ve put on my own to-do list.  Listed in no particular order…

1. Learn the names of flowers.  Personally, I hit a wall after rose, daisy, sunflower, tulip, orchid and maybe hydrangea (sometimes I forget which one they are).  Wouldn’t it be cool to know them and pick a few intelligently for your backyard or patio, or give a unique one as a gift?  Here’s a basic start guide.

 

Sweet looking hibiscus in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica

2. Get into historical biographies.  I read a lot, but I’ve only recently discovered how fun biographies can be, and there were some crazy people back in the day.  Potentially good ones: J. Edgar Hoover, Enoch Johnson (Boardwalk Empire’s Nucky Thompson), Frank Lloyd Wright, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Alan Clark, Mother Jones and Mao Zedong.  There are so many interesting political figures whose lives are much deeper than what we know from history.  And they all broke the rules!  Biographies are never linear and balanced, with nuanced plots like a great novel might have.  The lives of other people, like our own lives, often take paths that make no sense at all.  They can be inspiring, revolting, funny and sad.  Here’s a little more inspiration.

3. Learn to draw.  Drawing is fun and anyone can start.  It’s a great break for your brain too, to try something new.  Try this site to start.

4. Call your mother.  I bet you don’t call her enough.  She loves you, you know.

5. Get back into an old sport.  Remember when you played three sports in high school?  How the heck did we ever do that?  How cool is racquetball, tennis, field hockey, ice skating, surfing, soccer and every other sport you used to play?  I love getting back into an old game.

Nothing like 2 good sets to take your mind off the BS!

6. Learn the names of trees.  

What type of tree is this? Now I know it's a Bur Oak!

I want to know a conifer from a broadleaf.  Here’s a cool online guide from Arbor Day.

7. Get into a new genre of music.  I love music and yet I forget all about  it sometimes.  How about flamenco guitar, bluegrass, big band jazz, or reggaeton?  There are so many genres to discover.  Try Jango or Pandora.

8. Clean out every closet in your house.  Here’s a big project that will be well worth it.  Donate or get rid of the stuff you don’t use.

9. Start juicing.  

Vitamix, you will be mine someday.

After you watch Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead you may decide you want to eat less processed foods.

10. Take pictures.  I still don’t have a camera, but I’ve got a loaner from my dad.  It’s been so fun taking pictures again.  There’s nothing like candid shots.

11. Write an email.  Respond to all of those emails you’ve been meaning to write thoughtful responses to.  But first, read the The Sad Truth of What’s Really in Your Gmail Inbox.

12. Organize your airline miles/loyalty programs.  You might find you have a free hotel night or trip somewhere!  I’ve also enrolled all my debit cards at SkyMiles Dining (they have it for other airlines as well) so every now and then I find I’ve gotten extra miles without any effort.

13. Turn old, lame jeans into sweet cutoffs. Can also be done with old, lame skirts that are below the knee and need some “dressing down”.

Cutoffs are useful in a variety of situations, as Tobias shows here.

14. Borrow P90x or Insanity from a friend. No need spending $120 on it.  Get ready to be seriously challenged.

15. Clean your bathroom.  Take a hot bath as a reward. With candles.

On second thought, don't jump into that ground level bath without closing the blinds.

16. Take your dog to the dog park.  Let him pee on some new trees.

17. Write down a list of all of your regrets in life.  I always say I have no regrets.  But there are a few things where I find myself wondering, “what if I….” (the majority of them being the financial mistakes I’ve made).  I found that writing them down helped me to get the hell over it and move on with my life.

18. Bake a cake from scratch.

Mmmm, chocolate.

Chocolate. Black Magic Cake looks amazing.  Just add an extra bar of Hershey’s dark chocolate for extra decadence.

19. Foster a dog or cat from a local rescue group.  They’re dying for your help.  Just Google your town and “animal rescue” and you’ll find plenty of groups.  I could do a whole post on volunteering opportunities, but that’s for another time.  This is just one thing that’s simple to get involved in and you can decide how long you want to foster.  Some groups will even help out with your costs.

20. Make dinner at home.  I know you have some recipes you’ve been meaning to try.

21. Create a vision board.  I know, I was inspired by 2 Broke Girls and their cupcake store vision board.  I liked this article about using Ript to make a quick and easy vision board.  I should post mine when I make it!

22. Learn a new language.  Personally, I could spend the rest of my life learning new languages and feel fulfilled.  I love learning new languages because it makes the languages I already know that much richer.   I understand grammar a lot better because I know the 14 verb tenses of Spanish.  It also makes traveling to new countries so much better, And I love being able to haggle in a different language, making the bargaining process so much better.  It also opens up a whole new world of novels, poems and films that were otherwise only available as staid translations (Example: non-Spanish speakers think Shakira is a .  The LA County Public Library offers free online language learning with Mango Languages, so check with your local library as they probably have something similar.  I speak three languages fluently (English, Spanish and Persian) and definitely want to add Chinese and Arabic to that. And then for fun, I’d love to learn Italian and Portuguese to corner the Romance languages.  Oh yeah, and definitely some elementary Japanese because I really want to visit Japan.

23. Start an herb garden.

I seriously need to do this.  With just basil, mint and rosemary, you have the beginnings of extra flavor in all of your meals.  I just discovered how good lemonade tastes with just a little bit of fresh mint, and I don’t want to pay $2.99 every time I want fresh mint.  And theres nothing like fresh basil on top of your pizzas, pastas and bruschettas.  If you want even more herbs, grow parsley, marjoram, oregano and dill.

24. Create a portfolio of your skills.  I love the idea of a portfolio for people who are not painters, photographers, designers, etc.  A blogger could create a PDF compiling a few great posts, and then some of their skills, samples of projects they have helped others complete and anything else that you do that other people don’t know about.  Lots of people don’t know I made a short documentary about Tajikistan.   But I have all these skills of creating a story from raw footage, editing, handling interviews and so much more.  I am eventually going to make a portfolio site that has articles, videos and other things I’ve created.  But instead of focusing on just getting something up, I want to take my time to put together a really appealing portfolio.  And whether it’s a website or document portfolio, be sure to add where people can find you on LinkedIn, Twitter, Elance, Tumblr, etc.  And don’t forget a plain old telephone number.

25. Have your friends over.  It seems like people have forgotten the great art of hanging out.  I saw Demetri Martin at the LA Festival of Books and he said, “I would prefer to get paid to just hang out with my friends but nobody was paying me for that, so I do comedy instead.”  I totally agree with him.  My absolute favorite pastime is to have friends over and lounge around and talk.  I don’t really care what we talk about, I love spending time with people.  I guess that is another reason why I want to have a nice place to call home.  But even in our 1-bedroom apartment, I am happy to see people come over to eat, hang out and spend time together.  So when you’re looking for something to do instead of shopping, do nothing.  And call a friend to come over and do nothing with you.

How did you like the list?  What are your new activities since you’ve broken the shopping habit?  I’d love to hear from you!