When I was a teenager, back around when Facebook first came out, I was one of many people who were posting everything, saying anything I wanted. I had no care in the world—I just wanted to share and express my thoughts.

But as time goes by—around the time before graduating high school, my mind “matured” I guess, but it’s more like “poisoned”—and I started giving a heavy weight on other people’s opinions and what they would think if I say this or do that.

I started defining myself as a “private person”.

• I never posted anything on social media. (Aside from birthday greetings here and there)

• I was very uncomfortable expressing my thoughts and feelings because I thought it doesn’t fit my current circle of friends and that they would find it cringe if I did.

• It had negative effects on my romantic relationship because I couldn’t show my appreciation in public. I couldn’t even do this for my parents as well. (Yeah, it was that bad.)

This continued all the way through college up until I was already a young working adult around the age of 20-23. I couldn’t express and articulate my opinions on work meetings because I thought they weren’t valuable or my seniors might think I’m too cocky or arrogant.

And it doesn’t end there, during the early stages of my entrepreneurship journey—this was the time when I first discovered and tried an online business called SMMA. Having an active, sociable and normal looking social media profile was a huge driving factor for success on this business model.

Posting reels and valuable insights related to the niche were the norm and possibly bare minimum but I couldn’t do it because of something as simple as I was afraid that my friends at the time might think, “What the heck is James doing?”.

Humans Are Socially Intelligent Beings

Ever since the dawn of time, humans have been drawn to each other. They seek company and approval with each other to survive the very harsh living conditions. People depended on each other, and so if you’re alone—you would simply have a harder time surviving and the possibility of dying increases exponentially.

This is why being socially rejected means death back then.

Over time, humans have evolved with this kind of thinking and up until now—there are still people who are so afraid and are doing everything they can to fit in because they fear social rejection.

Why You Overthink And Never Act

You’re afraid of being judged.

This is caused by growing up with a mentality that you shouldn’t get in other people’s way because it might upset people. This is most common during childhood.

As a child, you were scolded when you made a mistake or caused problems to other people when you pursued your curiosities. This slowly builds up the mindset of being a “people pleaser” and that you should only do what they deem normal and are aligned with their opinions.

Over time,

• You lose your sense of self or authentic self because you are focused on doing what other people thinks you should do.

• You lose your ability to think on your own, always just going with the flow of everyone’s opinions.

• You lose your confidence at what you do because the quality of your work is affected.

  • Your mind has a bandwidth—if you care about what other people think of you you lose part of that bandwidth which you could’ve instead spent on what you do.

The Caveat

I’m not telling you to just literally not care. No. It’s not that. That’s just irresponsibility.

Detachment is different from not caring. It’s giving your best effort but not caring about the outcome. It is what it is and just let it be.

If you’re aligned with the truth and you know that you’ve done everything you can to the best of your abilities—you can afford to not care. Because you know it’s out of your control now. Whatever happens, happens.

How I Did It And How You Can Too

Exposure

I realized there was no other way but to just keep exposing myself to it. Reading about it won’t help me, thinking about it won’t help me. Doing it will.

Being in the SMMA business model helped a lot because I kinda like had no choice if I wanted to make it work.

• I kept on sending cold DMs.

• I cold called random people to get clients.

• I called my client’s clients as an appointment setter.

The idea of sending message to strangers alone is enough to make me want to just curl up on my bed and hide, what more if I had to call them.

All those times I was thinking that these people might judge me—hate me—be annoyed with me. It was so uncomfortable, I was literally going against the grain. But I kept on doing it and over time I developed something what David Goggins calls a Calloused Mind in his book Can’t Hurt Me.

Face your fears

You know yourself more than I do. So ask yourself:

• What are you running away from?

• What’s that one thing that when you think of doing—you just tremble and you feel this indescribable grumble on your stomach?

Then do it.

You don’t have to do it all on one big leap—ease into it. Do it once a day if you have to. Then the next week, do it twice a day. Keep repeating this process until you’re no long afraid of it.

The most important thing is to keep going. Remember that it’s not going to be hard forever. You’ll overcome it and it’ll be easier for you.

The Grand Scheme Of Things

We are nothing but a very small entity in this world. And this world is nothing but a very small planet in the whole universe. A single person’s opinion is very insignificant when you take into consideration the grand scheme of things.

Remember that it’s all in your mind. Just do. There’s more to this world than just living inside your mind.

When you overcome this, you’ll feel a sense of freedom that you’ve never felt before. Your future self will thank you.