Tag / fear

by Nathan Coumbe

How much is enough?

I asked myself this question a few days ago and elaborated on it in my journal. Specifically, I was asking myself, “How much money do I need to make to feel like I am making enough?”

Honestly, making more money right now would not bring me any more happiness. It’s not money that my conscience is crying out to gain: it is meaning, purpose, the ability to use my God-given talents and strengths to serve and help other people.

The income I make now is actually more than enough to satisfy my needs at this moment. So why am I not doing something that fills my cup?

Have you ever asked yourself what enough is? If you made $40,000 a year, could you live on that if it meant you were doing something you cared about so much and so thoroughly enjoyed you couldn’t dream of doing anything else?

My answer is yes. Yours may be different. At a certain point, making more money is just making more money. Studies tend to cap the increase in happiness that comes from money at about $75,000.

So what goal, idea, or passion is the quest for more money preventing you from pursuing?

Are you, perhaps, an artist who wants to paint? A musician who wants to play and teach? Or are you, like me, a teacher who simply wants to teach?

Ask yourself this question: could you, honestly, make a living knowing the starting or average income that job in your head receives? Could you survive, or even thrive, if it meant you were doing what you felt passionately called to do?

The irony is most of the time when you quit pursuing money and start pursuing passion in the service of others, more money than you imagined comes into your life.

How much is enough? Could you make it doing what you love?

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by Nathan Coumbe

Verify, don’t trust.

Perhaps it is because of my history education background, but I have a pet peeve about verifying information.

Human beings love stories: we have been telling stories ever since we could draw, write, or communicate with the most basic sounds. It is part of human nature. Because we like stories so much, we also love to embellish, hyperbolize, and, frankly, make stuff up.

In times of crisis, the last point is particularly common. There is a lot of misinformation out there: cures have already been created; vaccines are readily available; drinking liquid silver and bleach will keep you from catching the notorious coronavirus that causes COVID-19; mutations are occuring; martial law is being enacted.

Humans like to tell stories, and even when it is unpleasant, humans like to have their emotions stimulated. People make up stories to trigger these emotional responses. You must be aware of this.

This is not new.

For as long as we have been telling stories, writing articles, and now, using social media, people have been sensationalizing things simply to be heard. People crave attention; they desire to be heard. Some people will do anything to make that happen.

This habit of making things up, of telling half-truths, of seeking attention from the public – it isn’t new. The difference now is scale: more people than ever before, 2 billion in fact, have a voice; not all of them use that voice for good.

You must be vigilant, and check your sources. You must also resist the urge to share every single social media post you see, especially if you haven’t verified the information you are reposting. It will cause fear, panic, and anger. This situation is bad enough as it is, and people are already feeling dread.

Why make it worse?

You are lucky to live in world now where you have a voice; 100 years ago, you would not be so blessed.

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

–Uncle Ben from Spider-Man

You have a voice: please use it responsibly.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Profit vs. service

You have a really good idea, an idea that people will love, that will make a difference, that will make things better. In fact, the little voice in your head continues to tell you, “This might work.” But you continue to hesitate; you still haven’t shipped. Why not?

Money.

It always come back to money…but I don’t mean money in the way you’re thinking.

You might be a freelancer, a musician, a writer, or a budding entrepreneur: you want to improve the world, and you need to eat. Essentially, you are wrestling with two competing ideas: “Will this make me money?” vs. “Will this help people?”

If you live and work by the former question, you will make very little progress. There is no way for you to know if your endeavor will generate revenue, which means you will probably wait until you are sure it will work before you act. But if you can’t be sure (and you can’t), you won’t act.

Around and around it goes.

If you are searching for “yes” to the money question, you will feel fear every time you create a new video or go to click on the checkout button of a webhosting platform. You’ll be terrified every time you pick up the phone to make a sales call or approach a new customer in a store.

If you are worried about the profit, you revert to a scarcity mindset:

“I don’t know that this article will make money, so I probably shouldn’t post it.”

“Someone else is already doing something similar; I won’t be different enough to standout and earn an income.”

“What if I spent a little money to make this happen, but I never earn it back? I’ll have wasted it!”

Is that true? What if you didn’t make any money back, but you helped someone by spending it? You gave a gift; it was charity.

You do need to eat, which might mean you need a job while you seek to serve other people. If you work to answer the question, “Will this help people?” you will find that your ideas come naturally. They will be much easier to send out into the world: you won’t hesitate, because there is much less riding on the outcome.

In fact, the outcome is practically harmless. You either end up right where you started, or you make change happen. If you only help one person, then the answer to the question is a resounding “YES!”

I think the secret is faith and the right mindset. The right mindset is seeking to help people because you want to help them, not because you want to profit from them. Ironically, if you help enough people, you will be much closer to turning a profit than the fool who is focused on it.

Seth Godin says it all the time: “Ideas that spread, win.” They do. Helping others spreads, which means it wins. If you help people, they will know who you are. If they know who you are, they will come to you for more help. They will probably tell their friends about you as well. Soon you have an audience, people who trust you because you sought to help them, not profit from them. When people trust you, you win.

Live a life of abundance and give, give, give. Have faith that if you help enough people, the money will come.

And if it never does?

Well…you still helped a lot of people.

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by Nathan Coumbe

This one is just for me

(These are simply thoughts I needed to work out yesterday. Feel free to skip today’s post, as it is rather selfish. However, if you, for whatever reason, read all the way through this post, think about where all the signs in your life are pointing; ask yourself why you are hesitating going down the road.)

What do you do when all the signs are telling you to go a certain way? Why don’t you just go?

All the aptitude tests, interest assessments, and personal inventories tell you to go do this one thing, but still you hesitate.

Is it because you don’t know the next step to take? No, because you know the next step – get a graduate degree.

Is it because you don’t know the field in which to get the degree? Maybe…you do have trouble choosing between your varied interests.

Is it because of what you read and hear? Perhaps so.

“Professors don’t make a lot of money.”

“Most professors are adjuct, so they have work at multiple schools without receiving benefits from any of them.”

“Colleges are slowly dying – it’s hard to get a job at one, and it isn’t the most secure form of employment anymore. The cost of college is keeping people away, and the student loan crisis is going to cause all of them to fail.”

“You may be teaching in a field you love, but the students might not care about the material.”

“Half of the Ph.Ds out there are working in fields unrelated to their studies.”

Or perhaps it’s internal. Students are borrowing small fortunes without thinking to study things (or party but still somehow get the grade) that won’t guarantee them a stable job and a livable wage. That is something in which I cannot, in good conscience, involve myself.

Is it because you might have to stop working, taking a severe pay cut in order to attend?

Are you afraid you’ll fail? Perhaps you are worried you might get the degree, but you won’t be good enough/smart enough/talented enough/hard-working enough to be the best, which means you might not be sought out by the people who need the expertise you went to obtain.

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by Nathan Coumbe

What is the art that is yours to do?

How do you identify it?

Seth Godin asked the question, “Where are the spots [in your personal/professional/creative life] in which you are most afraid?” 

Find the places and things you are afraid of, and determine why you are afraid of them. Then you can identify what you need to go work on.

“Begin with the thing that scares you.”

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by Nathan Coumbe

What is failure to you?

If you try something new, you might fail.

Why is that such a debilitating statement? Unless you are attempting to leap between two buildings or run past a speeding car on the interstate, our failures are rarely fatal.

Yet we are paralyzed by the thought of failing at a new side hustle, of being rejected when asking for a date, or of failing at the new hobby we have never before tried.

If being proactive means choosing how one respond’s to a situation, then we can fail proactively. You can look at failure as a reason to never again attempt something, or you can look at it as simply one way the new thing won’t work.

Thomas Edison tried 10,000 ways to make a lightbulb before he found the way that worked. He saw each failure, not as a discouragement to trying again, but as a stepping stone to success.

Choose to see failure as a learning experience and you will only ever improve the next time.

by Nathan Coumbe

What are you afraid of?

Why haven’t you started yet? Why have you not launched your side-hustle? Or started tackling that new skill you need to get a new career?

Is it really the fear of failure? If you start a side-hustle and it fails, who cares? You didn’t lose your job. You aren’t out on the streets.

If you try to learn a new skill and find that you are completely uninterested or you don’t have a knack for it, why does that matter? What has it cost you? Absolutely nothing.

So is it failure that scares us, or something else?

Maybe the reality is we don’t feel like we are good enough. We feel like phonies, that if we put something out there, people will see us as such – that we are not experts. We are simply amateurs, and they might scoff at us.

Or maybe it’s the actual shipping of your idea or work that scares you. Because in order to make it work, in order to get it started, you have to tell someone about it. You have to try and get someone to bite.

And they might say no.

Why does this terrify us? It’s just one person, or two, or ten. But you only need one person to say yes in order to get the ball rolling.

And if no one says yes, then make better work, make different work, until someone says yes.

Ask yourself today what you are really afraid of, then see it for what it is and act.

by Nathan Coumbe

Decisions

Sometimes you agonize over making a decision, only to have that decision taken out of your hands. There may be a sense of relief when it happens, but all too often, that relief turns to regret.

The questions start boiling up: Why did I not jump on the offer when I got the chance? What held me back? Why was I so afraid?

Are you guilty of “paralysis by analysis” when it comes to making life decisions? I most certainly am.

I have lost so many opportunities over the years simply because I waited too long to decide. I sought out advice, weighed the pros and cons, did research…the problem is I never took action when it was time to decide. I was too afraid of failure, of taking the wrong road, of looking back at the possibilities I may have missed because of what I chose.

So I didn’t choose, and that in itself was a choice. It was a choice to have someone else decide for me.

Sometimes the decision is taken out of your hands. You have to learn from the experience. The question is not, “What could I have done differently?”

The question becomes…

What are you going to do now?

by Nathan Coumbe

Overcome the resistance

Steven Pressfield talks about “the resistance” in his book The War of Art when discussing the mental blocks that Creatives encounter during their artistic pursuits. This is that fear in the back of your mind, the one telling you there is no use in trying what you are attempting to do as it might not work.

Every Creative goes through this; you are not alone.

My resistance is telling me now that my business endeavors might not work out; it’s trying to convince me that I am not skilled enough, not knowledgeable enough, or not important enough for people to use me as a resource in their creative endeavors.

Don’t listen to the resistance. All you can do is press forward.

Launch your ideas; reach out to potential clients and customers; let the public see your work.

Beat the resistance down, and when it comes back, do it again.