Our own worst critics

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about The Reitoff Principle for Productivity. At the time, I thought the post was a load of shite - I had to come up with something for that week, and couldn’t think of anything, so I pulled a few paragraphs out of my urethra and sent them out. I thought the renaming of ‘write-off’ to ‘Reitoff’ was kinda funny, but apart from that, I knew that I was just spouting drivel.

Much to my surprise, the post seems to have resonated with people. I got lots of nice and thoughtful comments from you guys, and the following week I happened to have dinner with a lovely chap who subscribes to this blog. He’s a 39-year-old vet who had just sold his own veterinary practice for a lot of money and was working on setting up multiple side-hustles to generate passive income for himself and his family. He also commented that he really liked the idea of the Reitoff Principle and shared a story of how he’d been applying something similar to his own life.

I was pretty shocked. Somehow this post that I originally thought was terrible had actually helped some people.

That got me thinking about something my brother and I discussed in one of our early podcast episodes. Clearly we’re our own harshest critics*, and we’re not very good judges of the work that we produce. This is a massive issue for anyone who’s ever tried to put themselves out there in almost any sphere - the fear that ‘what I’m making isn’t good enough’.

Building a YouTube channel, recording podcasts, writing this blog post - these are all partly exercises in overcoming fear. With almost everything I produce and stick on the internet, there’s a part of me saying ‘this isn’t good enough’. Thankfully, over time and with practice, that voice has gotten quieter to the point that I can comfortably ignore it for the most part.

So if you’re ever trying something new, putting something out into the world, and you’ve got that niggling feeling of ‘what if this isn’t good enough’, don’t worry. Everyone goes through it. We just have to battle through, ignore that voice, and do it anyway.

* I recently posted on my Instagram story asking for viewers to send in their assumptions about me, for the sake of an ‘answering your assumptions’ video. I’ve never been roasted so hard in my life. Except maybe when I got put into middle-set French in Year 9.