How to Get Over Fear of Failure (and stop procrastinating)

This video is sponsored by Brilliant, but more about them later in the video. Yes, we also learned that Tina is scared of literally everything. So yes, that is completely true. However, this part is also true. Yeah, I am afraid, but I still do it. And this is kind of where I got myself to, you know, I can be scared of everything, but I do it anyway. I'd have to say like all the scariest things that I got myself to do, I am so happy that I did them. My life would be so different, like much worse different, I think, if I didn't do these things. Back in 2019, I got an internship at Goldman Sachs as a software engineer. So in the end, I decided that I didn't want to be a software engineer. I wanted to be a data scientist. So I also took a leap of faith over here, did the scary thing and didn't actually accept a return offer. Then in 2020, when the pandemic started, I made this YouTube channel. This was back in July when I first started working at my job as well. And this was also a leap of faith. It was terrifying putting my face saying things on the internets. And I'm so incredibly grateful because I 100% would not be where I am right now if it wasn't for that. Then we fast forward to 2022, which is, you know, this year, back in March, I quit my job. I quit my job at Meta. And now right now over here, this is my next leap of faith. My next super scary thing, which is building my company called Lonely Octopus, which is a self-learning platform. If you came to this video wondering how to not experience such fears, I have bad news. I don't know how. Like I'm still terrified every single time I'm making one of these choices. I genuinely am. It's okay to be scared of failure. Like it's okay to have a lot of fear and be terrified of everything. Like I am. If you really care about something, then you should be scared. Like if you're not scared, it means that it's something that's not worthwhile. It's already within your comfort zone or you just don't care about it. Then you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place. I actually did read this from a book, which I think was the Myth of Motivation, but don't quote me on this one. It was something about like you should actually use your own fear as a way of gauging how important or what are the things that you should be pursuing. So if you feel fear towards that, if you feel uncertainty towards that, anxiety towards that, then that is actually going to be the thing that's most important for you to do. That's going to be the thing that's going to help you grow the most as a person. But I'm not saying that if you're like, I'm terrified of jumping off this building. Like don't do that. Okay, you know what I mean? By the way, I also have a newsletter called Boops Keyboard. It's about learning. It's about coding. And it's also the place in which I release initial information so that the newsletter people actually have a priority towards the things that I'm releasing. For example, with Lonely Octopus, I released that early, around three to four days early to the newsletter people first so that they had a chance to apply. So you should have subscribed. This is the link and also linked in description. Okay, so it's first starting off with how to do the thing, even though you're scared. Like this is my favorite tip is make it so that you don't have a choice. When I first started working on coding in a bioinformatics lab, I got that job and I knew a little bit of Python, but I definitely knew zero R. It was like, oh ----, well, I better learn how to code or else I'm going to get fired. So again, put myself into a situation where I don't have a choice. So then I'm like, oh, I better do it now. Second piece of advice from me on how to get over that fear of failure and stop procrastinating on something is to lessen the failure barrier. That's what I call it. When I was starting my YouTube channel, right? Like I'm like, oh, I want to like go into YouTube and then do like my own company and all these different things. I kind of like had it in clean. I'm like, oh, I kind of want to do that, but I wasn't just going to quit my job immediately and then go do that. So what I did was I just scoped it all the way down. I'm like, I'm going to keep doing my day job and doing that, but I'm just going to start making YouTube videos. What is that called? Like a threshold of failure is so much lower now because the worst case scenario is that nobody watches my videos and then I just stop making videos, right? I'll still have my day job. So that kind of de-risks me in that sense. Oftentimes, there's also a lot of people who come up to me and ask me like, oh, Tina, I want to transition into computer science and data science and all these different things, but I'm really scared of starting. You can just start off with one project, right? Learn a little bit by yourself and see if you like it or not. You don't have to like make it so big in your head because the bigger it is you make in your head, the scarier that it feels. So if you just think about it, I'm going to take this course, I'm going to do this project and if I fail, I fail, like whatever, right? It's like not that big of a deal. Then I think getting over that barrier is it becomes a lot easier. The next thing has helped me get over that fear of failure and to stop procrastinating is really trying to logically understand what's the upside and what's the downside. I kind of like look at the pros and cons of quitting and not quitting my job. It may seem like it's a very aggressive decision, like a very, very big decision and it is, right? It's a life-changing decision. However, if I look at the pros of doing this, I'm like I'm going to be able to do something that is able to lead to the vision that I have for myself, the vision that I have for my life, while staying at my job is most likely not going to lead me towards that path of going where I want in my life. And on the con side, you know, like yes, I'm quitting my job and that's kind of risky. I'll have to go find another job. But I also know I'm like, you know what? I have experience working at Meta as a data scientist. If I really wanted to get another interview, I think I should be able to. So when I weigh that risk and reward, it makes sense for me to quit my job and try to do the thing that I really want to do. And if it doesn't work out, then I'll just go get another job. I do want to make a note here that I know I am so privileged to be able to say something like that. Trust me, I am very aware of this. Okay, so the next thing, have a vision for yourself and think about how sad you will be if you didn't achieve that vision. There's this quote. I don't know who said it, but it reads, someone once told me the definition of hell. The last day that you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. You spend your entire life not taking those risks because you're too scared of failure and you saw the person you could have become if you did take those risks. How sad would you feel? How much regret would you feel? I don't want to be filled with regret when I am hopefully an elder Tina and lying on my deathbed. At that in combination with kind of like my model, which is called memento mori, remember you will die. And how do you want to live your life? Knowing that you will die. I think it's a very empowering thing because it makes you realize that the amount of time that we have on this earth is so short. Don't live it in a way that you're always cautious, right? I mean, you probably, unless like, you know, Elon Musk does something. So hopefully those tips that have helped me so much get over that fear of starting. Hopefully that helps you guys out as well and you get to a position where you're like, okay, I do the thing. I am motivated. Like we were saying earlier, you can be motivated towards something and you get started, but then you quit because you don't have the systems and the correct habits in place for you to actually continue doing the thing that you want to do. How many times have you guys started an online course and not completed it? How many times have you guys tried to lose weight and that didn't work out? You know, list goes on and on. That's okay. That's also human nature. The trick to this so that such things do not occur, it really lies in taking that initial motivation, that initial passion that you have and putting that, like don't waste any of this, putting that into immediately building the right systems and the right habits so that you will continue doing this thing because emotions and passion and motivation, this is going to fade. Like there's no way that that can sustain you from a very long period of time. So you need to put that and build the correct systems while you are still motivated, while you still are passionate. The way in which I recommend doing this is really two-pronged. So the first one is determine the correct metric. Like what are you going to goal yourself on so that you can visibly see your own progress and that is going to keep fueling your motivation and keep fueling your passion for stuff. It's about leading metrics and lagging metrics. So the lagging metric is the ultimate thing that you want to accomplish. Like it's the thing that you're striving for. While the leading metric is the metric that you should be goaling yourself on on a day-to-day basis. If you work towards that leading metric, then that's going to result in the lagging metric. So my lagging metric could be something like, I want to reach 1 million subscribers. Well, my leading metric in this case is that I'm going to make one video per week. That's something that's completely within my control. I will make one video per week. And if I keep making that one video per week, then that should naturally lead to me achieving my lagging metric of getting 1 million subscribers at some point. And the second prong of this is to establish systems of habits so that you actually work on these different things and work towards your ultimate goal. So there's research that shows that for people who actively say how it is they're going to incorporate a new habit into their lives, they are much, much more likely to actually incorporate that habit into their lives. For example, if you're just going to be like, I'm going to walk every day and then just leave it as that, you're probably not going to walk because you don't have like a specific, it's like not integrated into your schedule, right? However, if you say after dinner, I'm going to go walk for 10 minutes around the block, then it becomes tangible. It becomes something that is clearly within your schedule and you're much, much more likely to do this. Now, if you combine this like action, actionability with consistency of saying, I will do this every single day or I will do this every other day, then over time, that's going to keep compounding. And that's how you also establish that habit into your lifestyle. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the sponsor of today's video. I think learning is probably like the number one skill that you should develop as a person because that is going to be the thing that is going to get you so far in life. Like it's okay that you don't know things, but if you have the ability of learning things, then there is nothing that you cannot accomplish. Now, Brilliant, the sponsor of today's video, is a brilliant way of learning STEM subjects. That's a good one, Tina. Brilliant is a STEM learning platform that specializes in interactive hands-on learning. Some of you may actually not know this, but if you interview at top tech companies like Meta, for example, they actually tell you to use Brilliant in order to review your math and stats. For the interview, it's designed for STEM subjects specifically, which are often subjects that are pretty hard to learn by yourself. So they make it into interactive problem-based learning and also use a variety of different learning techniques to help you absorb that information faster. Even now when I'm not doing interviews anymore, Brilliant is still a great resource for me to go and learn new subjects, as well as to freshen up subjects, like things like math and stats and probability, which are subjects that for some reason I just keep forgetting. So I still go back to Brilliant whenever I have to like refresh myself a little bit on these subjects. They have timeless course offerings like math and stats, programming with Python, which you guys know, I think coding is one of the best things to learn ever, as well as new course offerings, such as topics like neural networks and quantum computing. You can join the millions of people already learning on Brilliant and head over to this link to get started for free, also in the description. If you go through my link, the first 200 people will get 20% off the annual subscription. So thank you guys so much for watching this video. Actually, let me know, what is the biggest thing that you are currently scared that you're going to fail? Like that you're procrastinating on and you're really scared of failure. What is that thing? Let me know in the comments. All right. And I'll see you guys in the next video where I live stream. Bye.