Solid on the surface as I crumble within
But legends are made out of vulnerable men

- Deliverance, Bubba Sparxxx

Confidence is a strange creature - it is useless until you don’t have it. There is something frightening about that. Until you’ve failed - you don’t know what is driving your success. I’ve failed - and wrote about it. It changed my life.

It’s still changing my life.

The more I think about it - the more I realized I was so lucky to fail.

To be in a situation where there appears to be no way out, in my case no way to happiness, is amazingly frightening. To see a lifetime of confidence vanish in a *poof* and suddenly all your crutches are snatched away.

College degree: doesn’t matter.
Work experience: nope.
Being responsible, likable, hard working, caring: pfft - get fucked.

To instantly just be a man - alone in every sense of the word was something that nothing in my life had prepared me for. All of the happy times and friendly faces seemed to be lost to the past. No amount of manufactured adversity in my adolescence could have prepared me for the situation I was in - and it scared every ounce of confidence out of me. I was sure I would fail again at everything I tried. I thought I had been caught as a fraud who didn’t know what he was doing.

Fear. At an unprecedented level.

When I finally looked around me without being scared of what I would see, I was shocked to realize that my situation wasn’t as terrible as I thought it was. I wasn’t sure what to think because my brain was so sure that failure was permanent. I assumed that I must be misreading anything positive that happened. But then, bit by bit, interview by interview, job offer by job offer, smile by smile - confidence snuck back into my life.

It doesn’t come instantly. It doesn’t come when you expect it. It sneaks out of the black hole that contains your greatest fear while you are to scared and quivering about what might happen to notice that it’s with you.

And that’s the thing -  if you don’t have that immense, terrible fear lurking out there, somewhere in the dark, the confidence has nowhere to live, and grow, until it is ready to be a part of you. It’s just an abstract idea that people think can be given, like a shitty trophy at the end of a little league game.

Until you are tested you aren’t shit. You’re a shell, a facade of what you could be. But there is no way to recreate the terror of imminent failure. There is no startup in silicon valley that’s plotting to change the world with their instant-confidence drug. Even if there were, it wouldn’t be the same. Because with every important thing in life, you just have to earn it the hard way. Let me say that again:

You just have to earn it.

So, go out there, face your fears, take on the bully in the shadows. You might lose, but when you pick yourself up you’ll realize that it was probably worth it in ways you could never expect.

Find someone who makes you laugh. Find someone who makes you laugh at six o’clock in the morning and eleven o’clock at night. Find someone who makes you laugh when you feel like crying. Find someone who makes you laugh when you are anxious or scared or nervous. Find someone who gets a big laugh out of their own jokes, who laughs with you, who makes you laugh at yourself and at the world, who can cause these little lines to form around the side of your mouth because you laugh so much.

Go read it

But then the silver quiet that only death brings descended upon the room and a cold wind blasted right through all the tiny bones of your ribcage.

Go, read it.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

-TS Eliot, East Coker

Insanely Great

When Steve Jobs announced the original Macintosh, he gave it the tagline “insanely great.” Think about the standard that set. If it was true, it set EVERYTHING the company and Jobs did himself up for failure. If it was just meaningless boasting, they would be a laughingstock.

Of course, the original Mac was a massive success and validated its billing. Of course, in making the Mac live up to that aspiration of being insanely great Steve Jobs had planted the seeds of his removal from Apple - it’s in their nature that the highest aspirations can come back to bite you in the ass.

Try to do something amazing

Sometimes getting the job done is enough. But, often, there is an impulse to do more. Do something amazing. Scratch that - Try to do something amazing - Try to do something impossible. Try to do something that is so complex, so daunting, so fucking frightening that the only solution is to start.

Crack open that text editor and start hacking. Pick up the brush and start painting. Pick up a pen and write something.

Begin.

Don’t stop until you have something amazing. And when you have something amazing show it to the world.

We’re flawed, because we want so much more. We’re ruined, because we get these things, and wish for what we had.

Nerds might be impressed that is uses HTML5 localStorage for all data storage. They may also be impressed that I built it in less than an evening (three hours, but who’s bragging?). What I think is most impressive is how easy it is getting to use new technologies to create something and get it deployed, extremely rapidly.

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