perspective | The Caleb Barney Collection

Embracing your fear to make you better and live with less anxiety

Embrace your fear. Everybody fears something. Don’t be ashamed of it and don’t recoil from it. If you fear making mistakes and you don’t embrace it, you will do everything in your power to not make a mistake. Eventually that will lead you to stop taking any chances at all just so you don’t look bad…

But the thing is, it’s all in your head. Most people won’t judge you for making mistake. And if they do, it’s pretty hypocritical. Everyone makes mistakes. The best learn from their mistakes and from the mistakes they’ve observed others make. They not only learn from that isolated incident, but they also can apply their new found knowledge in other areas of life. They figure out where the carryover is and become better predictors for future events. Then they test the hypothesis and keep pushing.

The more you push your limits, the more you grow. But if you don’t want to push your limits and always want to stay within your comfort zone, you might grow slowly, or you might not grow at all. And in a worst-case scenario, you’ll actually end up getting worse.

Embrace your fears. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, to look weak, to look dumb… If you don’t understand something, ask a question. If you think you can lift the weight, but you aren’t sure, try it anyways. Ask for a spotter. People like to help if you let them.

Focus on the good, not the bad

When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you will always have enough.

Be grateful for what you have. Chances are that if you’re reading this you’re way better off financially than the majority of people in this world. Focus on the good in life and seeing the silver lining in every situation. Train your brain to find what is good and to make the best out of any situation. If you only focus on what is going wrong in your life, eventually that is all you will see.

Let your past make you better, not bitter

Things don’t always go our way. Sometimes people have wronged you intentionally. Sometimes they’ve wronged you accidentally. Sometimes it could be chalked up to being young and stupid. Other times it could be attributed to them being spiteful, prejudiced, or racist.

No matter what the reason, use your past to benefit you. At the very least, you can say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…

Find the silver lining in all situations and learn to forgive, but not forget.

The bare minimum

When working a W-2 job as an employee, don’t expect a raise just because you show up to work on time, you don’t take sick days, and you‘be been there for a long time. Showing up to work on time and not missing extra days is the bare minimum of what you should be doing. That’s part of the job! But just showing up doesn’t necessarily mean you’re providing value to your employer. You still have to perform, and that’s what your raise should be for (if you get one). It should be based on merit – how are you “deserving” of a raise? (By the way, I despise the word “deserve”…we are becoming very entitled and often feel we “deserve” things when we really are owed nothing.)

There are a lot of downsides with being an employee, one of which is that someone else gets to determine what you make (whether that’s hourly or salary). But that employer has taken the risk of being an entrepreneur. They are responsible for keeping the business afloat, for always striving to find more customers so that they can pay their employees. If you haven’t put in the legwork and only see the end result of what you think the employer is making, it can seem wrong with how much they’re making with how “little” work they’re currently doing. But that’s the wrong mindset to have. And if you want to do something about it, you have three options: negotiate for higher pay, find another job, or start your own business.

Knowledge and ignorance

“The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.” John F. Kennedy

You don’t know what you don’t know. I used to think I was relatively smart, then I began reading more and realized that there is so much I don’t know.

We will never know everything. We can’t even know everything that we think we know, let alone use science, math, and other information/data to break through to understand new answers and technologies.

As long as you remain humble, keep an open mind, and always try to learn something new, you’ll be in a good spot. Don’t talk down to others because you think your idea of “the truth” is more complete than theirs. Over time, you’ll come to realize that your truth today is only a partial truth. It’s your truth, but then there is also the other person’s truth (their perspective of the same event/situation) and the objective truth (what happened, with no thoughts/opinions of why something was said/done, without assigning intent or judgment, etc). And what really plays with your mind is when you realize that your truth today gets twisted/altered so that when you look back at the event in five, ten, or twenty years, you have yet another version of the truth.