At the beginning of the month, I joined the #reverb10 challenge where you write a blog post based off of a daily prompt to reflect on 2010. My blog post today is based off of a prompt that was given to us on December 11th. Being the person I am, I didn’t follow the rules completely.
Prompt: What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?
There is only one…
Doubt.
Problem: Doubt has been a major reason that has prevented me from pursuing to some amazing opportunities and relationships. I made it over this hump while at Northwestern, but it is still something I let invade my mind everyday.
Solution: Take chances. Actually take life by the horns and see what happens.
What else? 11 things… I mean I can of course look at my possessions and see what I don’t need, but I don’t want to eliminate the want side of myself.
I love my life right now. I get to wake up every morning, go to my computer and get to work. I love going in the kitchen and watching TV shows on my iPad while I make breakfast. I love working hard for a couple hours and then going into the living room and watching my DVR’ed shows on a beautiful 51-inch HDTV.
Now of course I should not have these things, because after all, I don’t need them. Yeah you are right.
But I don’t care.
We all deserve to have fun in our lives, I think the problem is that we use fun to hide away from our responsibilities in life. We procrastinate with fun to hide our problems. We buy things to cover up how we really feel about life. Hey, maybe that’s what I have been doing by buying all these Apple Products and clothes for the past few years. But I have a feeling that even if I decided to go full throttle into minimalist land, I would still have those problems, those inadequacies.
I know what my problems are. I know what I need to do to fix them. The things I have or the things I want to have to make my life is happier. My life is not happy because of things I have, but they do add to my happiness.
Yeah… I think that is really it. Doubt.
Doubt that I will be able to become an awesome web designer. The doubt that I will actually being able to help others live amazing lives. Doubt that people will believe in the words that I say.
I don’t think you can remove the capacity to doubt, and I don’t know if I want to. I mean part of my motivation is that person in my head saying that I should doubt myself, that I should be scared. That doubt gives my competitiveness its spark. It’s like, “Ok, you think I can’t do this? Fine. I will just have to show you.”
If I can cancel out the power of doubt through my actions, it will be a happy 2011.
