We, human, always exhibit some sort of fear. It’s normal, it’s a form of self-mechanism to protect ourselves. But from what? In this post, I’ll be writing about this particular topic from my experience and try to bring an introspection of what is the cause of this phenomenon.

Personal Experience

As a person with social anxiety, interacting with people is daunting. The fear of being judged is the biggest concern that runs subconciously in my head, this can be explained (atleast some part of it) by a tedtalk “How to not take things personally?” by Frederick Imbo - I often take people’s gaze as a way of judgement. Most of the time, this results in me fearing to do normal daily tasks, helping people, giving opinion in a crowd etc because these event will leave a traumatic mark(a memory that stays in my head) and leads to memory pop from time to time (anyone interested on why this happens). These mental scars leave me exhausted of trying, and I see this similar pattern in other people. The most occuring reason why people (myself included) that I know don’t try to commit on opportunities usually revolve around undermining their abilities, I can’t recount how many times I’ve heard people saying “I don’t know anything”. So what’s so wrong about staying in a comfort zone?

Innovation is the result of persistent trying

I understand that factors such as having other priority(is) and mental or physical disability plays an important role as a deciding reason not to partake in some commitment. But seeing people with talent, intellect and strong ethic doing so, I find myself confused at times, because they would definitely make a positive change. I’m not going to argue further about this because everyone is entitled on deciding their do and don’ts (well to some extent). After reading through 4 chapters of How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley, I understood innovation is the result of trial and error, and for one to be able to commit on successfully producing a beneficial innovation, persistence is a crucial characteristics of many of these inventors. So it begs the question, ideally, if everyone innovates - contributing to trial and error - then everyday we are one step further than we are currently doing right? Where am I coming from this? A proposition that I thought of, maybe if we try to take a step outside of our comfort zone, then the positive feedback that we gain is not self-exclusive but for others surrounding us too. Instead of thinking “this is meaningless to me”, have it appeared “how people will benefit from this”?

Conclusion

I’d go longer if I wanted to, but I’d rather stop with the rhetorical. I might continue on in another part in the future after I educated myself sufficiently. The point of the entire point is to consider a different prespective, of course its gonna look bad for now, but impacts it brings to you and other people in the future, I’d say let’s not undervalue it.