“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
Epictetus
I often think about humility: how soon in life we lose it and how hard it is to get it back, if only momentarily. If you spend time with a small child, you’ll notice that they do the same activity over and over, even when they’re not “good” at it. The task completely absorbs them, and no one can persuade them to stop and do something else. That humility, and to a certain extent, lack of social skills, is blissful. You can devote every working hour to play for a couple of years in your early life, and no one’s opinions will convince you to do something else, even if you have no goal in mind. At no point does it occur to the child that he or she is not good at the activity. This destructive narrative develops over time.
According to psychology, the ego develops between the ages of 2 and 4. Now, let me be clear about something: the fact that at some point, we develop the ability to differentiate our own needs from the external reality is healthy, not only for us but also for everyone around us. Nevertheless, there’s also something healthy about being obsessed with something and ignoring anyone who tries to talk us out of it. The child doesn’t care if he falls over and over while trying to walk. The child doesn’t care if someone else makes fun of him for trying to build an impossible structure with blocks. Our most productive years on this planet might be our first two because we comfortably ignore everyone else’s opinions and achieve a series of milestones because of it.
Then something happens. At around 2 to 3 years old, children develop self-conscious emotions, such as shame, guilt, embarrassment, pride, and jealousy. Needless to say, life suddenly becomes more complicated. Little by little, we start adjusting our behavior to pursue positive responses. It is great when the people around us have our well-being in mind, but this also leads to our dreams being crushed by everyone else.
As we grow older, we feel an innate desire to fit in. If we’re not careful, we might lose our sense of individuality to conform with the group. Although it would be easy to call young people inauthentic, most are trying to figure out who they are. The reality is that most adults are inauthentic, but unlike young people, we don’t have an excuse. At some point, we willingly gave up on our dreams because we believed we weren’t good enough. While we have to be realistic and accept we won’t be able to do certain things, most dreams are achievable.
Some of the most common dreams are financial freedom, building a successful business, starting a family, improving oneself, experiencing the world, or making music that changes the world. Those seem like unattainable desires, but they’re not impossible. As long as you do those things for yourself and not for any external rewards (money, fame, attention, and so on), you should at least be able to pursue them wholeheartedly, regardless of what everyone else thinks.
Life should be about enjoying the ride while it lasts. Let’s go back, if only momentarily, to those first years of our lives where the thoughts of those around us didn’t matter as much. To be clear, we’ll never be able to ignore the noise completely because paying attention to the opinions of others is what makes us human in the first place. But if we can at least be aware of it, we may laugh at ourselves when we make mistakes and see that’s part of learning something new.