When there are no cheerleaders

It is ingrained early on that your worth is tethered to approval from the external. As a kid, you are conditioned for this with grades, diplomas, special assembly trophies. Later on there are proud pats on the back for getting a new job and enquiries about progress in your ‘career’.  As an adult, through a good salary or when someone buys your stuff.

All good, unless... you want to make a masterpiece, a cool innovation, build a real business or obtain an extraordinary skill. To achieve this, you need to spend a certain amount of time, mostly years, in the proverbial dungeon. A place where you are often on your own, where you haven’t produced or achieved yet. There is no acknowledgement of the work you put in, because there is no ‘result’ yet to acknowledge. A place where you sometimes might consider yourself ‘useless’.

What do I know? At 40 years old I have put myself in a complete beginners seat. Extracting an income from my small trading capital does not take that much time. Managing someone else’s large capital is just not something I could muster an appetite for. So here I am, writing a fiction novel for young adults and developing an innovative experience for teens in London. Both circling in on unlocking real agency.

The issue is that I am a trader, not a writer. My writing is frankly rubbish. My fiction writing is even worse. The time it will take for me to produce a worthwhile creation might be years. Besides having “My Big Why” and hints at “How”, there is close to nothing. I spend a not insignificant amount of time seemingly unproductively, reading, going down rabbit holes that interest me, whilst trading on the side. My “success” is highly uncertain. 

In the meantime, my contribution to society or being skilled at my craft is not there yet. And it is likely not going to be for some time or maybe even ever. For someone who is used to ‘winning’ and ‘performing’ I noticed a simmering undercurrent feeling of uselessness.

That feeling, if allowed to fester, impacts the effectiveness of the endeavor itself, besides the quality of life, which for the result-obsessed person is often secondary. But the self-doubt and self-flagellation is more costly than it seems.

One thing I learned on the trading floor is that permitting myself the luxury of wallowing in feelings of fear, limitations and need for anyone’s applause was expensive, monetarily and otherwise. The proverbial trading graveyard is littered with those who give up because it’s hard and scary. I can imagine the entrepreneur graveyard is not dissimilar. 

In the end, no one really cares whether you succeed or not. You are either going to do the thing and become your own cheerleader before you make it or you will get taken down by your fears and overthinking.

I can understand many young people could feel this way and worse, before they have the skills necessary and ability to do cool things. Especially in a world where you can see so many achievements of others immediately online. 

When I grew up, your circle of influence was limited to your university and school friends. You could not engage in endless comparison of the nuances of your situation vs others on reddit. “There are 10 people who quit college to build a start up of which 3 made it, 2 are broke and 5 are coping. Hmm, where would I fall?  The cope and failure described sure do sound unpleasant”. Or just the plain old “Why apply to this highly desired position when there are 500 applicants. Surely they can’t pick me with all my deficiencies, which I am so sure I have.”

Even when one’s odds are not bad, one can still fail just because we tend to over focus on the negative whilst downweighting the positive. Our brains are just wired that way. This is nicely presented in The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It . The authors argue that the negativity effect is so powerful in the brain, that it takes four positive experiences to counteract a single negative one, a concept they refer to as the "Rule of Four." While the negativity bias may have served an evolutionary purpose by helping our ancestors avoid danger, it is one of those hurdles we need to outgrow if we want to progress as a species.

The good news is that brains can be rewired if one sees the logic for doing so.

But how can someone with a logical, sane mind, master the logic to become one’s own cheerleader? 

The key is to get to the stage where you see the practical usefulness of rewiring. Then it’s practice makes perfect to get to that ideal middle ground with a slight tint towards healthy optimism.

But hang on a sec.. You might say: “Why wouldn't one entertain data points that he might not be good enough and how others are better and more successful at xyz ? That he just might not have what it takes to ‘make it’? Isn’t this .. realistic? Prudent risk management?”

First of all, because this is ineffective. Did Solzhenitsyn require the comfort and security that anyone would read his writing in the future, whilst sitting in the Gulag? No, there was no certainty of him ‘making it’. He didn’t engage in such concerns, he was too busy composing  "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" in his head, for the lack of paper. Did Viktor Frankl have anyone tell him his life had meaning in the concentration camp? No, he had to come up with his own meaning, in a way that his intellectual brain would buy. And survive that way. His keen observation couldn’t help but notice that those who couldn’t master this - didn’t (survive).  

Given all the trials and tribulations of the people who created great art and innovations powering us now … what excuses can there be for those of us, for letting the mind worry about things we can’t control? Why not just do the work at hand?

The second reason why it isn’t necessarily ‘realistic’, is you are more likely wrong and your estimates are biased.

The probabilities are not set in stone. If you love the thing and something inside tells you it's a worthwhile pursuit, even if the likelihood of success is low TODAY, equating this to your final chances is a figment of imagination. Reality is a complex adaptive system and outcomes cannot be boxed in as easily as you think. Probabilities evolve. The path of probability can develop depending on your attitude, input, chance and a hundred other things. Thinking you are smart enough to know the probability in advance is actually giving your beliefs more credit than they warrant. 

If you are not sure why you really want the thing, by all means cut the endeavour, swallow the sunk cost and move on. Just don’t do it out of fear, need for certainty or need for cheerleaders, whilst sitting half way through climbing the proverbial Mt Everest. 

What gives me strength is I have unconsciously done this before... 

The seat of the clueless beginner.

Before applying to Lehman brothers summer trading internship at 21, I spent a year punting Eurostoxx futures with borrowed money at home, without job security, savings or anything like that. That has given me some good practice in losing. When I showed up on Lehman's Brothers trading floor I had nothing special going for me except a ‘childish’ belief that I was lucky for having survived to be there. My grades and uni were of worse caliber than pretty much everyone applying for analyst. I was not a math genius. But I was in the building, and that was a little win, and I cheerleaded myself for any little win that followed, whilst not beating myself down too much every time I messed up.

Getting the internship, getting the job, getting more responsibility, getting your own capital to trade, making the first million in trading profits etc - win win win. All noticed and embodied in me being a winner. Forgetting to blotter a trade for my boss, messing up interactions with colleagues, losses (that are part and parcel of trading but still hurt) and being told off for them - all tough stuff. But I didn’t pay them as much weight as I did to the wins, so they wouldn’t knock down my confidence.

Being my own cheerleader here wasn’t planned. It just happened that I found out much later in life that this is actually how staying power is created.

So why is it that we crave external validation to tell us that what we are doing is worthwhile? Why can’t our own desire to just live and be present not be enough?

A mother raising 3 kids is often unable to do anything else. No cheerleading for many years, if ever, for that endeavor. 

What about when you are older and need to learn the reason why it has value in itself to be able to just sit and appreciate the sunset, whilst producing nothing? Without anyone telling you that what you are doing is worthwhile? It is an intellectual journey just to realize why you having that experience with full attention has a lot of worthiness in itself.

These are the things we are pushed to investigate. And the answer, when found, is beautiful and penetrates the logical mind. But I digress… Back to the young and the restless.

What do I want to model for my son?

Not relying on external validation to give what he is doing meaning. This allows for a longer time horizon. Which is needed for mastery.

Being comfortable in the beginners seat, whilst doing something that very few will understand.

That this includes risk of failure, a highly uncertain pay off and no cheerleaders.

Realizing that needing them is just one of those weird conditionings we pick up in an always connected world.

Appreciating that when you have killed that need and are still doing the thing - you are likely onto something.

Then discarding any trace of the feeling of uselessness.

With full knowledge that this is a rational, productive act.