Reassurance is futile.
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Notes
Worrying:
- a quest for guarantee: that the outcome will be worth the effort
- seeks (in vain) to build confidence
- depends on attachment: it seeks to control something beyond our control
- unproductive (only work is productive)
- a way to hide that we’re wavering on our practice
“Instead of seeking reassurance and buttressing it with worry, we could make the choice to go back to work instead.”
Thoughts
I’m so far from being able to ship anything that this doesn’t resonate yet. Even those rare times when I am ready to ship something. I don’t think I worry—though that doesn’t mean that I don’t seek reassurance, and all that jazz.
My problem is closer to the starting line, and I don’t think I worry that early in the process. (Maybe I’m deluding myself…)
Given that this appears in the section called “The Professional” and comes so quickly after the high-stakes “do your job despite uncertainty,” I suspect that worry is a common the strategy used by people with uncertainty, but I’m not sure it’s one that I deploy.
Either way, I know this much (intellectually, at least): work is the antidote to uncertainty.
This series is meant to capture my thoughts as I work through Seth Godin’s The Practice. It’s a book with over 200 (very short) chapters, which I hope to work through and, I further hope, to implement over time.
If you’re interested in more of Godin’s ideas, or my thoughts about them, you can check out this collection of posts. Note that if you’re more interested in the former, you should probably get Godin’s book and read it yourself; my notes will be both incomplete and idiosyncratic, and my thoughts will relate to my own experience.
But if my thoughts resonate with you, or if you think I’m just silly, I welcome your comments.