Burned out. That word pretty much summarizes my
state of mind right now.
I don’t even know why I feel this way, really. I
don’t have the most leisurely life on earth, but my life’s far from being
unmanageable.
I have a pretty stable job with a relaxed work
environment, and a reasonably supportive family to come home to. So why am I
feeling like a drowned rat?
Well, information overload should certainly shoulder
part of the blame.
Over the past year, I’ve been reading every book
and watching every video I could get my hands on, that had anything to do with
productivity, success, digital marketing, novel writing, or publishing. And
I’ve gotten some fantastic advice and bucketfuls of motivation.
Plus, I’ve had more epiphanies than I can count in
these last few months.
Getting a Handle on Life is Hard Work
I returned home after finishing university in May,
2017. And I could not be happier with the progress I’ve made since then. I feel
like a completely new person now, in terms of everything I’ve learned about writing,
storytelling, book-marketing, brand building, blogging, and self-publishing –
all this while holding down a full-time job and learning the ropes of corporate
life.
So it’s not that I feel I haven’t learned or grown
enough. It’s just that I feel like, no matter what I do, no matter how far I
go, it will never be enough. I feel
as though I’m always running to catch up, and no matter the distance I cover,
the goal-post just keeps moving further and further away.
There’s no dearth of information on the Internet.
Hell, people have published entire step by step guides to success, about how
they achieved their goals and succeeded in their chosen profession; how they
built an audience online and started making a full-time living from their
writing. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am to have access to all these
resources at the click of a button.
The Never-Ending To-Do List
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because there’s so
much to do, you never feel like you’ve done enough.
If I write a thousand words a day, the next moment
I’ll read an article or watch a video by someone who regularly writes two
thousand words before breakfast.
If I start a blog, I’ll read an article about the
importance of an email list, and if I start an email list I’ll watch a video
about how the software I’m using is on its way out and really I should have
signed up for a different emailing software and used a pop-up on my blog to get
better conversion rates.
And after I’ve done all that, I still can’t be sure if I’ve done
anything right. If any of it is going to work or if I missed out on some
essential element that will bring the whole thing crashing down.
Uncertainty and the Fear of Failure
There are so many blueprints to success that they
all get jumbled up together until the whole structure looks like it’s gonna collapse
with a resounding bang any second now.
Will something that worked in 2013 work as well in
2018? Or is blogging old now, and what really
matters is having a YouTube channel? Will that
work? Does it matter? Can we ever know?
I suppose this blog post is my attempt at getting
some kind of catharsis. I’m talking to myself as much as I am to anyone who
might be reading this.
I’ve never considered myself technologically
savvy. Nor have I ever believed that I had any particular talent in the realm
of marketing, or finance, or graphic design for that matter.
Hell, a year ago I could hardly have a phone
conversation with a stranger without having a semi panic attack. Sometimes, I
still can’t.
Fake It Till You Make It
And yet, building an online business requires me
to do all of that, and then some. And not just to do these things, but to do
them well. To do them like an expert. And all the while writing two or more
books a year.
Well, that’s what the online guides and tutorials
say, anyway.
And it isn’t that I haven’t managed any of them. I
have, in fact, ticked off quite a few boxes on that list. The only problem is
that the list is ever expanding. So every time you tick off one box, four more
appear at the end of it, taunting you with the empty little space inside the
square.
The space where a tick should have been, if only
you were a little more hard-working, a little more diligent, a little more
committed.
But commitment’s easier said than done, isn’t it?
Especially when you’re not sure of the outcome of your
efforts. When you’re not sure what it’s all leading up to, or if it’s leading
up to anything at all.
Sometimes, I feel like that’s the worst part, the
uncertainty of it. To an extent, I guess this boils down to the education
system that we all grew up in.
Life Has No Annual Exams
In school and college, you studied what was there
in the syllabus and you took a test based on that syllabus.
And you either passed or failed that test, there
was no third option. If you failed, you studied the same syllabus again and
took the same test once more, hoping for a better outcome this time. If you
passed, you went on to the next class, studied a new syllabus and then took a
test answering questions on that.
The point isn’t about the quality of the syllabus,
it’s about the certainty of outcome.
For the first 15-20 years of our lives, we have
very little experience with uncertainty. You’re on a ladder and you always know
where the next step is, and what you have to do to get on it.
You know the syllabus that you have to cover when
studying, the day on which you have to take the test, and the marks that you
have to score in order to pass.
And I’m not saying any of that is easy. All I’m
saying is that it is what it is.
There are only two options: either you pass or you
fail. If you fail, you study the same material all over again and try to do
better next time. If you pass, you go up to the next class and prepare for the
next examination.
But no matter what, there always IS another class
to get to, another test to study for.
You may like it or you may hate it, but you’re
never at a loss for what to do next. You’re never confused about whether or not
you’re on the right path, because for those 15 years (barring very few
exceptions) there is only one path.
Am I Wasting the Best Years of My Life?
So you don’t have to worry about whether or not
you’re wasting all this time (and maybe even money) chasing an impossible
dream. Whether or not there’s something better you could be (or should be) doing with your time.
Whether or not any of it will be worth it in the
end.
And of course, there’s no way to know any of that.
Uncertainty is the only constant in life, and it’s pretty much the only thing
we’re never taught to contend with during our formative years.
And I wonder sometimes if that’s part of the
reason why we’re so afraid to follow our dreams, to work on our passions. Why
it’s so much easier – at least in the short term – to do what everyone tells us
to do.
To get the degree your parents want you to get and
take the highest paying job you can get your hands on during campus placements.
Why Dreaming is Scary
I mean, that degree and that job mightn’t bring us
happiness, but they are safe. And I
don’t mean financial safety, though that is a part of it. What I mean is
emotional safety, which is as important, if not more.
Because you see, if we fail at a job we never
truly wanted or liked in the first place, well, we can blame it on
circumstance. Family issues, inflation, shrinking job market, excess
competition. Take your pick.
But if we fail at our passion? At the one thing
we’ve always wanted to do? Now that’s scary, because then, we’ve truly failed. Then, we can no longer be
the victims of circumstance. Then we’re the captain of our own ship. And if
that ship sinks? Well, we’re going down with it.
Or it feels like that, anyway. And that’s scary as
hell.
The Drawbacks of Captaining Your Dream Boat
Setting a goal, by definition, means defining the
criterion for failure. When we say what we want, we simultaneously make a
statement, whether knowingly or otherwise, about what we don’t want.
To then not get the thing we’re aiming for is
failure. And failure is never more painful than when it’s associated with the
one thing we want more than anything else; our passion, our dream.
It’s much safer to leave our dreams in the realm
of eternal potential.
Much more comforting to say I want to be a writer, than to say I’ve written 64,000 words for the
manuscript I’m about to trash, because I don’t know where to go from here. To
say that I’ve written three full manuscripts that’ve all been uniformly
rejected by every agent and publisher. To say I self-published a book that
didn’t sell twenty copies because I didn’t know the first thing about
marketing.
Because you can’t fail at wanting to be a writer. But you can very much fail at finishing a
good manuscript, getting picked by an agent, and making sales on Amazon.
Dealing with Success and Failure
So when we try any of those things, we’re defining
criterion for failure. We’re telling everyone – and more importantly, ourselves
– that this is what I’m trying to get. And if I don’t get it? Well, then I’ve
failed.
And that’s terrifying. So terrifying, it can
paralyze us.
Especially when we’re not used to dealing with
uncertainty, with the sting of failure, the possibility of getting knocked
down.
And when you’ve grown up seeing the world in
binaries – through the lens of pass or fail – it can be hard to see that you
can be getting closer to your goal even as you fail.
It can be hard to see that writing an unfinished
bad novel is a necessary stepping stone to completing a good one. That
publishing a book that doesn’t sell is essential for learning how to publish
one that does. That getting rejected by publishers is the only way you’ll ever
learn how to write, publish, and market a book all on your own, before starting
to write the next one.
When you’re used to studying from a syllabus, the
endless possibilities of life can come as a damn rude shock.
I mean, what do you do when you can literally do
anything?
There Can Be Such a Thing as Too Many Choices
Do you focus on the corporate job, or try to get a
traditional publishing deal, or try your luck in the confusing maelstrom of the
indie-publishing world? Or some disconcerting, burnout-inducing, combination of
all the above?
That’s the dilemma.
And that’s the one thing the
study-the-syllabus-and-take-the-exam system doesn’t teach us. How to deal with
dilemmas.
As I write this today, I’m sleep deprived and have
ache-y arms from hanging off the grab-handles of an overcrowded bus for more
than an hour on my way back from work.
At the end of a hectic day, did I want to sit down
and write this post?
Hell no.
Was there something more interesting I could’ve
been doing? Hello, Netflix! Was there something more lucrative? Hey there,
freelance writing!
There’re no more tests to pass, so every moment is
a test. Every decision you make will add or subtract a point from your final
marksheet. And there is no syllabus to tell you which parts of the book of life
you need to memorize to pass this exam.
The Perks of Indecision
Should you do the thing that you want to do, but
which doesn’t pay well? Or the thing that you don’t particularly want to do but
will add to your bank account? Or is doing anything at all a waste of time in a
meaningless universe wherein the only truth is Netflix?
Honestly, right now, I’m leaning heavily toward
that last option.
You know, I would’ve liked to have ended this post
with a solution, a nice concluding paragraph wrapping everything up and laying
out the answers to the questions I’ve brought up throughout this article. Anybody
who knows me knows how much I hate
cliffhangers.
But the thing is, I don’t know what the answer is to any of this stuff. What’s more, I don’t
even know if I’ll ever find out. Most probably not.
But that’s okay.
On this test, I’m giving myself the freedom to
fail.
