I Thought I Needed Confidence Before I Started
Why waiting to feel ready kept me stuck.
I thought confident people did things I couldn’t.
They talked to strangers.
They started YouTube.
They played piano.
They walked into the gym.
They started businesses.
I thought confidence came first.
I was wrong.
I’m trying to start my gaming channel full time for my mother who would come home exhausted for work.
But I don’t know where to start. I don’t trust myself to know what I’m doing.
So I’m constantly checking the views…
Constantly judging the comments people posted…
And sometimes deleting videos because I thought they were useless…
Where do I even go from here? How am I supposed to build a channel like the YouTubers I admire?
They’re all so confident and popular.
Maybe…
I’m just never going to make it, I don’t even have any confidence.
I wasn’t only trying to improve the videos. I was using every upload to decide whether I belonged on YouTube.
I’m doing my first practical driving test, if I complete this I can finally drive a car.
But…
I’m so nervous, my hands are shaking.
My hands are shaking, and the steering wheel is covered in sweat.
I’m also driving in another city where I’m not used too.
…
As I’m trying to reverse into a corner on a street.
I completely mess up.
The instructor says…
Try again.
But I almost steer off the road.
I can tell she’s annoyed, by her voice.
…
I end up failing the test, crying my heart out because I have to call my father…
Tell him to pick me up, because I failed.
…
Second driving test
Failed.
Third, fourth.
Failed.
…
Eventually, I end up getting a driving test in the city where I practiced all these months.
All of the sudden, I’m driving like a formula 1 driver.
I’m so fed up with all the failures, I decide to not focus on all the times I’ve failed…
I’m done thinking about the worst that can happen on the road.
All the turns I did correctly now,
All the times I indicated…
All the times I maintained the correct speed.
Why was I so nervous?
I hadn’t suddenly become a better driver overnight. But for the first time, I stopped treating every mistake like proof that I couldn’t drive.
…
Alex… You’ve passed, congratulations.
…
After 5 attempts.
After five attempts, I almost start crying again.
Not because I have to tell my father I failed.
Because I finally get to tell him I passed.
I’m trying to play this piano piece for the first time.
I haven’t learnt any notes, haven’t learnt how the piano works…
I just watch a tutorial on how to play this piece River Flows in You.
And I almost get overwhelmed and tell myself to quit…
But I just press the next note, memorize the next set of chords…
All of the sudden, I can play ten seconds of the piece.
As long as I keep on moving forward, through all the mistakes…
I will eventually learn the whole piece.
…
I’m learning this extremely difficult piece years later.
I’m watching and thinking this is impossible…
Liebestraum by Liszt.
I give up the piece because it looks too difficult.
…
I’m trying to look for a new piece.
But none of the other pieces feel right. I still want to learn the one I abandoned.
Maybe the challenge will be worth it, let me just focus on practicing the ten seconds ahead.
…
I get to the most difficult section of the piece.
But because of the patterns and foundations I learned earlier, I pick it up surprisingly quickly.
I end up learning this part extremely quickly.
I jump up…
Clap my hands aggressively while smiling…
How the hell did I manage to learn something I thought was impossible…
The piece was still difficult. But difficulty no longer felt like evidence that I couldn’t learn it.
A few years later, I upload another video.
It ranks ten out of ten.
The worst-performing video of my last ten uploads.
Years ago, I would have stared at the views, read every comment like a judgment and wondered whether I should delete it.
Now I open the analytics.
The idea was too narrow.
The title wasn’t clear enough.
The opening lost viewers.
I write down what failed and begin the next video.
The disappointment is still there.
It just no longer decides what I do.
After hundreds of uploads, the gaming channel has nearly 200,000 subscribers.
There were great videos, terrible videos and everything between them.
I stopped asking whether I was confident enough to become a YouTuber.
I uploaded, studied what failed and made the next video.
Looking back, I was never confident before I started.
Not before uploading.
Not before taking the driving test.
Not before sitting at the piano.
I thought confidence was something certain people naturally possessed.
Something you needed before doing difficult things.
But confidence was never waiting for me at the beginning.
It was being built every time I acted without it.
Every failed upload taught me something.
Every driving test made the road more familiar.
Every wrong piano note made the next one easier.
Passing the test didn’t suddenly create my confidence.
Learning the piece didn’t create it either.
The failures had already been building it.
They proved I could feel embarrassed, disappointed and uncertain.
And still return.
…
I didn’t earn confidence by proving that I would always succeed.
I earned it by proving that failure wouldn’t stop me.
…
Maybe confidence isn’t believing everything will work.
Maybe it’s knowing that even when it doesn’t, you’ll continue.