The spotlight effect and imposter syndrome

I am also learning that, yes, it is important to find a niche, but if you can’t figure out how to niche just yet, writing something is better than writing nothing. Just keep writing. Maybe if I start with languages, something about that can become a niche. I can also see myself having fun writing about money. No matter what I write about though I feel like kind of a fraud because I don’t reeeally have experience in anything that is worth anything to anyone, but maybe that is selling myself short. Maybe if I just keep immersing myself in examples of how others have done it, whatever I might do will get clearer and clearer.

Even if I can’t document my success to anyone else, I don’t have to, right? If my ideas are interesting to people, no one is going to quiz me on how good I am at languages! There are ways to write about investing without needing tons and tons if experience with it. I’ve been familiar with the language of it since I was a kid and I see things and have ideas and can put together thr ideas of others in new ways. Only my audience will decide if my ideas are worth anything to them, and the value I create has nothing to do with how much I’ve actually made in the stock market, but with being authentic and reaching an audience.

Though in certain ways it almost feels strangely well-founded in my case (I have been in situations where everybody seemed to know eay too much about me for reasons I cannot explain) I experience the ‘spotlight effect’ all the time: the idea that everyone is paying attention to everything I do all the time, so if I make a mistake or someone doesn’t like me, rather than learn from failure, or taking what I want to from the criticism and moving on with resilience, I start to feel like the whole world must be gossiping about me in all sorts of ways, and I get very shy and unable to make any moves at all no matter where I go. Strange things *have* happened. Who knows what this person already knows about me? It might be true that people who don’t like me are paying attention to what I do but I don’t need to let that bother me. The ‘spotlight effect’ ends up exacerbating my sense of imposter syndrome: that store clerk in Mexico saw how bad I fumbled with Spanish, therefore everyone everywhere is going to think I am just faking it. Everything. Since I have been awkward in this or that in one place or another, nobody anywhere is going to take me seriously. I have been found out by the world. Maybe it is true, but I think this is something I need to get over. It has had such an effect on me that it has been positively debilitating. Maya Angelou said, “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.”

I have spent the day reading and thinking about ideas for starting businesses that bring in a good amount of passive revenue. There is so much to explore and so much reading to do, and for some reason my days (or nights mostly) fly by waaay too quickly. It makes me nervous how fast time flies by especially when I am not even using it to immerse myself in Spanish! Getting good at languages is ansure thing if I keep at it a little bit. Researching ideas for passive income and making money with ease doing things I enjoy is not necessarily something that will pay off and I may soend a lot of time reading sbout things that I don’t even end up doing. Or I could fail. But I keep seeing the word mindset everywhere. It’s all about mindset. In one way or another I am growing a business and the time I put into this *will* pay off, it just feels with my obsession with languages that there’s not much time for anything else these days or even that. I want to have time to play video games and things! I think I’ll have a more relaxed sense of time when I get to Latin America but right now it makes me nervous. I somehow have no time for things I want to do even when I have nothing I need to do; and maybe the fear that I might be asked to go out and spent my time in this way or that, trying to find a job, contributes to that. If it can be so hard to find time, it is highly unlikely that the whole world would spend its precious time looking through everything I have done for my faults, which is a relief.

When I wasn’t even looking for anything of the sort I think I found the most exciting book on investment that I have ever found. I kind if don’t want to put it down somehow but I feel like I should because stocks and options should rightly bore me and it takes time away from studying languages! But what if I take the mindset that investing is part of my business, too, and that it can actually be really fun? I don’t feel wuite ready to throw my money into trading right now just like I don’t feel ready to dive into reading Japanese. But if I study 30 kanji every week and read a chapter of this book every week I will come a huge way to being ready for both of these things in three months time.

Another cool idea I read about today is to break your life into four 12 week years. Instead of just making goals for the year, make goals for the next 12 weeks, and then take a little break, and do it again. If I think of it that way, I will know almost 400 kanji after three months and finishing this book in that time on top of that is definitely doable. I’ll be a lot more ready to make wise investment decisions when and if I decide to do that. I’ll also be better at Spanish. And hopefully German.

Anyway, tonight I wish I could just turn back the clock and make it like 9 pm again…