Doubt Effort, Not Aim

This whole last week I’ve woken up, oddly, at the awkward time of two AM. Which means, for me, getting up for a glass of milk. Then kind of lying there for half an hour until I fall asleep again. Today was better, I slept until four thirty.

So I got up, and put the kettle on for a coffee.

Then walked outside to the half-moon lit sky.

I remember reading in some Jack Reacher books, probably, that around four AM was the KGB’s favourite time to run raids on their adversaries, because they were fast asleep. I don’t know if that’s true. But this morning I was up at four, and it felt like there wasn’t another soul moving, that’s for damn sure.

It was a clear night and there were more stars than anyone could count.

So I cocked my head back to take it in. I half expected a shooting star or meteor shower. Instead I got something totally unexpected. A deep chill. Suddenly I was very cold.

It may have been the temperature. But I couldn’t help feel it was related to the size of the sky, because I felt very small as I was looking up there.

Chesterton wrote that towers are not tall unless we look up at them, and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we.

We can’t appreciate the scope of the night sky unless we look up, and realise how small we are.

Our ‘smallness’, creates the bigness.

And in the same way, a giant imagination or idea starts with humility, and realising that the very idea is bigger than we are.

People get this with all kinds of adventure sport, probably. Sailing. Climbing. Surfing big waves. You can be confident in your skills, but you can’t be too confident in your self. Not compared to the power of the ocean or a running into a great white shark, should you come eye-ball to big black eye-ball while you’re diving. You are very small in those arenas.

Anyway, back to the night sky.

So there I was feeling like a little speck in the black coldness. I made a note of that for later. Then went in for my coffee while the world slept.

Chesterton’s whole take on humility is interesting, and can help us think about our business in a different light.

“The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.”

Humility is virtue that has run off course in the modern world, and created the most crippling question for the modern business owner:

Am I going in the right direction?

Is this the right path?

With media, social media, and a constant flow of information, we’ve trained ourselves to be ‘self-confident.’ But not direction confident.

People train muscles and a strong posture more than vision and faith.

We are creating business owners with very little self modesty, happy to make claims on how great they are, or flaunt revenue screenshots (conveniently leaving out the refunds, charge-backs, and profit margins…),.

But are too mentally modest to have conviction that two plus two is four.

They don’t doubt themselves one bit. But they doubt where they’re going and the path that they’re on.

High performance habits, but low performance direction.

It can create a terrible paralysis.

The transformation

It’s OK to have self doubt.

You don’t need infinite confidence in your self.

You don’t need to walk into a room like a lion.

You can relax in not knowing. And allow yourself to look up at the awe of it all.

But we can do this, while at the same time, doubling down in our direction.

This creates different kind of humility. Where you don’t doubt where you’re going, your creativity, or your ideas, but rather your effort.

You can bring this shift into your business. Where you are the spear-head of your mission. You can have self-doubt, and you can be decisive. Because it’s OK to not be sure of your self in the face of the world, while you also have confidence in your path and your ability to walk it.

Let others have conviction on their certification, or the instagram tag-line.

The leaders we look up to have conviction on where they’re going and their experience.

They sometimes doubt their efforts, but not their aim.

Something to think about.