Hello everyone, I’m Nikolay the Russian Guy, and let me be brutally honest with you today.
Our lives are filled with pain, and our brain doesn’t like pain, so it protects itself from pain whenever possible. Which results in our heads being considerably far up our own butts.
Most probably you know a number of bright young people with some startup ideas. And every one’s a unicorn, right? No, most probably not. Not until they prove they are. Yet they don’t really let themselves consider this “proving” part as an option.
Why wouldn’t they do that, you might ask? The answer is brutal: ‘cause they are god damn frightened. What-if situation, you know. What if nobody will understand the idea? What if it won’t rack up millions in cash? What if it is so hard to implement that you shouldn’t even start?
So they just go on with their sorry-ass lives, doing completely nothing about it. Caressing the idea in their private part of the brain — you know, the one only you can look at. An internal safehouse.
Yes, their heads are deep up their butts, and they don’t think straight. Obviously, you are not that kind of person, right?
Fucking wrong.
We are all the same when it comes to this. We are all afraid to face “what-if” scenarios. We are all protecting ourselves with sweet lies to keep our souls from being hurt. Try to be brutally honest with yourself and admit it. You can find such cases in every fucking day of your life. The scenery could vary, but the scenario itself remains the same.
Your boss asks if you could take some extra task this week. The task is small, and there seems to be no one else who is able to do it. So you accept it, even though deep inside you know that some other work might suffer. Or you might need some extra working time, resulting in bad sleep and tiredness, resulting in less productivity. Yet that’s too scary and painful to think about, so you accept.
You meet a beautiful young girl you would like to ask out — yet it’s too scary and painful to get “no” as an answer, so you never do.
You tell yourself you will start a new life from next Monday. Then you don’t. Then you prefer to just forget about it, as it’s too damn painful to think about. This one could create an interesting recursion. Next time you decide to do the same, it will be painful to even think about your previous failure. And then you might even restrict yourself from thinking about the validity of the whole “start a new life” idea.
This list might go on and on and on. And it all hurts. And It all makes you protect yourself from pain. And It all drives your head further and further up your own butt.
What is much worse — usually the people besides you are doing the same shit to you. They don’t want to hurt your feelings, they don’t want you to look sad, feel sad, or spiral down into depression. They would like to protect you, as they care so much about you. So they almost never allow themselves to tell you the truth.
And let’s admit this: if someone else is brutally honest to you — it hurts. It really hurts, and it makes you want to lie down, curl back and cry. Even if you won’t show it to the others. Even if you won’t admit it to yourself. It really fucking hurts. And it makes you to really fucking hate the brutally honest person who hurt you that much. Sometimes it comes out in a form of aggression toward “this stupid fucker who just hurt you so badly”. Which makes people even more careful about your feelings, and restricts them from honesty.
Thus, the only person you could take it from without becoming overly protective is yourself.
At every fucking moment of your life, ask yourself a question: “am i afraid to be brutally honest to myself here?”
It might come up in different forms.
Like, for example, “am i tolerating this asshole because i’m too afraid to be brutally honest to myself and admit i have no other people i could call friends?”
Or “am i not getting the startup idea into the market because i’m too fucking afraid to be brutally honest to myself and admit that my idea is a cheap pile of total crap?”
Yeah, most people just don’t do that. So they become the startup wanna-bes and just caress their crappy little ideas for years and years. Which is rather sad, as sometimes the ideas could be quite good. Nobody will ever know, as they are just too damn afraid to try and find it out.
And if they are able to overcome it and make a “go” decision — they face a whole new world of hurt. Let me be brutally honest about it.