New Things Pt. 2: How to Start New Things in a Judgmental World

Nearly four years ago when I was fourteen years old I had an idea, "I wanna write something." That same night I wrote my first post New Things about starting... new things, groundbreaking—I know. Now, nearly four years later, I write part two for my first ever post.

In this post rather than talking about finding new things and doing them, I wanna talk about one of the processes of starting something new when you're afraid of others' opinions, and not just a random stranger's opinion, but the opinion of the people you know.

I can understand this. I started a blog and a podcast, and I would love for people to view them, however, for the blog, when I started it, the hardest people to tell were the people I knew. Right now, in the first stages of my podcast, the people I'm most afraid to tell are the people I know. Why?

There's a lot of reasons this could be. You may be insecure about what people think about you: specifically when starting online things like a youtube channel, a podcast, etc. because you may act weird at the beginning of those things, this is normal, getting used to talking to people that aren't there is a strange experience, but this can make some people insecure. Another reason could be that you're afraid they'll ask things such as, "why are you doing this?" And your answer, "because I want to," doesn't seem good enough for you, so you don't want to give it.

For me, the reason is that, especially with the podcast and being new at it, I'm worried about the production value of the podcast. I'm incredibly proud of my podcast, and I wish I had started sooner, don't get me wrong, however, I know I'm new, and every time I listen back to the episodes I can see an extraordinary amount of room for improvement. So I'll probably be more comfortable with loudly saying, "I have a podcast," in a year or two because by then, hopefully, I'll have gotten much better at running it and making it sound cleaner, making a video version that I'm proud of, and other things that I would be proud for people to see.

If that's the case for you, then the only advice I give to you, and the advice I'm trying to follow is work. Work hard, and try to get whatever you're producing to that point where you can be proud of it sooner than later, then you can spread it more.

Another piece of advice is still spread your product a little bit. Try to tell a select number of people about it and regardless of who's listening you shouldn't work any less hard, and make sure you aren't demoralized by letting people down. Keep working, keep getting better, and sooner than later, you will be at a point in which you are able to confidently, proudly share what you're creating.

The last piece of advice that I want to give is if thinking about people's opinions is the main reason you haven't started that thing you want to do, start it. You don't even have to tell anyone, just start it. Trust me, if you never start it you'll regret it, and if you wait to start it you'll regret not having started sooner.

I hope that these words helped you start something, no matter how big or small, regardless of what others may think. It's easy to tell people to "not care what people think," so I didn't say that, especially if, like me, what you're creating is based on what people think. Anyways, go out there, start today, not tomorrow, tomorrow will never come, it'll always just be today, I wish you the best of luck.