Social Pressure, Receiving Advice, and My Biggest Fears
Host: Eric Chow · August 30, 2019 · Episode 6 · 34 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited for names and terms. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Quoted from this episode: 16 quotes on the quotes page.
What is up everybody? Welcome back to the Eric Chow Empowers Podcast. In this episode, I'm going solo to talk about some ideas and insights that have been on my mind for the past week and just sharing them with you guys. First, I'll talk about this pressure that we have put on us by society to have a life figured out. Second is self-awareness. particularly in the context of receiving advice from people. And third, my biggest fears in life and how it's changed over the years and why. I'm just going to get right into it. This is episode six. Thank you for tuning in. The first thing I wanted to talk about for this episode was how society puts a lot of pressure on people to have their lives figured out.
Particularly, there's a lot of pressure on teenagers and young adults like ourselves to really have a plan for the future. Questions like, what are you going to do? What college are you going to? What's your major? What do you want to do with your life? What do you want your career to be? And they also encourage us to pursue a very limited number of careers, particularly in... the Asian community, engineering, law, medical field, et cetera. And people, adults, put a lot of suggestions, recommendations, and advice that they just project, that is basically just them projecting their own beliefs and desires onto us. And that's particularly true for parents and for relatives who feel that, you know, you're...
their kid, so you must have the same beliefs and desires as they do and want the same things that they do. So they project it onto you without realizing that actually you are your own individual person. And I actually want to just talk about this for a little bit. First, with just this pressure in general, I think that this pressure that we have to know what we're doing is just totally unrealistic. I mean... The way I think about it is how can we, you know, teenagers and young adults possibly have the rest of our lives figured out at 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 years old?
How can we possibly be expected to plan the next 70 to 80 years of our life when we haven't even lived 25% of the rest of our lives? You know, I mean, if we assume that we're going to live to 80, 90 years old, and nothing horrible happens where we die in some unfortunate incident. How can we possibly plan the rest of our lives when we've lived so little of it? It's just not possible. Plus, life changes so quickly. I mean, just thinking about the past year, I've grown and developed as a person significantly. Or even in the past three months, I've grown and developed so much.
I mean three months ago I didn't have my podcast. I had never written an article on Medium that was completely from scratch. Three months ago I was only creating content because I found it fun and I wanted to share a few things. Now I create because it's fun and I really enjoy providing value. Three months ago I was also mindlessly procrastinating on my work and now I choose to put off things consciously. How can we possibly know the rest of our lives if life changes so incredibly quickly if we change so incredibly quickly, it's just not realistic and you know Even if we do have a plan if we spend so much time creating a plan for the rest of our lives or even for the next decade or five years or even one year life changes so quickly that plan is gonna go to shit so fast.
So it just becomes a waste of time to plan. And I'm not good at planning. It's just not something that I'm good at, but I definitely recognize the need for planning. Planning is super important. If you go into something blind and without any general sense of direction, you're going to be screwed.
this is just facts. But really being expected to have a plan, a long-term plan for the rest of our lives at such a young age, to me, is just unrealistic and absolutely ridiculous. And it's great to have a general direction. I think that's super important. And it's good to have maybe a a general plan. I think that's awesome. That's really great to have. But I think putting pressure on having it all figured out is just ridiculous. And so if the pressure placed on society to have a plan for the rest of our lives, whether that's major or careers, what we're going to do, if all that is unrealistic, I say that it is okay to not know. It is okay to not know.
It's okay to not know where you're going, what you're doing, what your major is, what your career plan is, what the plan for the rest of your life is. For me, the way I think about it, and this is something I've very recently come up with maybe last week, was the way I'm gonna do it is I'm gonna look ahead to the next step. What's my next step in life? What's the step after that? What's the third step? And maybe a few steps after that one. And I'm gonna make sure maybe seven steps forward. I'm not going to crash and burn. I'm not going to be walking off a cliff.
I'm not going to be drowning myself or something like that. I'm going to make sure that, you know, seven steps ahead, it's still a path that I can walk. In my last podcast, Isaac Mashman had a great analogy for thinking about this. He said, if you're driving from one destination to another and you have your whole route figured out, but then.
heavy fog rolls in and you can't really see that far ahead of you. You can only focus on the next couple of steps. You can't see your destination, you can't really see much of anything in general, but you can see the next couple steps. And that's the exact same way I want to think about life. Think about the next couple of steps ahead and make sure that as far as you can see, you're not It's gonna screw yourself over, that there's still a path for you to walk. And so as long as you have the next several steps figured out, you can pursue that, you have a general direction.
And then let's add the idea of a North Star. For centuries, even millennia, people have looked to the North Star to find their way. But the thing is North is a fairly broad direction. You can go straight North, but you can also go North East, Northwest.
Heck, even if you go south, if you keep going, you'll end up going north eventually. So I say have a north star, a general direction that leads you a certain way to a destination that you can be proud of. And so take your next couple steps. And as long as you have that figured out and as long as you have a general direction for you to go, I think you're going to be just fine in life. And the great thing about a north star is It can change because it's a general direction and it also means that you don't have to go straight. You can take a winding road, you can take a random path on the side and that I think that flexibility is just more realistic in my opinion.
Figure it out and have a general way to go and I think that's the way to do it. The other thing about this whole pressure from society is that a lot of it is just people, particularly parents, relatives, projecting beliefs and desires onto us. We are not our parents, our relatives, our friends, or anyone else. We have our own unique set of beliefs, desires, and values that we have to follow if we want to be quote unquote successful. People have their definitions of success. Society has its definitions of success. Perhaps it's being rich and wealthy, maybe a business owner or whatever else. I say fuck that.
Fuck their definition. Why pursue just a career for the sake of a career? Money for the sake of money. Create your own definition. I mean, who has the authority?
to decide whether you are successful or not, whether you're a failure or not. Nobody has the authority to tell you whether you are successful except you. You are accountable to yourself. So what does success look like to you? For some people success is having a rich lifestyle. For others it's having a beautiful loving family. For others it's traveling the world. Or perhaps maybe all three are part of your definition and they're just at different points in your life Like maybe you're gonna travel in your 20s or have a beautiful family in your 30s and then get rich in your 40s Or maybe it's a different order or maybe it's some other things altogether But it all comes down to one simple thing happiness Success has to equal happiness Success can't be money for the sake of money, family for the sake of having a family, traveling for the sake of being able to say that you're traveling.
It can't be pursuing something so that you can brag to other people about what you have. It just can't. Success has to be happiness. Whatever it is that you define to be your version of success, it has to make you happy. And what you define as success, If you want to live for yourself, should not and cannot be predicated on someone else's definitions or values. It has to be yours. We have to silence the noise that comes from society that tells us what we're supposed to do. And instead, follow ourselves, follow our own timeline. Some people graduate college at 22. Some people graduate at 26.
Some people get a job at 23. Some people get a job at 30. Some people get a job at 16. Some people get married at 30. Some people wait until they're 35 or maybe 25. Follow your own timeline because you're not late. You're not early. You are right on time. You have your own clock for life and everyone else has their own as well. So don't let society put pressure on you Don't let your family to put too much pressure on you now of course It's important to have some pressure right to push you to make you actually do stuff but don't let it control you because all this Judgment that comes from the outside the external world should have no impact on your ability to make your own decisions for yourself.
The second thing I wanted to talk about was self-awareness, because in the past several episodes of my podcast, I've been talking about self-awareness. And that's because it's a huge theme. It's to me one of the most important. The better you understand yourself, the better you will be able to make choices in life that align with who you are and what you want out of life.
the better you understand yourself the better you were able to make choices that maximize your skills your talents your potential your productivity your growth your happiness and The better you understand yourself the less chance of you doing things for other people For pressure that other people put on you now, of course, it's great to do things for others, but Not allowing others to control your life is what I'm trying to say and Self-awareness as I've said in the previous episodes is Can start by paying attention to how you're doing right now? What makes you tick? What gives you energy? What makes you happy and things like that paying attention to yourself and how you're doing and Developing that self-awareness allows you to live life a little better But in this episode I want to talk about it in the context of receiving advice.
I think it's important to always consider who is giving the advice, the context of the person, because are they someone you want to be getting advice from? If someone has different values than you do, particularly in a situation that is occurring, you have to ask whether you should listen to their advice or not, whether or not that their advice is correct for you. Because the thing is Most of the time when people give their advice or give suggestions, they're giving their honest opinion. And from their perspective and from the context of their own lives, their advice makes absolute sense. Your job, as the receiver of advice, is to ask whether their advice makes sense within the context of your life.
For me, when I give advice, in fact, even right now, as I'm saying this, which is in a way advice, I try to be careful with it. First, I try to make sure my advice is actually wanted before I give it. If I'm talking to someone, I want to see if I can gauge whether they really are looking for advice or not. Of course, if it's over-text or even say when I'm creating my content, I can't really tell if someone wants my advice. So I just have to make the decision myself.
Sometimes I may ask if it's, for example, over text, but for the most part, when I'm in a conversation with someone, I try to find out if someone wants my opinion or if I think that someone might get value from it. Second, I listen before I advise. A lot of people, they give their advice and again, it makes sense in the context of their lives. But I don't want to do that. I don't want to give advice while only considering myself. I want to make the person's job easier by trying to understand their situation to see whether my advice makes sense within their framework. Of course, that person should still judge for themselves whether it fits or not.
But I try to consider it and understand it so that my advice can be more valuable. I also try to be careful with what I preach. You know, there's a saying that People should practice what they preach. I disagree. I think that's stupid. I think that practicing what one preaches is not enough. Maybe not stupid, but certainly not enough. Instead, I think people should preach what they practice. I'll repeat that. People shouldn't practice what they preach. They should preach what they practice. The difference is this. If someone practices what they preach, It means they believe in their idea because it sounds good. They are practicing what they preach, which means they preach it first.
They believe in their idea because it sounds good and then they try it. But if someone preaches what they practice, they believe in their idea because it's genuinely worked for them. They preach what they've practiced. They preach what they've tried.
And so they genuinely are giving advice because they believe their idea can work because it has worked for them. The vast majority of what I preach is always something I've applied to my life or that people I know and look up to have applied in theirs. Now, obviously, not all my advice is going to follow that, but I try to make sure that my advice is ideas that I believe in. In fact, even with what I'm saying now about the importance of self-awareness when it comes to receiving advice, I genuinely believe that what I'm saying is valuable, but it's your job to determine whether or not it truly is for you.
So I ask that if you do believe in this idea, please take the time to understand that you and your life is very different from that of other people. And so it is important to compare and contrast your values and your lifestyle with those of others when you're considering advice. If another person is coming from a place or a perspective that you'd like to be at, if another person has a similar value set to you, if another person's suggestions seem sound, seem reasonable within the context of your life, apply. But if the other person is coming from a place or perspective that you don't want to be at, that you dislike, or perhaps has some important differences in their value set, or doesn't seem reasonable within the context of your life, I think you should simply thank them for their time, for their opinion.
See what you can learn from the interaction. What did you learn about yourself, for example, and then move on. The last thing I want to talk about in this episode is my biggest fears. Now, they've changed over the years, so I also want to talk about the reasons why they've changed and the insights that I've gotten from having these fears. I used to say that my biggest fear was failure. particularly failure where the type of failure where I put my all into doing something. You know, I put a ton of effort, energy and time and it would all be for nothing. I would fail anyway.
And the sheer weight of that complete and utter failure was horrifying. But eventually I realized that failure isn't that scary. Now, it certainly isn't preferable.
failing kind of socks, but I no longer consider it a big fear of mine because I've learned what failure creates. Failure means I have room to grow, room to learn. It means that I can be better, I can do better. It means I made a mistake or perhaps several mistakes that I get to learn from and grow from. And in that way, perhaps failing is actually better than succeeding. Because if I succeed, it means I did well and I get a sense of satisfaction from it. But after that, what else do I get? I just move on. But with failure, even though I feel disappointed and hurt, I also get lessons that I can use to make myself better. And...
Give myself a better chance of succeeding next time and in doing so Having that history of failure will make that next success even more amazing even more Satisfactory after I realized that I started to say that my biggest fear was regret Which I mean is kind of the cousin of failure There are two types of regret first. There's the one where you regret doing something stupid perhaps you embarrass yourself. It sucks, but you can learn from that embarrassment and that regret and move forward. You can't change the past, so that's kind of all you can do. The second type is the one where you regret not doing something that you feel you should have done. And it's this second version that I said was my biggest fear. Regretting not doing something.
See with the first one I felt like I could move on from it and learn from it perhaps even in the future I could laugh at my That my regret of doing something stupid I could laugh at my embarrassment But with the second one all I could see was that I would be imagining how Amazing it would have been if I had acted if I had put in whatever energy time and effort was necessary I can only imagine how amazing it would have been and realize that I would never be able to have that. It horrified me. The idea that I'd be powerless. The idea that I'd be unable to do anything but stand witness to my inability, my failure to act and simply regret not doing something.
It's horrifying. And the idea that I'd also be maybe on my deathbed and realize like I can't do anything, but I failed to do so many things. That scares me because that powerlessness is just horrible. And I said that regret was my biggest fear for a very long time until last night. See, last night I realized that even though I'd been saying regret is my biggest fear for maybe a year, maybe more than a year, probably several years now.
As I thought back to the past several years, I had actually accumulated several regrets. And so even though I was so scared of having regrets, I had still accumulated several regrets. And I hadn't acknowledged those regrets, probably for fear of realizing that my biggest fear was true. But I realized that even those regrets, those are also in the past and all I can do is learn from it. Our mistakes make us into who we are. Perhaps our mistakes even make us more into who we are than our successes do. So just like with everything else, I can learn from those regrets. Maybe even imagine just for fun what could have happened.
But not get stuck in it and actually just move on. I'm still scared of regret. I still don't want to feel the powerlessness of not being able to act.
But I've realized something new. It isn't just simply regretting not doing something. In looking to the past and regretting not doing something, we lose focus of the opportunities that are now presenting themselves right in front of us. There are opportunities that I had no idea existed because I was so busy regretting something in the past and that resulted and having yet another regret, so I'm no longer afraid of missing opportunities. I'm afraid of allowing those missed opportunities to make me miss more. When it comes to the hard parts of life, it isn't just about learning from mistakes like I thought. It is also about looking for new opportunities to present themselves, realizing that they are there and seizing them, moving quickly to seize them in that moment.
And I also realize that All these fears that I had over the years were all kind of the same. We're all just me being afraid of being stuck in the past. A lot. Me realizing instead that I'm going to be fine regardless of failures and regrets. Being patient in the long term that things are going to work out and learning from my mistakes.
and knowing that I should be seizing the opportunities that come up in front of me was incredibly powerful. Gary Vaynerchuk, who I like to reference, has this quote, micro speed macro patience. In the micro, the small scale, for example, in the daily, move fast. Take opportunities quickly, act quickly, learn from your mistakes, and move fast. But in the large scale, the macro, be patient. Know that no matter what, you're going to be just fine. And the coolest part about this is the faster and the better you move in the micro and learn from the mistakes, the more confidence you can have that in the macro level, you're going to be just fine. I'll repeat that. The better you move fast in the micro and learn from your mistakes.
the more confidence you can have that in the macro level, you're going to be just fine. Micro speed, macro patience. And so I don't know what my biggest fear is anymore. It's not failure. It's not regret. It's not missed opportunities because I know that all the mistakes I make will help me develop into a better person. And I know that the mistakes that I've already made in the past have made me into who I am today, perhaps more so than my successes have. And I'm proud of who I am today. I'm really proud of myself. And so I don't regret my mistakes. And being able to say that is incredibly liberating and means that I've accepted it and that allows me to move forward.
And Look around me to see what new opportunities arise, be ready to take them, move fast in the micro, and always remember that I am going to be just fine in the macro. Hey everybody, thank you so much for tuning in to episode six of the podcast. This was pretty interesting to do a solo episode.
just to have me talking my throat feel significantly more dry than normal. This also took a lot more effort than my episodes with guests because I actually have to know what I'm going to say instead of being able to sort of bounce off what someone else is saying. So that was kind of interesting. Please let me know if you like this solo episode, if you like just having me talk. share some insights and ideas and maybe I can do more of these whenever I can. This was quite interesting to be honest. Also let me know if you like the ideas that I'm sharing this episode if they resonate with you or perhaps even if you disagree with something I'm saying.
Let me know. Let's discuss it. Let's talk about it. Let's see what we can learn from each other because I have so much to learn and so does everyone else. So, you know, maybe we can learn something together. As always, all this feedback and your thoughts on the episode, just message me, Instagram, Twitter, underscore, chow, Eric. There is no one else to plug in this episode. This is so weird. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into this episode.
as always just means so much to me that you've done so if you found value from it let me know and maybe share it with your friends and your social networks and that would be incredibly meaningful to me as well. I really appreciate everyone who messages me about it and who talks to me about it and who also shares my work with other people. It truly is so incredibly meaningful to me and I'm so grateful for it. Guys, I think I'm just gonna end the episode here. Thank you so much again for like the fourth time in the past like two minutes. Have a fantastic rest of the day. Thank you for tuning in to episode six.