Rudrank's Dispatch: Fear of Failure

Reflecting on the previous years, I realize that fear of failure has prevented me from achieving my goals. Fear of failure is a common feeling, but it is debilitating. It manifests in many ways, like procrastination, self-doubt, and avoidance. My major problem mostly revolves around self-doubt. It is paralyzing.

And this fear has been deeply rooted since childhood. Failing school exams meant failing in life. Failure was taught as a negative word. Not getting into the prestigious college of the country meant being a disappointment. And this fear of failure has crept into adulthood, too. I am trying to unlearn the societal definition of failure and working on creating my own.

When I read biographies of successful people by textbook definition, they loved to fail.

They fail towards success.

After a year, I got Kindle Unlimited again and picked up this book, "How to Finish Everything You Start. The initial chapter talks about fear of failure, and the starting line is:

If you don’t finish a task or project, you can’t fail.

Is that a failure in itself, or the success of not failing at all?

First Accepted Call for Paper

Speaking at a conference is terrifying. It is stressful. And also fun! I wrote a new post about my experience of my first accepted C4P submission! I hope this inspires you to apply for your first conference! 😊

Exploring Conferences: First Call for Paper

When creating the goals for 2024, I also went through the notes from 2021 to see how my goals have progressed over the years. One of them was to submit a call for papers for Swift India 2021 (unfortunately, this conference never happened after 2019) and iOS Conf SG 2021.

RudrankRudrank Riyam

Sponsor

A shoutout to RevenueCat for sponsoring the website and this newsletter! I have been an unofficial advocate since 2020, using it for personal and client apps. 

Their latest feature, Paywalls, helps you add paywalls in one line of code. I already used it at work, making it much quicker to iterate, edit, remotely configure and test your app's paywalls!

Quote of the Week

While I do not have a quote again this week, I have a technique that works well for me and may help you, too! I picked it from the same book I mentioned above.

Try the “just a little” approach. Tell yourself, “If I just spend 10 minutes on this project, I can do something else.” Most of the time, if you let yourself spend just 10 minutes, you will get “into” the project or task and 10 minutes will become an hour or however long it takes to make progress on this task or project.

Conclusion

I am not expecting much from this year, so it was a normal first week. No crazy running on the treadmill the first few days or waking up at 4 AM to take a cold shower. How was your first week? 👀

Like what I write, and want to support me? Check out my technical and experience books.

Have a great year ahead! 🎊