the audacity to do it anyway

One thing you should know about me is I have the audacity.

The word “audacity” is defined as the quality of being bold, daring, or fearless—often with a healthy disregard for conventional rules.

Not the cinematic kind— Remove any image in your head of me being brave and heroic, saving lives or making remarkable change. What I actually am is someone who looks at a task that I have never done before and has no clue how to do but thinks  “I can probably do that.”

And then I do it. Imperfectly, maybe. But I still do.

I found an old digital camera—great, let’s take pictures and learn as I go.

Crochet looks cool—sure, I’ll give it a shot.

You need a birthday cake? I’ll watch a couple YouTube tutorials and make one. Then another. And then cupcakes.

Saved some money? I'll take a solo backpack to Rajasthan.I’’ll figure it out on the way.

And really—who said I can’t?

Tell me, who says you can’t?

I saw other people writing online and building personal websites and thought, “That looks cool—like a digital diary.”

So I gave it a go. Even though I didn't have any knowledge or all the tools. 

Over the last 6 months, I’ve taken more pictures, travelled alone, created more things in the past year than I ever expected—not because I had it all figured out, but because I wanted to.

No one reading this website, seeing my photos, or buying my artwork was going to stop me.

So how do you build this kind of audacity?

Well, somewhere in the last six months I realised:

I was never going to be “ready” enough.

Never going to have enough money to buy the things I needed.

Never going to magically gain the perfect skillset or full knowledge.

I was trapped by my own self-limiting beliefs. Most things I wanted to try had asymmetric returns—massive upside, very little downside. Inaction holds more people back than incompetence ever could.

Here are four ideas that helped me build this audacity:

1. The internet

In the digital age you can look up and figure out anything, with some internet guidance. If something looks wrong, you can Google “how do I fix this specific thing,” and chances are someone has already asked that exact question—on Reddit, no less—with a detailed solution.

Reddit is what Google dreams of being.

Think your idea is original? Look it up. Someone probably posted about it in 2012. Want to learn to paint, code, bake, or budget? It’s all online. Free.

We have the internet. And yes, I’m fully aware of the socioeconomic privilege that comes with that. But if you do have access, use it.Any book. Any film. Any lecture from Harvard. Zero cost. Infinite upside.

2. Embarrassment is not real

Embarrassment is a made-up emotion. (At least, that’s what I like to believe.)

Happiness is real. Sadness, anger—real.

Embarrassment? Its a social construct

Which is why I like to believe every time you get embarrassed, along with it you have this feeling of “ewww”, is basically your body’s way of saying it's not meant to feel this emotion. Embarrassment is something that is socialised within us, a sense of what we feel, when we violate said unsaid social norms. When we were Neanderthals in the stone age, violating social norms could literally get you and your tribe killed by wooly mammoths

But in modern times, especially at our age (assuming you are also around my age 16-23), consequences of our actions are very limited. The worst that could happen is someone thinking you’re “cringe” for five minutes before moving on with their life.

You need to unlearn embarrassment and develop the audacity to do things anyway.

Even if you fail. Especially if you fail.

I’ve failed a lot. Burnt cakes. Half-written projects. Still can’t do a proper push-up which I thought I would be able to learn in 3 months. And if you succeed, great. People succeed at things all the time, if they can do it so can you.

Stop focusing on the result. What's the worst thing that could happen, wooly mammoths are not going to come and kill you!

3. Don’t Kill the Part of You That Is Cringe. Kill the Part That Cringes.

Don’t let the fear of being cringe stop you.

Start that project and pretend a thousand people already love it.

Don't make yourself smaller or quieter, of what people might think of you and your passions. If you have even the slightest glimpse of self-belief that what you’re making has value – grab that belief and use it to its full potential.

Have the audacity to believe that you can do it, even if you're not sure how you're going to do it, and then get to work. Figure out what you need to do. 

The self-limiting beliefs we impose upon ourselves, tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies

"The man who says he can, and the man who says he can't , are both usually right" - Confucius

They aren’t both really right. Both men can do it. But one who thinks it impossible, prophesying his failure without ever trying, that leads to that person never being able to go beyond his assumed constraints. Whereas, the one who thinks it possible, however ignorant he may be at the time of his belief, at least keeps the door open. He gives it a shot. Then another one. And another. Depending on his conviction, he perseveres until the goal is reached, the act is done.

4. Stop caring and start sucking.

We suffer from our own imagination.

A spider never stops spinning a web because she’s worried it won’t be geometrically perfect. But humans? We possess the strange gift of being haunted by visions of what could be. This torment has a name in cognitive science: the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it).

This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap", which separates from doers and consumers.

That gap can drive you to create. Or it can drive you to avoid creating. We call it “productive avoidance”: hours of research, Pinterest boards, planning— while avoiding the vulnerable act of creating which has a possibility to fail. I was guilty of this, often I still am, but I remind myself. It feels like progress because it engages all our intellectual faculties, so you feel you have already achieved it but actually I am doing nothing helpful.

“Create like a child and edit like a scientist.” — Frank Ocean

Children aren’t worried about standards or aesthetics. They just draw. Initially, you will suck, your first painting, your first day at gym, your first time building a product all will suck. But the important thing to do is get it out there, you can always go back and edit it to your perfection. Dont care for instant results.  No mistakes = No progress

I know from a young age, we get impressed upon the idea that one should avoid being wrong at all costs. But making mistakes is better than not starting at all. In reality, people learn from making and correcting mistakes. Those “corrected mistakes” are only just better mistakes which people learn from again via the same procedure.

Mistake —> Error correction —> Better mistake —> Error correction .

Thinking can only reorganize data. Mistakes generate it. The more data you have, the better decisions you can make.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The audacity to just start—and then learn—has saved me from my own perfectionism more times than I can count. 

When I wanted to create this website, I didn’t spend months reading or watching endless YouTube tutorials on how to build one (though I was very tempted to!) Instead, I asked someone who had already built a site what tools they used—and I figured it out along the way. It was hard. The site still isn’t perfect. I made mistakes. In fact, if you’ve been here long enough, you’ll know: This isn’t even my first website. The first one, made on WordPress, crashed. I lost all my old blogs. But hey—now I’ve got better mistakes to work with.

You can dismiss all this as contrarian nonsense. Or an elaborate self-own.

But I thought—why not just put it out there?