Advice I’d give my teenage self: get involved — and confront everything you’re scared of.
Join school activities. Try out. Speak up. Get rejected. Suck in public. Feel “not good enough” and keep going anyway.
Because when you don’t confront fear, you don’t stay “safe” — you get owned by it. You learn avoidance. You learn freezing. You learn how to disappear from your own life.
I learned later that you can reverse-engineer confidence. You confront the thing. You build the habit. The habit becomes a skill. The skill becomes proof.
That’s how I made up seven F’s and still transferred into Cal State Long Beach. That’s how I repeated the same grind there and graduated.
And I’d tell him this too: you don’t always have to listen to people. Sometimes you listen to yourself, try the thing, and see what happens.
Reader question: What’s one fear you wish you would’ve confronted earlier — and what would it look like to take one rep at it now?
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