#8 - How to overcome FEAR and achieve your dreams

last week i jumped off of a cliff. this is part of the route. it was about five meters high which translates to roughly 16 and a half feet tall. my fiance and i were on a short trip to cancun where we did this water expedition amusement park called shell hub. when i got up to the rocky cliff standing on the edge walked over to the very tip looked down and holy crap. my heart was like this is so terrifying. i'm not gonna do this. it was much higher when i saw it visually than i expected. it's almost like dropping from a very tall building like one story. and after this experience i was thinking what pushes us to do scary things? how do we do the scary things that we know we will love after we've done it? what got me to still jump off that cliff even though every inch of my body was telling me no? i also thought this was incredibly important because i feel like many of us, myself included, we may grow up with this sense of fear of what others think or of our own abilities which causes us to miss out on so many great opportunities and the beautiful life that we can build for ourselves. like i always emphasize on this podcast i'm incredibly passionate about making our one life the best one it can be by really remembering that it's truly our one life, our one shot where we want to make the most of the time we have. i walk over to the edge of the cliff and i decided that i'm going to honor what i've decided earlier which is to proceed with jumping. i had a strong conviction at this point that i was not going to leave this park that day without having jumped off this five meter cliff. i actually stood at the top of the cliff for a long time before actually jumping. shon was waiting for so long trying to film me before i actually jumped and in the moment of jumping i just forced myself to not think about it any longer, to not hesitate any longer because the longer i waited the more fearful i got. so in the moment of jumping it was like i'd zero thoughts in my mind. i didn't think i just did, i just executed and obviously i am okay. i'm here fine speaking with you today. i think that one of the biggest things that got me to do it at the end was the knowledge that i was going to be okay. that even though this is incredibly scary and not something many people might do and not something that i've ever done before, that i knew there was water at the bottom and i know how to swim, at the end it was like why wouldn't i do it if i know i'm absolutely going to be okay. but actually i was wrong. i was not just okay. i was more than okay. that's what happens every single time you do something scary that you feel in your heart you want to do. when you follow through and do something that just speaks to you no matter how scary it is, you will be more than okay because of how brilliant you feel after it. knowing that you did the scary thing and you survived and you've gained that new sense of confidence in what you can do. falling deep into that cold water was exhilarating and right after i almost felt like i wanted to do it again just to feel the thrill. with that experience i feel like i can maybe jump off a higher cliff next time and that's how life works. that's how we become better and make our lives better and better. it's by tackling the little hills first and then we can move on to bigger and bigger mountains where those new mountains we tackle look as small as the smaller hills from before because wild challenges might be getting bigger for us in life. we are also getting stronger and more skilled such that even when we get older and become adults we might be like wow these problems are so much bigger than the ones we had as kids. things are so much scarier to take care of their responsibilities. even though we may think that actually those problems to you as an adult are still the same relative size then the smaller problems were to you as a kid. realizing all the scary things i've done in my past which i'm so grateful for and then adding this new one to the list of jumping off a cliff i really wanted to talk to you about this today to encourage you to go ahead and do whatever you are hesitating about to show you that when you do the scary thing you can tell yourself it's going to be okay because you are strong enough to be fine at the end of it but also you are going to be more than okay. hi for those who don't know me my name is amy and i was a graduate from caltech the california institute of the california institute of technology in 2021 where i majored in chemical engineering i worked as a management business consultant for my first full-time job after graduation and i also built my main youtube channel my non-podcast channel to 200 000 subscribers yay so naturally as you can imagine i've done quite a lot of scary things so today i'm going to go through three little examples that made a huge difference in my life which i hope will inspire you to go out and be brave and slay that dragon that you're scared of. the first example is about pivoting careers as i said i majored in chemical engineering and growing up i had always had it ingrained in me that i had to do something stem focused science and engineering focused because i was stable plus my strength was in math so to me i was accumulating all these years of experience and knowledge that it would be crazy to not continue leveraging that in some way however the summer before my senior year i did an internship in biotech and although i was very excited about joining this company and doing this engineering job after graduating i was advised strongly not to i was so shocked like you're telling me that after all these years of learning engineering that you this person as an engineer am telling me not to do this why my mind was immediately on defense like that's so terrifying why would i do that but this person who was advising me he actually did chemical engineering as well and he started working at this biotech company immediately after he graduated so he had a couple years more experience under his belt i realized that if he was exactly in my shoes then it would do me very well to listen to them i always advise us to listen to people who've gone through experiences so we don't have to learn the hard way he recommended that i look into management business consulting business management consulting i did and i actually realized that this might be exactly what i'm looking for to learn more soft skills and become the leader that i wanted to in the future i will skip the details because this isn't a career talk i just wanted to give some context for why this was something i was scared of but i decided you know what he's right and i'm going to take this leap of faith to recruit for this completely new industry not only that but business management consulting takes a lot of prep work basically you have to study for these case interviews which are like a technical interview but for business not knowing whether i could even get this job i put my all into this preparation i cased up to four times a day which was about an hour and a half each time i went ham on doing this thing that i didn't know was going to pay off at the end going into that final round interview my literal body was shaking and tingling throughout before and after like i felt like i was going to get a migraine because of how terrifying this was to do this kind of interview and to trust myself to do this fortunately i got the offer yay when i look back now i'm so so grateful that i took that leap of faith to pivot careers and do something i was completely unfamiliar with because in my heart i knew that this was the right decision that is what would speak to me and would put me on a farther starting point on the path that i knew i wanted to go down eventually so even though it was scary to make this decision and not only make this decision but pour in all that time and energy and do something i didn't know was going to pay off despite all that i knew that i had to try because only then can i see what is possible where i thought that there was only one path but if i try i can see whether this is another option for me i struggle with a sunk cost fallacy a lot but at the end of the day what i weighed was would i be sacrificing the potential of a brighter more suitable future for my past efforts and what i weighed higher was my future self because my past efforts are in the past it's about looking forward and what i can do looking forward also if there are credible voices telling you to do something in addition to you feeling like that's the right thing to do then my instinct is i have to listen to it i think sometimes we get held back by fear so much that we will not do the things that we know we should do and the things that credible successful people advise us to do but we have to realize that that fear is what's holding us back the fear is not helping us here it's actually hurting us the second example is when i was in summer of 2017 so going back in time a little bit this was summer before my freshman year of college and there was this idea that just spoke to me i started getting into bts which is a k-pop group but i couldn't sing their songs my sister and i love singing but we don't know korean so the idea had was that i'm going to translate these lyrics into english singable lyrics that follow the rhythm that rhyme and that makes sense and that we can sing ourselves i'm also going to make these into karaoke's and covers for the rest of the world to enjoy their music and the meanings behind their lyrics i never put myself out there like that in any capacity before growing up when i saw youtubers on my screen i just thought of them as a different species almost like i saw jenim and ryan hega and i was just like those are the celebrities kind of so to consider making myself a youtuber was incredibly out of the blue and i remember when i was filming for the first video there were always moments of doubt where i'm like why am i even doing this why am i putting so much effort why am i setting up the camera five million times it was such a struggle why am i going through all this when this could all fail and lead to nothing and like why am i even doing this scary thing that no one else is doing it was just all those thoughts and before we hit publish it was also the feeling of wow people are gonna judge us this is so embarrassing i can't believe we are putting a video with our faces out on the internet fast forward a month two months we started gaining traction and recognition and people loved our content because it was unlike something anyone else has done before see the reason it's scary is because no one else has done that before not only because it was putting ourselves on youtube but it was also doing something that other youtubers haven't done before but that's what shines when it's different and people started to take notice and people started commenting such kind sweet words like this is the best channel i've ever found because now i can sing my heart out to the music that i love thank you so much for making this beautiful cover because listening to it has given me hope to continue living it was crazy the comments that we got and naturally i was so incredibly grateful that we did that scary thing that i pushed myself to do these scary things once again and once again it paid off while it was scary to start that first youtube channel our music youtube channel it was again a weighing of two options i felt this pull so so strongly that i had to fill this hole on the internet that no one else was filling i had to make this music and give people the voice that they wanted to have i wanted that so much that it in times of self-doubt and lack of courage it felt like those negative emotions didn't even matter because what could matter more than me doing something that i'm passionate about and that speaks to me and that could help more people it's like weighing the potential and certain benefits way higher than the doubts and mistakes and fears of messing up i know i'm saying the word scary a ton in this video when i have a certain topic i try to circle back to the main words and theme thus i might repeat the word many times here maybe we should start a counter or something the third example is probably my most insane best leap of faith ever in that same internship i was talking about earlier in example one that person who convinced me to not return to engineering is my now fiance it's a key story which i'll say for another time but he was a full-time employee at that company just two and a half years older than me actually previously when it came to relationships and love i have been brought down so so many times that i just had no hope it sounds so sad i just had no faith that i would find anyone let alone the one i had been let down by people whether it was in high school in college and even had the people i was interested in like my friends anyway this is not a relationship video either but the point of that context is that to put myself out there and to indicate that i was interested in someone was very scary because of all that rejection and terrible experience prior so with shawn my now fiance in that internship i just somehow was like screw it this is my limited time in this company for the summer so why don't i just be friendly and get to know someone and really just be more outgoing than i ever was so i would strike up conversations as a little intern too right like you feel like you're lower than everyone so i think that's kind of bold of me to also just initiate discussions and be my witty usual louder self again not going into the full details because that story is for another time but i made some moves that too shawn were clearly like i'm interested in you it's not anything like we're like awkward or inappropriate for work i'm just saying like oh maybe like texting or things like that where it was just a little more than you would say to a friend i guess it wasn't anything flirty i'm not a flirt but i definitely put myself in a vulnerable position to be rejected because he knew that i was interested so it could easily be like i i don't like you immediately however on that last day in the internship he brought me somewhere and he confessed and he said that the reason he was courageous enough to tell me on the last day was because i had confidently shown him that he wouldn't be rejecting so you see here in a relationship someone has to give someone has to make a move that makes the other person more confident like if you're scared of being rejected by someone they could also be scared of rejected by you and then how scary would it be with two people both really really loving each other well not loving yet with two people really really interested in each other but never letting each other know so it was me being vulnerable saying like hey i have the capacity to be rejected right now but i'm still willing to show you my feelings such that he is no longer scared of rejection but if we were both scared of rejection then nothing would have happened and we would have never admitted that we were the one to each other and then be engaged right now that's incredibly incredibly insane guys please please please take the leap if you don't remember anything from this episode just remember that i'm literally engaged to the love of my life because i did not let my fears hold myself back it is just such a regretful thing if you don't know what could have been but that's what fear does to us with experiences like this now when i moved to new york city i put myself out there again i'm a complete newbie in this huge city but i DM'd other creators who i thought were great and now i'm like the best friends with some of them and i have this fun community now where i go to events and things and that would not have been possible if i had not just gotten over that self-doubt that people would reject me from this experience that i know that i am the driver of my own life that fear is not going to be something that holds me back i am not going to be put in the back seat to fear when i think about kids sometimes in my mind it's that they're so young and fearful of anything like the smallest little sound can make them jump or something simply because they don't know what it is i think that we as adults may think that we get braver and more confident with time and experience because now we understand how the world works we know that a tree is a tree we know that a fire is hot so we won't touch it however i think that actually the opposite is true that because kids have not accumulated self-doubt and known mistakes that they actually are bolder and braver and that's why little kids have such big dreams when i was in shanghai earlier this year this cute little kid came up to me with a camera and was like can you please take a picture of me and my mom it was the sweetest thing i was like wow this kid is so brave for doing this but i realized that a lot of kids are able to go and ask for candy or scream in the in a public area and it's because they don't have enough of a doubt or like awareness of how the world works where they're just like i'm gonna do what i want to do i don't have a fear of anything what is fear even as early as elementary school i had accumulated self-doubt that changed the way i act i was made fun of for the way i dress and the way i'd pronounce some words these experiences especially when we're young making us feel like conformity is the top priority really changes the way that we view our potential and can make even the simplest things seem daunting i remember when i was in middle school i would fear the sound of my own voice so i'm not gonna go ask a stranger for directions or ask a stranger to help take a picture for me thus something i'm reminding myself of too is to be a kid again i've accumulated a lot of mistakes but i think now i'm able to place those mistakes as less weight in my head psychologically there's science behind this we as humans tend to remember the negative things more than the positive so if you've made mistakes which undoubtedly we all have then you might weigh and remember those mistakes more than what you've overcome and thus you will become more doubtful of any new thing you try but what if you had the courage and the curiosity of a kid again what if you had the curiosity of a kid not knowing what this button does so they press it anyway go press that button even though you have no idea what it does see what happens there's only one way to find out what's this hand motion that's exactly how you can achieve the dreams you had as a kid rather than just accepting that every dream gets crushed when you're an adult don't accept it because the ones who do reach their dreams are the ones who can channel that inner child within them again i suppose that this discussion of being a kid again and reaching your dreams could be a whole another podcast episode on its own like how to achieve your dreams but i want to illustrate the interconnected nature of all the things i discuss within these videos so just a heads up about that i think is really exciting and mind opening to make connections between seemingly disparate ideas it would not be an amy video without a mention of yin yang every once in a while so as a reminder yin yang is a concept where mindset and action are two elements that self perpetuate in an interconnected circle so if you have a great mindset that will lead to great actions and great actions will make you have a better mindset and that will continue into a positive spiral on the other hand if you have a negative mindset perhaps you had a rough day and you're retired so then you go on your phone and then you do things that are bad for you then your mindset is going to be worse and if your mindset's worse you're going to be even less likely to do the productive things that are good for you in these big sister slash friend conversations these podcast episodes i really want to emphasize the importance of mindset because i don't think that the internet has enough advice about how to think it's more about the actions to do like wake up at 6 a.m so the mindset shift here to help you with the mindset part of yin yang cliff jumping why did i do it let's go back to that before i decided whether or not to jump off that 16 feet cliff i had a bigger fear than jumping off and what was that i thought how scary would it be to not do it to go home with regret and to not know the next chance i would have to do this when would i be back in mexico when would i be in this water park when will i see this tall cliff again and be able to fuel that exhilaration that i know i will have i would feel so much guilt and a most shame and not trying something regret that's what scary this is the mindset shift that helps me that i hope will help you too where it's again weighing two things it's way scarier to not know what could have been than the scariness of simply doing the thing one is weighed higher than the other instead of being scared of doing that thing be so incredibly terrified of what would happen or not happen if you didn't do the thing this is incredibly evident in each of the three examples that i gave but also in all of the examples as an accumulation because all of these little scary things i do day after day accumulate into the path that i am on right now having conviction in doing the things even when i don't feel like it push me farther and farther into the person i am today and i'm incredibly proud of the person i am today you live a happier more fulfilled life when you can go back and say hey i did that the result might have been bad or it might have been good but it doesn't matter because i did that anyway and i'm proud of myself live in a way where you will be proud of yourself because at the end of the day our lives are limited our lifespan is limited something can happen tomorrow covid the pandemic can happen tomorrow again and do you want to live with regret to be like oh well now i can't do that thing that i've always wanted to do when i was in caltech sure workload was really hard and maybe it's kind of scary to schedule going to la when i still had five more hours of homework to do but i did it anyway because i know that i'm going to be okay and i'm going to be able to handle it and now i'm so grateful that i did because after the pandemic hit i never went back to college and had that amazing experience with my friends again you need to live every day like it's your last so well this went a little bit off script off the rails like i do but it's the idea that if your life weren't end in a month you would do all the scary things you you want to there's no reason to not do them so have that mindset right now today how scary would it be to not know what your potential is simply because you never give yourself the chance to reach it that's the mindset shift thank you so much i hope you'll check out the rest of my podcast episodes where i dive deep into topics i hope will inspire you to reach your potential and live live your best life i'm amy thanks for being at my kind of chaotic one person podcast i'm thinking of having guests on soon so stay tuned for that that'll be so fun my very first podcast episode actually was with my friend taiki and it was one of the best conversations i've ever had my mind was like exploding by the end of that conversation so please check that out it's a very long one which is crazy because we literally talked straight through so you can watch it in chunks but i promise like always there's a lot of wisdom i said this in the video about how to overcome your insecurities but i want to say it again here just in case i think of these conversations these podcast episodes not as me lecturing or preaching at you but more giving a candid perspective of what i would have told my younger self and also the kinds of reminders that i would give myself today as much as it is to help you let me know if there's anything i can be doing better and comment what you'd like me to talk about next thank you so much for engaging for liking for sharing and i love reading your thoughtful comments thanks and until next time