Years ago, I was so confident, and so naive(幼稚的). I was so sure that I was right and everyone else was wrong.

Unfortunately I was lucky and got successful, so that kept me blind to my weak points. I sold my company, felt ready to do something new, and started to learn. But the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew and how lucky I had been.

I’d start to make things, but then saw how stupid I was, so I stpped. I lost all confidence. I spent a few years completely stuck.

Finally, some new ideas helped:

Learning without doing is wasted. If I don’t use what I learn, then it is pointless! How terrible to waste hundreds of hours spent learning, and not turn them into action. Like throwing good food in the trash: it’s wrong.

This isn’t about me. How I feel in this moment doesn’t matter－it will pass. Nobody is judging me, because nobody is thinking of me. They are just looking for things to improve their own life. The public me is not the real me anyway, so if they judge my public personality, that’s fine.

The work is the point, and my work is special. If I can do something that people find useful, then I should. It doesn’t matter if it’s a masterpiece or not, as long as I enjoy it.

So I’m glad my old confidence is gone. Now I aim(以……为目标)to make my work my little contribution to the world－just special and useful.

A teenage girl writes to Choices magazine, asking for help with a problem, and other teens give their advice.

The Problem

Four Replies

People often talk as if shyness is a disease or mental condition that can be cured. I prefer to think of it as an emotional disability. It’s something we are born with and something we carry with us in our entire lives. There are many people, however, who seem to be determined to find some way of doing away with their shyness. In my opinion, it’s a waste of time. I don’t mean that we should do nothing about it; quite the contrary, I think we need to separate the basic fact of our shyness from our ability to take part in a social environment.

Look at one of the most famous shy people, Johnny Carson. This man is painfully shy, yet for decades he made a living talking and associating(交往) with different people every night, in front of a national audience. Carson has never done away with his shyness, but he has successfully found a way to deal with it to the extent that he could be, not just a talk show host, but a legend(传奇) among talk show hosts. Look also at Sally Fields, who has recently admitted her problem with shyness. This is a woman who has appeared in many films, TV shows and interviews, yet in her early years she was so shy that she turned down a lunch invitation from Jane Fonda because she was terribly afraid of meeting her.

I guess that our shyness is there because each of us is born with some insecurity and this insecurity prevents us from reaching out to others the way people with a more open personality do. As we grow up, we allow our social skills to grow and develop. But we are still stuck in kindergarten or elementary school or wherever it was when our shyness took root in our soul.