Don't Underestimate Yourself

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Do you feel your work is not good enough? If you're anything like me, your comparing yourself to people you look up to and admire. You wish you were more like them and that things were as easy for you as they are for those other people who are so successful.

Making a start for yourself and taking the leap into the unknown is aways scary. There will aways be a degree of uncertainty and it will aways take a lot of work and effort to get started. And it's often hard not to get discouraged to the point of wanting to give up instead of keeping going.

But don't be too hard on yourself. Just because you feel deep down inside that you can do better, doesn't mean that what you've done is not good (enough).

I want to share with you a personal experience that changed my outlook on my work.

In 2010 I met a young Romanian woman online and we started chatting. We really connected and she inspired me to write her a poem. She really liked it so I wrote her another one and she told me to write her more. It became my way of communicating with her and in 2 months time I had already written her 50 poems.

Unfortunately things didn't work out between me and her. But this Romanian woman was so different than any woman I had known before, that I wanted to find a Romanian woman again. So I signed up on a Romanian dating site. I befriended another Romanian woman. There was no romanic spark between us but we became good friends. When she heard my story and about the poems I had written, she asked if she could read some of them.

She loved my poems so much that she started pushing me to publish them. I laughed at her and told her they were far from good enough to be published. They were just simple little love notes that rhymed. I kept them simple so my Romanian girlfriend would understand them - since English was not her first language. I sent some of my poems to my high school English teacher to get her opinion, and also to a few other English native speakers. Although they first responded eager to read it, I never heard from any of them after I sent them. This was a confirmation to me that my work was not good enough, just like I thought. But my Romanian friend and another contact from New Zealand didn't give up encouraging me. After much pushing, nagging and persuading I finally gave in to them and decided to self-publish my poems.

When I told my Romanian friend in April 2013 that I had published my poems and that I would send her a copy, she immediately invited me to come to Romania to present my book in the county library where she works. Eight weeks later I found myself in Romania in a room full of fans who appreciated my poems.

To this day I still feel those poems are not good enough. But they are simple honest poems that expressed the way I felt and there is a niche of people in Romania and also in Brazil who love my poems.

Of course there are always critics, and people who think my work is no good. But there are alway people out there that do appreciate my work and are enthusiastic about it.

So don't underestimate yourself, don't be afraid to put your work out there because you think it's no good. Let others decide if it's good, and you'll find there is a niche out there who love what you've made and are willing to buy it from you.

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Recent Comments

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Hi John:
Great post!, my wife and I are new with WA and we have never done anything like this before so we may need your advice from time to time.. Best of luck to you.

Thank you. And no problem I'm here to help.

Great story. Cheers to our creativity and courage.

Awesome post!

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