How To Stop Quitting Everything You Start

when I was a kid I was often called bour Fe which translated literally from Chinese is middle of the road giving up I mean that's clever but it's mean not the nicest thing to say but it was true I started playing violin when I was 3 and I quit when I was 11 I started ballet when I was 5 and I quit when I was 13 but those were actually my longest standing extracurriculars there was also painting running which is a form of kung fu knitting gardening ice skating and juggling but it's just extracurriculars you might say nope it was also school stuff and my career stuff too if you ask me my favorite subject at school when I was little it would be different every single year I eventually decided to be Premed and go to college for pharmacology but that didn't end up lasting either it changed to bom formatics then to software engineering then to data science and now I am a YouTuber an entrepreneur my mom often likes to remind me Tina you do realize you have a master's degree in computer science from pen and now you're making internet videos yes but in all seriousness though I genuinely am really happy with where I am and I feel like I finally got my together I've been doing YouTube and other internet stuff for over 3 years now and I finally feel fulfilled and don't have the urge to drop everything and suddenly change my entire career yes I still do that thing where I get really obsessed with something and then give up like 2 months later but overall I do think I finally got my together mostly so in this video we are going to take a cold heart honest look as to why you may also have the problem of quitting everything you start that's it I quit and what to do about it the good thing is that it's often just a small tweak in your mindset that makes the world of difference it may also be that you actually have a powerful hidden talent that you never realized that you had I'll talk about it more later but first let me introduce you to the ditto H ballet is so elegant I want to become a ballet dancer when I grow up W say doctor is a very good career so stable always have a job I want to be a doctor and have such a stable career software engineer very good job such good salary I want to be a software engineer the ditto is someone that internalizes the goals and values of other people usually someone that you look up to like a parent or a mentor they say something is really good or something they've always wanted to do and you don't really give it that much thought and just also think that it's something you want to do Daddy when I grow up I want to be just like you which is find in the beginning when things are fun and you're seeing progress and everything is great but when something happens and things get hard you kind of just give up because you never really wanted to do it anyway so if you are a ditto this is what you need to do before you internalize the goal number one objectively assess it you're like hm maybe I want to start learning ballet first write out what you like about it like my mom thinks it's really elegant it looks really pretty it could be really good exercise I get to socialize but also play Devil's Advocate and write down what you don't think you would like about it takes up a lot of time it messes with your feet two actually try it out before you actually go out and buy Flats tights leotard point shoes actually try out a lesson first do you actually like it if it's something like choosing a career to become like a doctor or an engineer you might not actually be able to become a doctor or an engineer to try out but you can try shadowing someone who's a doctor or an engineer for a day or at least talk to before deciding if you want to do it or not it takes a tiny bit more effort but it would really show you that maybe what you're thinking in your head is not actually what it is let me know in the comments do you have ditto traits or are you pretty opinionated by the way I also do have a quiz which I'll link down below that you can go through to figure out what kind of quitter archetype you are and more detailed tips on things that you can do it's completely free thought it might just be useful it's Lev OA not Leva the gifted child in Harry Potter in a present of asan Hermione was in her third year and during her defense against a dark arts exam she had to go against a Bogard which is a creature that transforms into the worst fears of its opponents her mind is Bogard transformed into Professor mcgonagle who went down to announce that she had failed everything yeah she completely freaked out this is something that's actually really prevalent amongst people who were considered gifted children in a study by Muer and D fifth graders were split into three groups so they were all given a series of questions kind of like those IQ logic tests um that range from easy to difficult but for the first group after a kid successfully completes a question they were shouted with praise related to their intelligence like wow you must be so smart to have solved that problem for the second group when they finish a problem they were praised about their effort and motivation like you must have worked really hard for that score and the third group was the control group where they were kind of given just more like acknowledgement and not specific praise or general comment like that's a good score what they found is that those who were praised for motivation and effort they showed greater task persistence so if they can't figure something out they'll spend more time figuring it out compared to the control and the um prais on intelligence group on the other hand for the kids who are praised on their intelligence it was actually worse than if they weren't even praised at all they gave up more easily felt like they didn't enjoy it as much and they blamed themselves a lot when they failed when you're praised for your intelligence and your achievements like getting a on an exam this becomes tied to your selfworth so on the flip side if you fail at an exam it means that you're not smart anymore and if you're not smart then you're not worthy which is exactly what Hermione does in this other scene in divination class she just kind of stormed out and quit instead of actually trying to not potentially risk feeling like she's not smart enough therefore not good enough have I said something let me know in the comments if you were considered a gifted kid and kind of have this extreme fear of failure so what to do about it well the root cause is that you need to decouple intelligence with your self worth there's a really good video that I really recommend you check out if you feel like you have this problem um it's by Dr K he is a psychiatrist and I'll link it down in the descriptions but yes the way that you need to think about learning a new skill or doing a task is that you're just trying things out not like I must defend my intelligence it's such a tiny mindset shift but it makes such a big difference and it would be a huge way off your shoulders embrace the fact that learning is a journey and you're supposed to fail a lot of times to get good Your Own Worst Enemy Frank has been working as a software engineer at Airbnb for 3 years and at the beginning of the year he was asked to lead a major company project in the final few weeks he stayed at work until 10: p. m. every day just to make sure that everything was in place tested thoroughly and got delivered on time and it was and the project was a huge success the leadership was estatic and the or director himself let Frank know that he was on track for a huge bonus and a promotion to staff engineer all the money The Prestige and the job security in this economy everything he's ever wanted and in the next morning he quit what yeah that's self sabotage so here's a super simple explanation for why you might do this at some point in your life probably when you were a kid you internalized the fact that you are not a successful person maybe a parent told you that you'll never be as good as your brother maybe a teacher called you a hopeless case you're a hopeless Charlie Brown completely hopeless wherever it is somewhere along the way you develop the belief that you do not deserve success humans have this sense of self that is really hard to change once it's been developed we like to maintain a stable sense of who we are as people so you see yourself as a failure but you start getting some success in your life your brain is going to say oh no that's not right I better self sabotage now you're a failure both internally and externally much better this is what I would recommend get a piece of paper and split it into three columns column number one write down a deeply rooted belief that you have number two what is the evidence that supports it number three debunks it I will actually share two of mine with you which is kind of personal but you know so the first belief that I have which is kind of meta is the fact that I think that I'm a quitter like I just quit everything that I start fun tour fi evidence people tell me this all the time I see the fact that I start something and then just give up like 2 months later I see all of the career changes that I've made in my life but there's also evidence that debunks this I still doing YouTube I'm still doing my internet stuff and it's been 3 years and going strong I haven't even thought about quitting maybe I'm not someone that just quits everything they start number two deeply held belief I'm not particularly good at anything evidence to support this I'm pretty decent at most things that I tried except for team sports and anything to do with directions and finding stuff I'm geographically challenged but there just really isn't anything that I'm particularly good at not any like skills or subjects or careers or jobs evidence to debunk this so I'm actually going to save this for a little bit later not a cop out I promise it's because if you do have this trait it's a really big indicator that you have a hidden talent that you've seen as a weakness here in entire life I'll get to this later but first let's get through the rest of the archetypes the greedy one okay time for New Year's resolutions this year I want to become a professional ballet dancer I also want to learn French AI skills and become an AI freelancer by the way if you're interested in learning AI skills and working on freelance projects for real companies check out lonely octopus waight list also can't forget about the selfcare stuff got to make sure I meditate every day journal for an hour every day work out do yoga and eat healthy have a salad every day too oh yeah and of course I also got to do my like my normal stuff like take care of the kids and you know like do my job want to get that promotion as well two weeks later I just finished my takeout and stopped taking ballet classes and J PA say I am a failure now before you say that is so ridiculous I would never take out a piece of paper and write down all of the things that you're currently doing ballet class French class learning AI learning coding working out everyday eating healthy meditating journaling taking care of yourself doing your full-time job as a data scientist now categorize them into two groups things that you've already mastered and habits that you've already built and things that you are trying to learn and habits build there should be no more than one thing in a second category like maybe two if you do one that's related to your health and one of the things that you're trying to learn but no more than two write in the comments your list of things I finally realize that I can't do it Mr gr I'm a failure don't talk like that the Doom spiral yes I really want to learn about Ai and how large language models work so I'm going to go to brilliant. org and continue on this course pre-processing the process of turning draw text into a clean data set has two stages pre-processing and tokenization okay prompting this how is the alpha text formatted uh it looks like its letters are all lowercase and there's no punctuation yes I got her right so since the M Slide the magic pre-processing wand across the text what did pre-processing do removed punctuation no I got it wrong it's over I can't do this it's over I too stupid no large language models for me anybody guilty of this for this one it really is as simple as realizing the fact that you have a tendency to Doom spiral AKA when you think things are not going good you just have a tendency of spiraling into negativity my best tip for you is to measure yourself on input based goals as opposed to Output based goals input based goals represent effort you're putting into something versus output based goals is things that you are getting out of it for example if you're trying to learn AI skills instead of having your goal as finishing this AI project output base which is kind of like vague and feels very overwhelming instead have a goal of spending 1 hour a day for the next 3 days working on the project input based the thing is if you consistently put in the time and effort towards your goals without thinking so much about the results of your goals ironically you actually achieve the goals much faster and be much more less likely to quit it takes time to get good at things especially stem subjects which by the way if you are interested in learning stem subjects like computer science data science AI physics math you should check out brilliant who is the sponsor of today's video brilliant is a stem learning platform that specializes in interactive Hands-On learning meta themselves recommended me to use brilliant to brush up on my stats skills before interviewing so that's just how good their platform is even major tech companies recommend brilliant to their employees and candidates even now when I'm not interviewing I still use brilliant to learn new stem subjects and to brush up on things too especially with the rise of AI and L's I highly encourage everybody check out the very beginner friendly introduction to L's course and also the neuron networks course if you want to dive a little bit deeper they also have Timeless course offerings like calculus stats and programming with python you can join a millions of people already learning on brilliant and head on over to the link over here also linked in description if you go through my link the first 200 people will get 20% off an annual membership all right now let's talk about that hidden talent that you might have if you find yourself bouncing from thing to thing to thing especially if you reach some level of success of each of these things before moving on it's possible that you may have what is called a Renaissance Soul it's named after the multidisiplinary Geniuses of the Renaissance like Leonardo da Vinci who was not only an artist but also a scientist engineer and inventor it's not that you're not particularly good at anything it's that you can be good at everything which by the way is also correlated with a really high score on openness of the ocean Big Five personality test you have a talent for being open to new experience es and you're probably also a fast learner which is definitely a blessing and a curse but it can also be really difficult for you to fit into the mold of what is considered normal which is usually having like a deep expertise in one area like if you ask a kid what they want to do when they grow up the expected answer is usually like an engineer or like a mathematician an astronaut not like an engineer an astronaut a mathematician a gardener a ballet dancer and an artist but just because it's not considered like conventional doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it the key to being happy with yourself in this regard at least is to embrace this trait and to design your career and your life around it I just do want to make a cave on saying that I'm not saying you should just like quit things and be proud of that and it is important to like look through the list that we just talked about earlier and correct some of these Tendencies but if you do choose to embrace this Talent of yours and apply it in the right domains you can absolutely Thrive for example when I first got that job as a data scientist even though the entire role is called like data science it actually encompasses so many different subjects like business computer science and engineering uh statistics and math and scientists it was also a role that demanded me learn about all the new technologies that are coming out and I found that to be really stimulating and exciting now as a YouTuber and entrepreneur this is a even bigger Advantage literally part of my job is to dig into new topics and new things that are coming out learn about them learn from many different people and share it with you guys when I'm building lonely Octopus as a small business owner I don't have money to just throw at an expert marketing person for example right like I learn how to do that myself and then in the future I might like tweak my systems by hiring marketing consultants or I might teach other people to do these rules for me but a lot of it is me just learning things myself and applying the things that I learn so yeah let me know in the comments if you resonate with this and if you do take that quiz lck underneath let me know what your results are I'll see you guys in the next video or live stream