Not Feeling “Good Enough”

I spent a lot of my high school years stressing that I wasn’t “good enough”. If I didn’t get a satisfactory grade on a test, I felt “stupid”. If I wasn’t working, I felt like I was slacking off.

Why I Didn’t Feel “Good Enough”

Since graduating, I’ve had lots of time to reflect. I’ve realized how much we fixate on certain goals—how we convince ourselves that only by attaining these goals can we find fulfillment. We assess our lives and our self-worth by arbitrary metrics that we set for ourselves.

In high school, if I didn’t get an A in a class, I felt like I’d be a failure. After all, weren’t there other kids who were able to get A’s? If I didn’t get into the program I’d applied for, I’d feel like it was because of some serious personal shortcoming. After all, I’d worked so hard on my application—was my best just not good enough? 

However, I’ve now realized that my stress and anxiety came from metrics that I set for myself. Arbitrary metrics, that is. I assessed my self-worth based on my grades, the awards I won, the positions I received. I derived my self-worth from external forms of validation.

And the problem with external forms of validation is that they are fragile and needy. If you don’t receive external validation, you feel like a failure. But when you do get it, you crave more.

If you derive your self-worth from external validation, you have to constantly receive validation, or you begin feeling like a failure again. You feel the constant need to prove yourself to others and yourself.

Letting Go of Pride

In Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, he says that “Pride is a master of deception; when you think you’re occupied by the weightiest business, that’s when he has you in his spell.”

Bluntly put, that’s what deriving my self-worth from external validation was—a need for pride to sustain me. If I got all A’s in my classes, that meant that I was “smart”. If I got into the program I applied for, that meant that I was qualified.

But I’ve now realized how empty chasing after goals like being “smart,” “qualified,” or “successful” is. The truth is, it doesn’t matter if you get a better grade than most of your class or if you’re part of the [insert small number] percent that got accepted into a program. It doesn’t even matter if you graduate top of your class, get into your dream college, and become the next college dropout-turned-billionaire entrepreneur.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pursue these goals. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t pursue them for the wrong reasons. These reasons are:

To Prove Yourself to Others

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says that “So many who were remembered already forgotten, and those who remembered them gone.”

This may sound a bit far-fetched and even morbid right now, but it’s true. On a shorter-term view, think about it this way:

If you’re trying to prove yourself to others by receiving some award or other recognition, remember that people think about you much less than you think they do. It may sound harsh, but it’s true.

Everyone’s occupied with their personal problems—they don’t spend their time thinking about how accomplished you are.

Another related quote from Meditations that I really like: “The way people behave. They refuse to admire their contemporaries, the people whose lives they share. No, but to be admired by Posterity—people who they’ve never met and never will—that’s what they set their hearts on. You might as well be upset at not being a hero to your great-grandfather.”

To Prove Yourself… to Yourself

Perhaps worse is the need to prove yourself… to yourself. This is where I’d like to bring up the problem of assessing your worth by arbitrary metrics.

Who’s to say that you have to have a certain class ranking to be “smart”? Who’s to say that whether or not you get into a selective program determines your skill level?

We have to realize that these metrics are totally arbitrary. Plenty of people that failed tons of time before they achieved the things we now admire them for.

Stephen King, “King of Horror,” received countless rejections, lived in a one-room trailer with his wife and two kids, and worked at a laundromat before he had his first breakthrough novel. Albert Einstein was told by one of his teachers that, “You will never amount to anything” and “Your mere presence spoils the respect of the class for me.”

If Stephen King had let the rejection slips determine his skill as a writer, imagine how different pop culture horror would be today. If Albert Einstein had let his teacher’s remarks determine his potential as a student, imagine how different the field of physics would be today. But neither of them let these arbitrary external factors—a newspaper’s acceptance/rejection or a teacher’s approval/disapproval—determine their self-worth.

Here’s the punch line: you shouldn’t define your self-worth by your ability or inability to achieve certain goals. Life is not linear, and besides, the metrics we set for ourselves are totally arbitrary anyway!

This goes both ways. Let’s say you want to get into a certain college. If you don’t get in, recognize that whether or not you get into the college does not determine your potential. And even if you do get in, recognize that it does not mean that you’re “accomplished” or “destined for greatness” or whatever other characteristic of self-worth you attribute to it. It just means that you worked hard and were well-prepared.

You should never let external forms of validation determine your self-worth, whether to drag you down or to boost your ego.

Facing Fears, Learning, and Growing

I’ll be honest. I still struggle with comparing myself to others and worrying that I’m not pushing myself as hard as I could be. But I’m making progress.

For instance, throughout my blogging journey, I’ve been scared to invest too much time into new strategies, fearing that if I didn’t achieve the “numerical” success (# of page views, # of email subscribers, etc.) that others did, I would be somehow “less capable”. Now, I realize how silly that is. How quickly I’m able to grow my page views is a completely arbitrary metric I’ve been using to measure my self-worth.

It’s still easy for me to fall into old habits—to define my worth by how many problems I get right on an exam or to shy away from doing something for fear of failure. But when this happens, I remind myself that external factors don’t define my worth—that the value I give to them is totally arbitrary.

Follow Your Passions (Seriously)

You shouldn’t pursue goals for the wrong reason: to prove yourself to others or to prove yourself to yourself.

This means that you need to stop defining your self-worth by arbitrary external factors. Doing so not only drags down your self-esteem but also prevents you from pursuing things you want to do. (Sometimes, it’s easier to think, “If I try, I might fail. But if I don’t try, I’ll never know if I’m capable.” But this statement only has weight if you measure your self-worth by the goal you’re trying to achieve. If you don’t, then whether you “fail” or “succeed” doesn’t actually matter!)

Instead, pursue things for their intrinsic value. Don’t shoot for a top college to prove that you’re “accomplished” to yourself or others. Shoot for it because you’re genuinely excited by their academic offerings. Don’t compete in competitions for the temporary high of winning awards. Compete because you’re passionate about what you’re doing and want to engage in a similar community of passionate learners.

As cheesy as it sounds, do things because you’re passionate about them. Because pursuing them brings you inherent joy, not because you need to achieve something to prove yourself.