PERSPECTIVE

When ridiculous amounts of your time is devoted to proving you're worthy, the only natural response is to question your worthiness. Consider how much of your current environment is composed of assaults on your credibility. "Should we let you in? Should we give you money? Should we give you the time of day? Why?"

Know who doesn't doubt themselves in those situations? Sociopaths.

So veen has been helping me lo these many months perform a GIS analysis on my wife's business. Without getting into too much detail, she should get about 3 births per year by pure geographic allocation (no. of midwives, no. of births per year, percentage population within the target demo of any given zip code... it was some intense shit). By pure geographic allocation, our new site should be getting 84 births per year.

Sounds great, right? Looking at it that way we should be increasing my wife's business by a factor of, like, 30. And I've got 20 pages of analysis. I can tell you more about the demographics of home birth than probably anybody on the West Coast. Yet I'm freaking balls about failure because it counts.

The fact that my wife does 20-30 births a year RIGHT NOW, not 3, doesn't help. The fact that I've facebook-stalked every competitor up here to the point where I know my calcs are within 10% doesn't help either. Why? Pure, irrational doubt.

Perspective is that thing you get when you're far enough away from the problem to see it clearly. Focus is that thing you get when you're so deep in the shit that all you have are the details. For any given problem you can have focus or perspective but never both and I think you'll find that we usually select correctly.

Breathe deep, bust ass and trust in your skillz. After all, the only power you have over the situation is whether or not you choose to excel.