Welcome to the Sword of Sure podcast. Where doubt looms, fear whispers, and the only way forward is through. I'm Samar Carbo, and if you've ever felt like you're just sort of sure about what you're doing, you're not alone. This is where we face the uncertainty. Push past the hesitation and keep going anywhere way. So take a breath, step in, and let's move forward together.

Hello and welcome to the Sort of Shore podcast. In case you missed it in the intro, my name is Samar Carbo and I'm excited to bring this new episode to you this Friday. So I know you can't answer me, but how are you doing? Just check in with yourself real quick because none of this works. Nothing we ever do will work. No improvement, no program, no podcast can help us unless we know who's there. So who is it on the other end of this podcast? I mean, I'm speaking into a microphone, but you are a real live person out there doing something. I doubt you're just sitting there listening to me. You're probably working or working out or hey, maybe you're even driving, which, you know, let's be careful. If we're out there driving, we don't need you randomly, you know, kicking the bucket because you were listening to my podcast. It's not working. Worth it, friends. But what do I want to talk about today? Let's see. Oh, right, before we get into that, if you have a story of imposter syndrome or self doubt that you want told, reach out, shoot me an email at sort of shearpod gmail.com that is. I know you're, you're tuning into one that is just me, but the lifeblood of this podcast for 30 some episodes was purely interviews. I'm trying something new right now and that's going to end pretty soon. But interviews are what I love. And to be told, to be honest, I would be perfectly fine as well reading your stories. It doesn't have to just be something, you know, I'm asking questions or whatever. I can just read a story, no problems there. So by all means, shoot me an email of your story if you want to write it out and say, hey, please read this on the air. We can do that. My, my inbox is a fantastic receptacle for that sort of thing. You know, I'm thinking about this whole concept of self doubt and of imposter syndrome. And I was actually thinking earlier this week, my, my three year old has had a rough week. She has had, she acted, she's been Acting the whole week like she, like she does when she has a fever. So that's for those, you know, uninitiated or those with civilized children. That means she is constantly looking for a way to break something, to move her body to something to move. And, oh, man, it is something. And it takes a concerted effort to be the type of parent, the type of person that I want to be in that circumstance. So. But I wasn't born that way, right? Like, sure, it takes a concerted effort, but I was still able to have patience. I am still able to have patience. And maybe it's because I knew at the end of this week, I get to go away with my wife and we're going to see the fantastic Pete Holmes in Atlantic City and, and have ourselves a weekend around it. But at the same time, you know, we're, we're a family that thrives on patience. If we have patience, we do really well. I think, you know, most, if not all families are somewhat like this. So. So we thrive on patience. If we can't have that, we don't get through our day very well. Everybody's upset, right? If I can't have patience, my day gets worse. And I know that, I know that correlation. So what is there that got me here? And that, that's kind of the, the, the thing, right? Because when I'm, when I look at. And this is purely a me thing, this is not a definitional thing. When I look at self doubt, when I look at imposter syndrome, or wondering if I belong in a room, right? We're just defining now, but wondering if I belong in a room that I totally belong in. I'm talking practice. I'm talking about having the historical proof that today I am prepared for the challenges that came my way, that my preparation met opportunity at the right time. And so I know that. So when I was a kid, I spent a semester, we'll call it. We didn't have semesters, but it was half the year in, in an inner city school because my dad was working in an inner city place and my mom was still had a really good job back home and in, in, in the suburbs. So they split time. You know, it was, it was rough on them, but hey, they made it. They're still going strong today. So this was. Oh boy. I was 12 or 13, so this was a long time ago. And I am at this magnet academy in an inner city area and I am waiting for my dad. I was told to wait. So the school, it was very old building, but it Had a circle, it had a bus circle out front and then it had a sidewalk past that and then was the road. Pretty normal setup, right? Mansion style building, circle, sidewalk, road. There are trees near the sidewalk. But it was a, you know, pretty nice day when I left for school that morning. So I'm wearing a T shirt, a long T shirt, but a T shirt nonetheless. And it starts to rain, but I was told to wait on the sidewalk. Now perhaps this is just a thing about me personally, but when I was asked to do something, I did that thing. So I waited and I waited and I waited. And when it seemed like in this downpour that never seemed to end when I, when I'm standing out there, I didn't sit, I didn't lean on a tree, I didn't go inside the building that was very close. I didn't take the late bus, you know, and, and after a while, some parents felt bad for me, right? They, they saw me there on the sidewalk, just completely drenched. So to the bone as this little 12 year old. And I was very small. I'm, I'm 6 foot 3 now, but I was like 5 foot nothing. I was small. And you know, I was standing out there and these people are seeing this poor kid. And so some, a couple of parents offered me like, hey, do you want to sit until your dad gets here, like out of the rain? And I. Now that was twofold, right? The first thing was social anxiety. What am I going to talk to these people about while I'm sitting in their van? And I don't know how long my dad's going to be. No, thank you. But the other side of that was I was told to be here. And until another, for lack of a better term, command overrides the previous one that I'm holding, I'm going to stand here. Now that was something that I had, as a matter of fact, practice by that point. I do what I say I'm going to do because I said I'm going to do it. Now I, I would approach that a little bit differently today, but I am very near 40 and I am fairly independent as a person. But I had a million little moments like that and maybe literally I obviously haven't counted, but a bunch of little moments like that where even when it was hard, I stuck to what I said I would do. There's a great quote Inky Johnson has about that. I'm going to butcher it here because you would hear the little clicky clack of my, my keyboard if I looked something up. So I Don't look anything up while I'm on podcast. But he says something to the effect of persistence or consistency or something is staying true to what you said you would do long after the feeling you set it in has passed. It's something like that. It's a little bit clunky, but he is a very good speaker and incredibly consistent person. Now I'm going off of, I don't know him personally. I'm going off of what he says in front of a crowd. But still, that was the, the type of human I grew myself into. Now was that just because of me? Was I born that way? Was it because I have African parents? Because I'm, I'm a first generation American? It could be any one of a million things that came together and made me who I am, but I can tell you that I've practiced doing what I said I would do. And so we have these things today, right? We have these captains of industry who are making billions of dollars as billion with a B, right? We don't talk about millions like it's a lot of money anymore. We talk about billions. And some people are just turning the corner into trillions. And, and it's, you know, certainly the moral issues are there, but we look at that and we say these people just are them. But they didn't do this overnight, right? I, I truly don't believe that the trillions and billions can be earned. I don't believe that those can be a self made. I think you do have to go, you know, get windfalls at a certain point, whether that's by family money or whatever. But millions, for sure, for sure. Millions can be in a generation. A million dollars can fall into your lap through a few years if you do the right thing of focused effort. That is just, that is how that happens. It comes up to a million in essentially no time. But we call these overnight successes. But these are actually a bunch of, a bunch of things that come together to make progress. But the, I wonder sometimes if, if we have, as a society have come, have become allergic to difficulty, right? Things are so easy for 90% of your day and then you come up to something that's actually difficult. And obviously the difficulty changes throughout the day. Sometimes it's just putting your phone down, sometimes it's going for a walk. Sometimes that difficulty is standing up to your boss in a respectful and way that has a conversation, a dialogue rather than accusations and arguments. I think maybe, maybe we've grown allergic to this kind of difficulty. But I think discipline has become misunderstood. I think it's not about being necessarily rigid, it's about being reliable. Right? I've loved it ever since I heard Will Smith say it. And I know he's fallen out of the way, but a long time ago he said something to the effect of discipline is love. And I love it. And I glommed onto it and I took it and it's mine. But discipline is loving yourself enough to hold a boundary. And yeah, he basically said that. But let's look at it this way. I love myself too much to eat an entire cake, right? I, I love my, my body. I love what I can do with it. I love my blood pressure, all these things too much to eat an entire cake now. Now I, I do believe there are phases to adulthood. And I've, I've said ever since my early twenties that like the, the first, you know, big part of adulthood is realizing that you can. Or. No, no, here's how I said it. I'll cut that. Here's how I said it. The adulthood truly begins when you realize you can go to the store, buy a whole cake and eat it for dinner, right? And I still kind of believe that, right. Adulthood doesn't truly begin until you realize you're an adult. But the next phase of adulthood doesn't begin. You don't level up as an adult until you realize that, yes, you could do that, but your body is worth maintaining. And there are some people who have that as children. There are people who gain that as teenagers, people who I've found, people who work out a lot and people who go to, you know, just go to the gym for a sauna or for yoga, which can be considered working out. Some people look at it as just stretching. I am a person who sees that as working out because I am genuinely out of shape. But this is a thing that shows true love to me, is holding boundaries. It doesn't have to be discipline, right? It doesn't have to be an aggressive type of thing. It can be calm and it can be something that you keep moving. But I, I mentioned a little earlier that like the, the world just moves, right? Resilience that we have to, to overcome imposter syndrome and self doubt in, in this incredibly fast world. It is, it's like a fever you can't sweat out. It just keeps coming for you, right? This, this tension span stealing world that we live in, it erodes the endurance that we would otherwise have to build. Things like perseverance so that we can get that proof from ourselves that we are somebody that we, that we can love somebody that we can hold a boundary for and still love. I wonder sometimes if that is the thing, right, the five or seven minutes or whatever now that people have to be looking at their phone for, if that is the three feet from gold, you know, like if we could just do that, if we could just put the phones down or not look at the screens in general for a little bit, for a day, a week, a month. Maybe that is some people's success barrier, that's what keeping them from reaching the heights from other people calling them an overnight success. But I think, and this is just me talking naturally, but I think we can still value patience when everything else is instant, right? Because people one day got instant coffee, there was this percolator you had to put on the stove and you made espresso and you had all these things and, and then they got instant coffee and they made it for what, maybe 10, 20 years writ large. And then it became this kind of niche thing that nobody does anymore because it's not as good. And so I think for our society and for western culture as a whole, these fast things AI the, the phones, all the, the fast moving things. It's not a fad. I don't believe that. But I do think it taking up all of our attention is fleeting. Now I know I'm sometimes needlessly optimistic, but I think there will come a day when we as a culture don't need it. When we don't need these attention seeking things and we don't seek the dopamine of a quick interaction and instead are looking for something a little bit more meaningful. And we start to get that perseverance back when we start to see ourselves fighting against imposter syndrome by giving ourselves real proof that we can get through a day solving problems, we can get through maybe a shift, we can get through whatever you get in your life, a challenge, a job, an interview, where at the end of it we feel even more confidence that we felt at the beginning of it. And sometimes we do have to have the confidence to know that we'll be awesome and then later on prove it. And it's crazy and it's weird, but for some, certainly for me, that's how the way, that's the way the world works a little bit. And that's grit, right? That perseverance, that sticking to things, that magic bit of, of, of intensity. That's what changes lives. Maybe grit is just about staying true to what we said we would do after the feeling we said we would do it in has passed. Thanks to Inky for this episode and thanks to you for paying attention, for listening, for showing up. If you have a story of imposter syndrome or self doubt, I would love to hear it. And I'd love to tell your story or interview you about it. Shoot me an email for that at sort of surepodmail.com I can't wait to hear from you later days.

Sam Sa.