🎮 The doubt/confidence metronome

Probably relatable, even if you’re not running your own business

When you start your own thing, you don’t have a boss. YAY?

I’ve had some great bosses in my career. The best bosses give you the independence to be creative and do your thing, but also give you the motivation, encouragement, and guidance when you’re not sure what to do next.

When you don’t have a boss, all of that encouragement needs to come from yourself. It’s harder than I imagined.

This post is about balancing doubt and confidence. (Probably relatable, even if you’re not running your own business.)

Too often people only post about the confidence. I’m here to normalize the DOUBT, of which I have plenty. 😅😅😅

“A balance between enormous self confidence and enormous self doubt”

Saw a post from my old boss (who was great) Vinit Bharara on LinkedIn:

Was having an interesting conversation about self confidence and self doubt recently. I’m reminded of this nuance from my brother Preet Bharara whom I was lucky to work with at my last company:

“I bet a lot of people tell you that you need to be confident to reach your dreams. But I think we sometimes forget that confidence quickly, or over a long period of time, leads to arrogance, which isn’t a good quality in a leader. The best leader finds a balance between enormous self confidence and enormous self doubt. Humility teaches you that you are not always right. I am successful but I feel ignorant a lot of the time. People who get complacent through arrogance fail.”

Always on brand, I responded with a meme.

Oh man well said. This is me since starting my own thing. (But a bit more doubt than confidence if I’m being honest with myself.)

I get asked a lot, “How is Channel 3 going?”

It honestly depends on the day, on the hour, on the minute.

Confidence

Very often, I feel this is an amazing idea. I am so pleased with how quickly things are progressing. I’m meeting my goals on engagement, user growth, and revenue.

I have an ambitious plan. What we’re working on right now is the foundation. Once it’s in place, things will move even faster. We’re doing the tough stuff now so we can move fast later. I loooove doing that kind of quiet hard work. It feels good.

And when I get positive feedback from people I admire, it’s the fuel to work even harder:

I’m not kidding you, this is my new favourite site. Man when the app goes live my productivity is gonna die

This will be twitter for gamers end of next year

Do you have any idea how big this thing is gonna be. I mean dude it’s beautiful.

I just wanna tweet and post on Insta about it all day. I can’t wait for what this will grow into.

Ok but it really is so much fun. There’s all the games you can think of to rate and review and talk about. If you’re at all into games or even the nostalgia of it, get over there

@channel3gg is fucken amazing. It’s like Twitter if twitter were good.

And those are all just from David Hughes!

David, a friend of mine who also happens to be a social media comedy LEGEND, recently joined Channel 3. He has 200k+ followers across Twitter and Instagram. He knows content. So when he says stuff like this, that’s enough confidence fuel to last me a year. THANKS MAN.

Doubt

Radical candor: in spite of all of that, there are times when I’m overwhelmed with doubt, and I worry this is not going to work, and I feel embarrassed. Put THAT in a grind culture motivational hashtag. #nodaysoff #cantstopwontstop #riseandgrind #overwhelmedwithdoubt #ifeelembarrassed

Vinit and Preet’s words above reassure me that this is normal. I hope?

I believe that anything worth doing is challenging. And anything that’s challenging is going to cause a whole bunch of self doubt.

As my wife Laura reminds me in these moments, usually on our evening walks:

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

The positive encouragement from people I trust, like David, is confidence fuel.

But sometimes, I’ll reach out to people I trust who I think will appreciate the vision, and get… nothing. No response. Ghosted.

I’m mentioning this in case you readers are going through anything similar.

It’s easy to read into this and spiral in doubt. But look, everyone is busy, especially these days. And ultimately, when you’re doing your own thing, you don’t have a whole team (bosses, co-workers, upper management, a CEO) who are also vested in the vision. You’re on your own. In short:

But let’s not forget:

Respect the feedback you get. Even the silence. Be appreciative. “Feedback is a gift.” Create a plan to address it. And keep making it better.

During the moments of doubt, I try to focus on the next small thing. Just get a little incremental task done. Move forward the tiniest bit.

This (doubt) too shall pass.

The Channel 3 game library

Wrapping on a positive update… Channel 3 currently has 1,547 games that users can rate and review. And rate and review they have! 7,752 total.

Here is the most recent one:

Huge, massive props to Channel 3 librarians Dan Tucker and El Rey. These guys are incredible. Just so smart, talented, and hard working. The Channel 3 game library is what it is because of them. I really can’t thank them enough. HEROES.

Here they are in a Dan-made meme about controllers. This is Channel 3!

They’re hosting the Week 4 event tonight on Twitch. (I will be off the grid this weekend, at a silent retreat with Laura. No joke. Shhhhh.)

When a game is added to the library, we upload the cover image. This week I made it so it is stored in a tiny size too, so we can efficiently show all covers on the same page. (Setting up for lots of features coming soon. Game lists anybody?)

So I’ll leave you with an image of all the games in Channel 3. (Thanks again Dan and Rey.)

Have a doubt-free, confidence-filled weekend everyone.