Jesper

I have a friend who is a professional jazz guitar player. He's doing great, much better than most musicians. I don't think being extraordinarly talented is a guarantee that you will make a good living with music. My friend goes on tour through Europe each summer, playing on jazz festivals. He spends a lot of time networking and organizing concerts. If you want to make money with music you have to have business sense as well as musical talent.

Ofcourse it's possible. I used to have a colleague who told me long ago, "Isn't it great? We get to play with computers all day and we even get paid for it!". (I'm a software developer). Ofcourse, to make it your profession, you have to think about how you can make an income with your hobby. One thing to watch out for though is that when it becomes your profession, it's not just playing all day anymore. There will be deadlines and demands from your customers (or whoever pays you for your work). That might make it less enjoyable than when you are doing it purely for your own enjoyment, when nobody is expecting results from you. Computers and programming have been my hobby since I got my first computer when I was 13, but there are certainly days when it's boring or when I feel frustrated because I'm not making progress. I think that you will have good days and bad days with any job, even if you make your profession from whatever you love to do most.

Does anybody here have experience with Toastmasters? What did you get out of it? I am not yet a member of Toastmasters, but I'm interested in it and I'll go to a meeting of a Toastmasters club next week. This week (last Tuesday) I did my first presentation at a conference. It went great. I was prepared well. The conference organizers matched me up with a mentor months ago who gave me some useful tips for preparing the presentation. The best tip he gave me is to record myself on video. I did this 8 or 9 times in the weeks before the conference. It really helped me to get the presentation into my head and when it was time to do it for real, I felt I was completely ready for it and not nervous at all.

A few years ago I was drinking coffee all day at work, maybe 6 cups or so a day. In the weekends I would get headaches because I drank much less or no coffee. So I limited it to 1 or 2 cups in the morning at work and the headaches went away.

I would never do that. Multi-level marketing is a scam and borderline illegal. The idea is probably that you have to buy stuff from people up the chain, which you then have to sell to people down the chain. You'll probably end up losing money on it. At least be very, very careful with it and do research. Don't do it if you don't understand exactly what you're getting yourself into. Wikipedia says:

I just found that Leo has a video where he talks about Toastmasters: Fear Of Public Speaking - The One Key To Overcoming It Forever

Great that you are thinking about it in such a constructive way, and that you can see how you were acting in the approach and what effect it had. That's what's going to help you improve!

Sounds like a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme scam.

There are two interesting psychological effects which are on opposite sides: 1. The impostor syndrome, where an expert in some field doesn't really acknowledge to him/herself that he/she is really an expert and who is afraid of being exposed as a fraud, even though there is really no reason for it, 2. The Dunning-Kruger effect, where someone grossly overestimates his/her own ability or knowledge in some field and doesn't see how little he or she really knows. I've noticed that sometimes I suffer from the impostor syndrome, especially when I'm being interviewed for a new job. I know I am a good and experienced software developer (I've been doing this work for almost 20 years), but at an interview I still get nervous and sometimes start to doubt my own abilities. What are your experiences with these two effects? For the Dunning-Kruger effect, people obviously don't recognise this themselves, it's something you might have seen happening with other people.

@abrakamowse Toastmasters is a woldwide organisation, and it's already quite old - it was started in 1924. There are about 15,000 Toastmasters clubs all around the world. Here in my home city (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) there are two clubs, an English speaking and a Dutch speaking club. It is not expensive at all, the club I went to costs € 90 (about US$ 100) per year. They have two meetings per month. I went to a meeting as a guest last Tuesday. There were about 20 people, including 5 or 6 guests. The club has a number of workbooks, and each member works through those books in their own pace. In each book, there are a number of speeches that you have to do. For each speech, the focus lies on a specific aspect - for example there was someone who held an inspirational speech, and someone who held a storytelling speech. There's also "table topics", where everybody can join in and hold a short (1 - 2 minutes) improvised speech about some topic. The meeting was very structured: a number of members had different roles, for example to watch the time, to watch for stopwords, to watch for language and grammar. Each of them would give an evaluation of those aspects after a speech. It was very interesting and I can see that you can learn a lot about public speaking and leadership.

Thanks @Rares . I'm going to a Toastmasters meeting of a local club next Tuesday as a guest.

In my opinion, the most fundamental principle behind any kind of business is that you should provide value to your customers. So look at your business from that point of view: How are you providing value to your customers? Specifically with regard to sales: Be detached from the outcome. If you are attached to one particular outcome (for example, you badly want the customer to buy something from you), then you are sabotaging yourself. This is not only true for selling, but also for buying things. I was in Morocco once, where aggressive shop owners try to get you to buy tourist trinkets. They had nice wooden boxes. I wanted to buy one and haggled 50% off the price. I thought I had done well. Then a few days later at another shop I saw the same boxes. I didn't want one anymore, because I had already bought one. But the shop owner persisted and I kept telling him I didn't want it. The price went down to less than half of what I paid at the other shop. What I learned there was: the less I am attached to the outcome ("I want that box"), the better deal I get.

Watch out with random people that try to contact you on Skype, there are a lot of scammers out there - people who will try to make them love you and then they start asking for money. There are so many stories of people who sent thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars to someone they met randomly online and that they thought they were in love with, but who they have never met in reality and who turn out to be just trying to scam you out of your money.

Wow, I realized something important about myself tonight. I already knew that I have a fear of failure and rejection. But tonight I saw how pervasive this is throughout different aspects of my life, and that this is my weakest point. My life until now has been pretty smooth and easy. I had a happy childhood, I did well at school and never even had to work very hard for it; at University I had to work a little harder but it was never a problem, and at work I'm also doing very well. I can get along with people very well and rarely get mad at anyone, and the people I interact with almost always like me. I've never had to overcome really emotionally difficult problems in my life. (I'm impressed by the stories of some people who were much worse off than me, and it sounds strange but I sometimes even feel jealous because of how strong they've become by overcoming their huge problems). I am used to being successful and being accepted by the people that I deal with. But this is exactly where my weak point comes from: I am not used to failure and rejection, and consciously and subconsciously my whole life is being aimed at avoiding failure and rejection, in many different ways. I like working hard, but only on things that I know I'm good at or that I at least am convinced I can be successful at. I give up quickly on things that I don't see myself being successful at. I avoid people who I suspect might not accept and like me. Learning how to effectively deal with failure and rejection is one of the most important things that I'm going to have to learn. Because if I don't have to be afraid of failure and rejection, I'm going to be UNSTOPPABLE. That means I can't loose and I won't ever quit! These fears are also the main mechanism behind why I'm not taking any action with approaching women. What I've been doing until now with regard to women is trying to learn every bit of theory that I can find, watching hundreds of YouTube videos, reading books, etc. and always having an excuse for myself why I need to learn more or think about it some more before I undertake any kind of action. The underlying subconscious thought I have is that once I master all the theory, then I can take action and then I cannot fail. But this is ofcourse not true. When approaching women, failure and rejection is simply unavoidable. It doesn't matter how much theory I know, I am going to get rejected. In fact, I will probably get rejected more often than I will have success. I will have to face the fact that I will fail and get rejected and learn to deal with it effectively. It will be a major jump in my personal development when I can accept that and deal with it.

Here Comes The Sun by The Beatles (George Harrison). About that after bad times, there will be good times. Helps me to get optimistic when I'm facing difficulties.

Thanks @FindingPeace and @Leo Gura for making me think about the balance between inner-game and outer-game. I'm ofcourse looking at this through my own lens. I am a thinker, and I notice that it's easy for me to spend a lot of time learning theory and think about myself (inner-game) and I find it a lot harder to go out there and do things (outer-game). Because when I do that, I really have to face my fears, and that's scary.

Something that was thinking about today as I was in my car listening to a podcast: See life as an experiment. An experiment has an outcome. That outcome is neutral. It's not good or bad, it's not a success or a failure. It's just the result of the experiment, and it is whatever it is. See, for example, approaching women as an experiment. You get an outcome. Don't attach a judgement to that outcome. She might like you, or she might reject you. It's just what happens and it doesn't mean anything. Be detached from the outcome - don't be attached to one particular outcome (which leads to anxiousness for that outcome to become reality).

Maybe he has a scientific education, but he has some seriously crazy, unscientific theories. Not everybody who has a scientific eduction is automatically a real scientist. See for example Rupert Sheldrake on RationalWiki:

Rupert Sheldrake is not a scientist, he is a pseudo-scientist.

I agree that taking action is an extremely important part of personal development. Taking action is what creates real results. Just filling your head with theory by watching videos and reading books all day is not going to change anything. It's the action that follows that gets you the results. @Saitama for some things it might indeed work as you say, when you mentally learn things then your own perception changes and you'd more or less automatically take action. But for many things it is much more powerful when you consciously and deliberately do things. Deliberately experiment with applying the concepts in your own life and find out what works for you and what doesn't. Sometimes fears can stop you from taking action and no amount of learning theory will help. I know I have a subconscious fear of failure and rejection. These fears very easily cause me to make up excuses to not have to take action. Here are some of those excuses that I make up when I think about approaching an attractive woman: "She will think that I want something from her and that I'm weak and needy!" "She will laugh at me and think I'm weird!" "She probably already has a man!" I can watch a thousand videos by dating coaches, pickup artists and self-help gurus but if I really want to learn something I'm going to have to stop filling my head with theory and take action despite my fears, there's no way around it.

Great that you have set clear goals for yourself. Setting deadlines for yourself and then condemning yourself when you don't make your deadlines is a bad mechanism which will make you feel depressed and which will make you give up. It damages your self-esteem and self-confidence. I used to do this to myself. I'd promise myself that I would do something before 9:00 AM, for example, and then when it was 9:05 AM and I didn't do it I would feel bad about myself. After the same thing repeating a few times, I would quit because I had convinced myself that I couldn't do it anyway. So, stop doing that. You can still set deadlines for yourself, but do not condemn yourself when you don't make the deadline. Instead, you have to acknowledge and accept the fact that you didn't make it, without putting a judgement about yourself on it. Just accept the fact as it is, and move on. Also, learn to accept failure and see it as a learning experience instead of as something bad. (I'm working on this for myself too). When you fail, think about what you can learn from it and how you can do it better the next time. Working on things and failing is much better than giving up. When you work on something and fail, then at least you are moving forward and learning something, which is infinitely better than standing still and not learning anything at all.

Do you know the book / movie "The Secret"? It's about the Law of Attraction, but represents it in a wrong way - "you only have to wish for somehing and the Universe will give it to you automatically!". I agree that that is BS. Leo has a video about what's missing from that idea and what's misleading about The Secret: The Secret - The Truth They Didn't Tell You

@Anna Skywords maybe this one of Leo's video's is useful for you: Letting Go Of The Past - How To Get Over The Past In Minutes

I don't have a lot of advice, but...: You have to become very confident in yourself, and you should loose this fear: If you are being afraid of what women might think of you, for example if you're afraid that they will think you are a creepy guy, then they will sense that you are not confident and that's one thing they will not find attractive. I recently found Simple Pickup on YouTube, a bunch of guys who have lots of videos on how to confidently approach girls anywhere. I'm far from that level of confidence myself at the moment.

My dreams: Have enough money that I would never have to work for money or worry about money for the rest of my life. I guess I'd need at least a couple of million € for this. Have a nice, big, comfortable villa at home in the Netherlands. Have an incredible relationship with the woman of my dreams. Travel all over the world, together with my woman and great friends. See lots of places, people and cultures and experiencing adventures. Stay in the most beautiful places, for example three months here, three months there. Doing travel photography, but only as a hobby. I don't want to have the pressure of it being my job.