Confronting the fact that you might be bad at what you do

It's so easy to delude yourself.
To run with what your mind tells you. To get caught up in a daydream, to dream up goals for yourself you don't want to put the necessary work behind. To set up unattainable standards and expectations and to drown in them.
There is a way around this. Have you tried doubting yourself recently?

Self-Delusion has many aspects to it. We could talk about the stories we tell ourselves, our many biases that warp our perception of reality. This post is only about how humans tend to overestimate how good they are at something and tend to underestimate how long a task will take to finish. For example, when people are asked to rate their driving abilities, most people rate themselves as above average. This is mathematically impossible.

But if we know that we overestimate your abilities, why don't we turn this around? Let us cultivate the belief, that we are worse than average. It might not be true, but so are most of our beliefs. And this one is at least useful.

If you are convinced that you are worse than average at something, you think twice about starting it. You become more deliberate about how you want to spend your time because becoming good at something will take a lot of it. It forces you to focus, to drop most of your expectations and goals. But to the few things that stay, you commit yourself to. And you will improve.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

If you want to be successful, be highly critical of your abilities. Sooner or later, you have to confront the possibility, that you are not as good as you think you are. This will always be painful. It's much more comfortable to give into self-delusion. But the longer you delude yourself, the more it will hurt once you wake up from them.
And when you have confronted them, you will be glad you did it.