Don’t trust yourself

Is it odd that one of the first things adults tell you to do as you grow up is to trust yourself?
Trust yourself, they say. Have self-confidence, conviction. Now I believe as much as anyone thatyou should not flip-flop in your decisions or opinions, that makes a weak person. However, I fail to see the logic in trusting yourself.
For example, it’s often shown in sitcoms (and I would hope in most people’s lives, certainly in mine) that, as a teenager, when you screw up, your parents comfort you.
When you over-schedule and can’t keep commitments or do something stupid and get in an accident, it’s okay because that’s something everyone does and, as my mother said, “it’s all a part of life.”
So we’re expected to trust ourselves, but also to expect to screw things up and be okay with it. We should trust ourselves to fail. That almost seems to defeat the point if you ask me.
Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He was a genius, a great boon to humanity, and yet that is all humans do, is try and try and try, expecting not to fail when we do it frequently.
So, I believe Einstein was a brilliant scientist and a horrible philosopher.
All we do, because we’ve all been raised in the same way in this aspect, is try our hardest and expect not to fail the next go-round. Why? Because to us living with hard possibility—no, probability—of failure kills our drive and our passion. Which I believe is utterly stupid.
That is what many people, optimists, call pessimism. Realizing our faults and how they handicap us, rather than assuming we can overcome them, seems so negative as to be defeatist. I don’t see any other way of seeing things.
How can you look past human failure? Trusting yourself is what leads to failed relationships because you thought you could balance work and social life.
That is what leads to failing to pass tests or complete assignments, because you think you can get it done in the morning, or that you’re smart enough to figure something out in time.
If we lacked faith in ourselves, you may ask, how would we get anything done? Easy. We would turn to the only thing we had left. If not ourselves, we have to put our faith in others.
It sounds so stupid, because other people fail just as much as us, and even more if you’re smart and they’re stupid.
But who gets anywhere alone? Going back to Einstein, or maybe the great Benjamin Franklin, they were sure able to do things by themselves. But what country is founded with one person, how many trips to space have only been put together and enacted by a single man?
Humans need leaders, a person everyone else can trust and a person who can trust himself to take care of others. But what do you call a person whom everyone trusts and that person trusts only himself? A dictator. That or a religious leader.
Our great president isn’t trusted wholly, that’s why we have a Congress, as much as people hate it. Hitler, well, whatever he said went, no matter what his generls thought.
Every CEO has a Board of Directors who can overrule him. Jesus answered to no one, nor Gandhi.
Whatever they did was truly holy, without anyone’s doubt.


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