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Comment by djtango | Hacker News Reader

> The best way to network well is to stop giving a shit about doing it well.

As someone who has played piano for over 30 years and by any sane person's assessment I play at least "adequately", I can attest that worrying about how you play is the least constructive thing you can do and I have many times over my life crashed and burned when trying to play on the spot and in those moments people would question whether I knew how to play at all.

When I finally realised to stop caring (at least in the moment) everything got a lot better. Even if you screw up, owning it and laughing about it is better than curling up in fear and anxiety and making the moment worse and more awkward for everyone.

"stop caring" sounds like such unhelpful advice but when one finally realises you have agency over that, its like having a superpower

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The hard part is not realizing that one should stop caring. It's learning how to stop caring. For most of us, caring is an automatic, reflexive response, and changing it is not a trivial matter.

The idea that finally clicked with me came from a narrated meditation session in the app “Headspace”. I think it’s probably a common metaphor, but it’s the only place I had encountered it:

Imagine your mind is a highway, and your thoughts are cars that are driving along this highway in your mind. You, or rather your conscience, is sitting along this highway, and every time a thought comes along, you might try to stop it.

Of course, this is foolish, you can’t stop those thoughts any more than you could stop a literal car on a highway. The trick comes once you realize that attempting to stop unwanted thoughts is a doomed and pointless exercise. But just because those thoughts have entered your mind, doesn’t mean you have to engage with them. You could instead simply let them pass you by.

I don’t know why, but this worked for me. In the context of meditation, it freed me of the assumption that my mind should be blanked and free of thoughts, which always seemed impossible anyway. But it armed me with a useful mnemonic for recognizing when I am standing in the middle of the proverbial road, and the confidence to admit that I cannot do anything meaningful from such a precarious and hopeless position, so should move to the side, and focus on what’s possible.

“Stop caring” sounds unhelpful because it might be difficult, but it’s basically the one thing you have that’s actually in your control that you can do about it.

I think some people would rather keep searching for easier solutions than taking the difficulty one they can actually accomplish.

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