Obsessed With Success | Ishi Kulshrestha | TEDxYouth@ICS
my Enneagram is a type of thing for those of you who don't know what an Enneagram is it's an online personality test that categorizes you into nine times based on your deepest goals and fears so I'm Italian period you may be wondering issue what on Earth is the type period so type 3 is also known as Achievers started for success in everything we view ourselves based on how other people perceive us our basic goal is to be desired in our basic fear is feeling worthless now when I realized that I was a type period everything made sense I realized that every action I've done and my whole personality depended on my want for success I truly believe that I was pushed out of the womb Ready to Go Achieve things now wanting to achieve things and being ambitious is not a bad thing however it can easily spiral out of control which is exactly what happened to me now to understand a bit more let's go back to fourth grade so when I was in fourth grade I got my first phone with unlimited access to the internet now for a child this is bad for a lot of reasons I'm sure I don't have to explain but one of the reasons that affected me most was that on the internet you can see what every single person is doing and this meant that I could see everybody's successes which made me feel very insecure social media has this habit of praising achievements that kids accomplished at a very young age and that made me feel bad about the things that I was achieving which was nothing when I was in fourth grade all I did was Chase Boys on the playground I mean I felt very insecure about that what made it worse was that my dad would post these kids as well and I craved my dad's parents at that age I felt So Unworthy for not knowing how to multiply huge numbers in my head or being able to spell complex words I'd always been praised for being above average but seeing all these insane kids made me feel anything but the little tiger green and you wanted validation and acceptance from society like these kids were getting I it made me question my self-worth and wonder if I was even really good at anything because I wasn't getting the validation that these kids were getting so right there and then I made a promise to my little fourth grade self I would try to find any Talent OR Hobby and be the best in it that I possibly could so I could show off to everyone I knew and everyone on the internet that I was just as good as them and thus began to search for my egg Factor you could say I love Taylor Swift at the time and by love I mean obsessed so I started playing guitar and I started writing songs when that dream died I moved on to YouTube channels I started posting craft videos and origami videos and I actually made several YouTube channels but when they didn't take off as fast as I thought they would I gave up at around the end of sixth grade I got super into reading and writing I remember I was writing a story for my English class when I realized hey writing is really easy you know I could totally become the first child author to make it onto the New York Times bestselling was like there's no way it could be that hard right wrong um anyway so this Daydream fueled me enough to start writing my book immediately however I wasn't really focused on my book I was just focused on the aftermath I rushed through the plot the dialogue basically everything just to get this book finished when I finished the book I self-published it on Kindle and unfortunately you are not sitting in front of someone who has been on the New York Times bestsellers list yeah my dad sent this book to everybody in my family and I did receive the compliments and prayers that I wanted however I still wasn't satisfied I mean only my family had read this book and additionally I hated what I wrote I wasn't proud of it because I didn't spend any time on it at all I started doubting my abilities as a writer and wondering if I was even really good at anything the truth is when I was doing all of these Hobbies I wasn't really doing them because I enjoyed them I was just doing that because I wanted to achieve success so bad for example I liked playing guitar but I was only pursuing it because I dreamed of my name in billboard designs and I wanted fans to be screening their names at my name at me it was the same with the YouTube channels I didn't even a lot of crafts I'm really bad at Art but I I was just doing what everyone else was because I wanted to be validated through life I wanted to success so badly and so quickly that I didn't realize that it's a process I didn't even want to go through the process I just wanted immediate results I didn't understand that not going through the process of trial and error would never grant me true success because of this I started getting really upset at myself when I couldn't succeed at things immediately because if other people were so good at them why couldn't I just be good as well soon the stress um spiraled into anxiety I started believing I started believing that everyone hated me and that that everyone thought I was too competent I would get frustrated at myself for not knowing how to do simple things because if I couldn't do big things like celebrities could and why couldn't I just do small things that not only normal person could do at one point my anxiety got so bad that I couldn't even leave the house because I was so scared of being objection after opening up to people I did end up fixing my anxiety well not fixing but it got better however I had only fixed a side effect and not the root problem I was still very prone to anxious very danced and I was still super insecure about not achieving anything so you can imagine when I took my Enneagram test at the beginning of the year and realized that I was a type period I was shocked everything I read in this description was 100 accurate it made me realize how unhealthy my mindset was and how I was spending so much time on my future and focusing on achieving things and not on things that actually matter I wanted to change my obsession with success and my unhealthy mindset immediately since then I think I've come a long way the type of irony is still alive but I've learned to take I've learned to tell myself that it's okay to be bad at things it's okay to start from zero and learn and it's okay to not even achieve anything significant right now I mean achievements are still credible when you're old I mean look at my parents they're very successful people and they're what they're like 75 years old no I'm kidding being aware and accepting a problem is the first step to solving it stop an online free personality test was the way that I solved my problem or became aware of it but hey if the shoe fits I still get very jealous of child celebrities now and I still do get stressed about cheating things but now that I'm aware that I have this problem and now that I've accepted myself for it I've learned to manage my stress a hundred times better thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]