I need to stop caring (about what I'm doing)

[This is an old post that I once meant to publish]

I always think that the more I care about something the better I will be able to put my energies into getting it done well, but, empirically, this is simply false. The more I start to care about the things I'm doing, the more stressed I become about them and the more reluctant I become to deal with them. "Don't ruin it" becomes my mantra, and I become afraid to touch it at all.

Emotions really get in the way of doing stuff, for me at least. Emotional attachments, more so than pure emotions. Being sad doesn't really harm my ability to function, nor does being happy, but being afraid paralyzes me, and the more I care about what I'm doing the more afraid I become that I'm not doing it well. I naturally want to care about quality, but I can't care about quality. Caring about quality ruins my ability to create it.

"Do" needs to be my mantra, just "do." The more I do, the easier it becomes to do more, and the happier and more satisfied I become. This isn't about spending all of my time working or anything like that. It applies to having relationships with other people just as much as it applies to anything else. I need to just send the damn email, make the damn phone call, etc. I get worried every time I pick up the phone; I frequently freak out right before I send an email. What if I interrupt someone in the middle of something important? What if my friends compare notes about how often I call them and someone gets offended that I show obvious preference towards somebody else? Most of this seems overtly stupid. I would never think about comparing notes related to how often people call or anything like that, why would it make sense for me to think that anyone else does it? But I don't really gossip at all anyways. There are a lot of things I would never think about saying if it were about someone else that I eventually discover other people have said about me. When I say I don't gossip, I don't mean that I'm morally opposed to gossiping or anything like that. I just mean it never comes up. If I don't have anything I'd rather talk to somebody about than gossip, we probably aren't friends... I'd rather discuss statistics or biology or politics or economics or any one of dozens of subjects that are a lot more interesting than other people's personal lives. Most people have pretty boring lives. I have a pretty boring life right now, though it has had a few interesting episodes in the past, but none since I graduated college.

Or meeting people and then connecting with them on LinkedIn. You'd think that would be the simplest thing ever to just do, but I always worry that people will think I'm exploiting them if I try to connect with them on LinkedIn. It's idiotic. Presumably connecting on LinkedIn is slightly in our mutual best interests, and if we know each other even a little, we should be happy to do it. That sort of was how I felt about it anytime someone tried to connect with me back when I had LinkedIn, but then I deleted it because it became an extra source of stress associated with meeting people.

I need to figure out how to disassociate doing something from thinking about doing it. Just go through the motions, hit enter, and be done... I'll work on figuring out a training program for myself to make me better at doing this later.