The Cost of Playing It Safe: A Developer/Trader’s Struggle With Fear, Doubt, and Inaction
A brutally honest reflection on why I’ve been stuck, how fear disguises itself as caution, and what I’m doing to break the loop — in code, in trading, and in life.
I’m going to go right off the bat and mention that this article might seem a bit ranty and maybe a tad bit emotional, but it’s something I have been grappling with and I wanted to put it out there so that anyone also experiencing the same can learn from it. I share this with the hope that it would help you get out of whatever it is that is limiting you from growth and taking steps towards your goals.
I would also like to note that I will not be using AI to clean this up, so it might not seem as polished but I am ok with that, and hope you are too. I mean of course, I will organize it well for you, and ensure it’s readable, but I just don’t want words like eschew in something so personal 😅. I wanted an authentic experience for anyone reading this and to genuinely connect with you all.
With that out of the way, let’s dig in.
Why I Chose This Name, and Why I Haven’t Lived Up to It
You all probably know me as The Naive Dev (such a fitting name looking back - pats my back: “thanks past me”). I chose that name since I wanted to create a platform where I can encourage myself to chase quantity instead of quality. I wanted a place where I can be my authentic self and hope to encourage others to also do the same. I wanted us to be naive, and accept it before actually developing past that.
However, my journey hasn’t been like that at any level. In fact, it has been way more difficult, especially given my personality and a certain need to attract and become “perfect”.
I guess choosing that name was my way of trying to push myself towards the edge and just jump as opposed to pacing around there trying to figure out all the variables of the sea below before jumping. In real life, I am a human (😉) — John Gicharu, based in Nairobi, Kenya, a proud father of two boys and a self-taught software developer with now close to 8 years of experience in the industry.
I don’t say this to ruffle any feathers, rather I am doing this to first give up something I have been trying sooo hard to avoid. Trying to build a brand while “protecting” myself or the potential influences of said brand. This so far has felt like sitting beside the pool and only getting my feet wet. Never really submerged myself inside and let the waves push me around. In essence, while trying to claim I was focused on quantity and not quality, I was subconsciously and carefully choosing the quantity I was exposing myself to. At the time I didn’t know why I was doing this, but I think this week something just snapped and it let me “see” myself as I was and come to this realization.
For context before I jump into my findings and how it relates to fear, I’d like to mention that I also trade on the side and run a small youtube channel called SmallStepFX and tend to build software related to trading under the name TraderKit. The things I have learnt are coming from these avenues so I wanted to get that out there for context. You can check out these later if you wish to get a feel for what I mean. For now, let me show you how fear or rather my fear, led me down this dark road of disappointments and not pushing enough.
The Overthinker’s Curse in Code and Charts
I am the kind of developer who tends to obsess over small aspects and nuances of a project. I love getting to understand a problem first before actually jumping in and writing any code. Of course, at times I might write a PoC (proof of concept) to ensure that I and others are on the same page. However, in most cases, I tend to clarify a lot, might at times come off as nit-picky over some questions, but I just love clarity.
Such, formed the core part of my development experiences and therefore, when I heard about trading, I came with the same approach into the markets. I wanted to nit-pick entries, and on failure — which I have done a lot of, I would blame my tools and start tinkering with something on the side. See the good thing about being “naive” when building something and realizing it; you tend to want to question everything and gain a better understanding of what is happening. As such, you dig deep, and build based on your level of understanding of the underlying problem. In this case, I was loosing accounts left, right, center, and whatever products I built online (under Naive Dev or TraderKit) couldn’t get any traction.
I researched some more, and ended up realizing that maybe it’s not proving whether people want the product or not before actually building. As a result, I started building landing pages with early access forms to determine whether people wanted something. The first of it’s kind here was traderkit.io. While the product had a great premise (a tool to help you host your trading terminals on the cloud and perform actions remotely without having to manage terminals on your device and perform cool actions such as copy trading, automated actions like break even, trailing stops, alerts, and more) and I was also building it for myself, I launched to no reactions. I had a single person sign up to the early access list at the time and therefore decided to quietly continue building it — but just for myself. The same has happened to multiple products now collecting dust in my Github (or for the few, actually enjoying using them daily).
When it came to trading, I would develop “masterful” strategies, that when I give to any other trader, they would be able to make money with it, but I myself couldn’t. At this point I was wondering, was the problem really me in all these aspects? I had to find out, I had to figure out whether I was doing something to jeopardize my life and situation in this manner.
It is surprising that the lessons I have since learnt about life, myself, and how to improve in life, were all coming from trading. When working in development, one rarely thinks about their psychology. Self-doubt, fear, among other negative emotions are normalized by the proverbial “imposter syndrome” and we as developers just go a long with it. This also happens in other industries where we all come to the conclusion that we are just feeling like imposters and we will some day get better at not feeling that way. While I can agree that imposter syndrome is something most suffer from, I think the driver can be different. For me, it was something more elusive and hard to pin down. It was fear…
How Fear Pretends to Protect While Quietly Sabotaging
Fear is a very weird emotion if you ask me. It is weird from this perspective. You can feel it, know you are feeling it, convince yourself that since you are aware of it, you won’t act on it or be driven by it, but constantly fall for it’s tricks every time regardless. It’s difficult to perceive this in development work or life, but when trading, it pops right onto your face after you have closed your trades (at least if you are aware of it).
You start a session feeling confident, and start executing. However, midway, you subconscious mind starts whispering sweet nothings like; imagine if you could just close that trade with $100 profit, this could be a good day. Or, you can’t just execute there, what if you loose the $20 you’ve just made? Remember, the last time you saw that candle and it didn’t work? Among other things. Doubt slowly creeps in and you either end up closing huge winners, cutting trades the moment they show the mere hints of not going in your direction, hesitating to execute, and at times not executing at all.
For the developers here, does this sound familiar in any way? You have an idea, you want to build it as you are genuinely interested in it. However, a tiny voice in your head tells you; what if people won’t be interested? Well that minor feature seems kind of dum — who would want to use it? Why would anyone pay $30 a month for this? Please try charging $3, at least then you will have potential to draw people in. Who would trust a service from a developer from your country/continent? I mean, companies don’t even trust you without you having a Visa or other licenses to work there? Among other things.
We all feel fear, and I know it works in all of the industries all of you are in. It prevents you from taking a step forward, all the while sounding very reasonable. Results in you not applying to roles that deep inside you know you can fit in but the doubts that turn it into a 90% from a 100% sure likelihood lead to you not executing. We often question ourselves and once our minds are trained to see these negative aspects of things we are trying to do… we end up in a layer just below this. One I have lived in for sometime now…
When Your Mind Wants to Be Right More Than It Wants to Grow
I am calling this evidence based fear since I realized our minds actively try to find and create (yes create), situations that prove the beliefs we hold dear in our heads. It starts easy, your mind evaluates your beliefs, and searches your environment to figure out what is aligned with this belief and quickly highlights it. Think of your mind as an avid story editor with a huge highlighter and some whiteout. It quickly blotches out anything that might remotely contradict your beliefs and quickly highlights anything (and yes, I mean anything) that can confirm or be aligned with your belief — even when it is just the edges.
I’ll give multiple examples from myself so that you can see what I mean. When fear crept into my mind and I started doubting whether anyone would love what I build or my ideas, I subconsciously internalized this as a belief. As such, even when I built something, I never really advertised or discussed it online. I just made a post and walked away. However, you might argue, well at least I did something right?
Well, no. I didn’t do enough. My mind believed that it could fail, and therefore, never gave enough justification to invest more time, money or resources into it. At times, the resources might not be there to invest, but the mind still latches to this and uses it as proof that it might not work out, essentially proving yourself right. Our minds are very egotistical and good at doing what they do. They can rationalize even the weirdest of situations — even those that contradict our direct real-life observations.
Remember when I mentioned Traderkit and initially failing? Yes, well I realized that people didn’t want to add their emails. Some did after sometime (but this is despite me not advertising). However, despite these early access list sign ups, I still told myself well none of these people are contacting me, actively checking in, so they might not want it enough. I know this is weird, but this is the rationalization I used to push myself not to deploy the thing, but continue using it locally. Funnily enough, I have built a ton of projects online for clients and other people which are doing great but am afraid my personal projects will fail, sound familiar? (…pst, you can check out my portfolio here if you are looking for a dev gicharu.com .)
Same thing happened to my Youtube channel (though there I was really proven wrong). In a bid to not sound like an influencer (nothing wrong with them, I just don’t like to align myself with that side of the internet), I wanted my videos to be grounded, focused, and geared towards specific topics. If you can read between the lines, you can already tell they were made to be boring 😅. Check out SmallStepFX and tell me what you think. While there is some useful information in there that is helpful, I decided not to give it my all since I thought, no one would like me, my voice or weird ideas about trading. Heck, I am not even profitable. Why would anyone listen to you?
As a result, I didn’t apply myself enough. I couldn’t post often, and when I did, I tried to rush things. If you checked the channel, you would notice it has about 50 subscribers. Now this is when I started to think — see, several months and only 50 subscribers. There’s something definitely wrong with my content or me specifically. I told myself that it is because I don’t create videos geared for virality. I don’t create cool thumbnails and such. While I can agree with this, I also don’t want to seem scammy and need to remain grounded (maybe we can explore this in a future post).
From Ignoring Progress to Owning It
As you can already see, I chose to avoid the evidence of success from my examples above and instead focused on the “failures”. Instead of seeing 50 subscribers as a win, I saw the time it took as a lose. Instead of seeing a specific trade losing as a new lesson learnt or concluding that the market was different that time — which it is allowed and can be at times — I chose to focus on the fact that I myself lost and told myself I am a loser.
Why am I sharing this?
Because I know you do it too. We all do. And without being aware of it, we tend to push great ideas and evidence away and pull in tiny aspects of failure to self-insulate the beliefs we have inside.
So if all of this is happening subconsciously, what can we do to fix it?
I cannot say that this will work for you, but let me share what has so far been working for me and maybe it might help you too.The fix was becoming my own case study by watching myself fail
Conscious Self-Tracking (Yes, I Watched Myself on Camera)
I didn’t want to name this section “The Fix” since it might not work for you. However, I will sat that the fix I am recommending is worth a try.
After I noticed I was doing this subconciously, I decided to bring the whole activity into concious thought. I wanted to see myself and realize when I am doing this so that I can figure out what triggers these lines of thoughts and actions, thereby allowing me to deal with it. The fix I applied was recording myself daily doing the things I do — coding, trading, building stuff, interacting with family, etc.
You might just call it automated journaling, but I prefer to just say recording 😂.
I set up cameras in my living room and around public points in my house, setup OBS on my desktop, and for most decisions (especially when I am by myself), I would try to explain why I am making decision x instead of y. If it’s not a choice, just explain and talk through why you are doing X. Yes, as simple as that.
My findings were weird, since I ended up realizing there are a lot of subconscious aspects that drive my decisions to such an extent and I would just go along with the weird explanations given for why I should do things. The level of awareness I got from this was like in therapy, only — live. At least in as far as I watched the videos afterwards and carefully reviewed each action.
Was it a great experience? Definitely not. If you tend to be afraid to see yourself, and I mean really seeing yourself fail, act in irrational ways and such, this experiment will not be fun for you. However, I can say that I came out of this way better than before. Are my issues fixed? No, definitely not. In fact, now that I am aware of them, this awareness is also kind of bugging me since it makes me question whether I am doing something out of the fear and other aspects that I am now aware of, or I am genuinely interested in the thing 😅. So yeah, there is some more work to do. Being able to collect this much information about myself and my actions has been helpful.
There was a lot of useful tit-bits in the videos I recorded. This is especially true for trading as I was able to figure out what my mind naturally searches for in the markets (regardless of my strategy). For the traders, ask yourself questions like, do I see wicks as liquidity sweeps or rejections? And similar questions and you’ll get to your natural state of what type of trader you are. For anyone who does not trade, or is a developer, it’s a matter of figuring out what you are doing, why you are doing, and actually explaining it out loud. Of course, you might be in contexts where you can’t speak out loud, but in these situations, you just need to write down what you are trying to do, and why you are choosing a specific approach. Believe me, the insights that spill from your mind are gold!!
Review. Reflect. Execute.
The reviewing part was a bit difficult at the start. Going through hours of video where nothing happens and then you notice a trade or a pattern and start acting can be tough and taxing (especially with time). However, I can only encourage you to chase this as it is only by improving yourself through this small steps that you can get better. In these sessions, you basically check whether your assumptions at the time were correct either given more evidence after completing the action and getting results, or by reviewing whether it was your heightened emotions at the time that caused you to make such conclusions. It’s basically, review, reflect and then execute.
For anyone needing a more direct approach, I recently realized action also helps dealing with such. So if you prefer, you can take the things you’d like to do but tend to hesitate or avoid doing entirely and just do them a lot of times. I know this is weird advice but I covered it better in a series on my Youtube Channel (SmallStepFX) titled the Hidden Dynamics of Mastery. I came to realize that by executing, executing, and more executing, you essentially break down the barriers your mind creates by sheer brute force and force it to review things as the evidence proving it wrong mounts up.
While the brute forcing approach definitely works, I have found a combination of both works even better though. As such, I’d recommend you try both.
Progress Means Getting Uncomfortable — Constantly
Fear is a innate emotion that is meant to protect us. However, when it starts keeping us from achieving our dreams, then there’s a problem somewhere. I have shared my experiences with fear, the things I am grappling with and potential approaches I am using to deal with this to assure you that you are not alone. However, accepting you are not alone is not enough. You also need to work towards improving yourself, until you get to where you’d like to be. I hope that by me being vulnerable with you (had to cut out parts to keep this short, not as ranty and keep it focused), you will be vulnerable and honest with yourself so that you can improve. Please comment down below what you are working on, building, trying, and working one executing and I hope that putting yourself out there via the comments below might help you to start making steps towards improving your life.
Until next time, wishing you the best of luck.
Gicharu — The Naive Dev.
Contact — me@naive.dev
Buy me a ☕️ — https://ko-fi.com/gicharu
My Comment + Shameless Plug
I am working on getting myself and the stuff I have built out there. So here goes nothing;
- Traderkit Cloud — I have been building this for sometime. It is a platform that allows you to host your MT4/5 Terminals on the cloud and trade from anywhere. You can copy trades from/to other accounts, trade from telegram, set automated actions, among other cool features. (Didn’t really get any traction but I am still building it since I personally use it). You can find it here https://traderkit.io
- Traderkit Journal — This is an automated journaling tool meant for traders. Its main goal is to help traders improve the psychological aspects of their trading by recording themselves while trading, talking out loud or adding journal entries via text. We then use a model to review your trades and get you actionable insights on what you are either doing wrong/right and how you can improve or augment these actions for success. It’s not ready yet, but early access is open. — https://traderkit.io
- Inklet — This is a pet project I build with my wife (she loves beautiful quotes). The platform is focused on bringing back focus of quotes on your words by making them look beautiful or rather presenting them beautifully. You can add your quotes or generate them using AI, but AI is secondary here. The goal is in presenting your words in a way that captivates others online. Once done, you export the post and can post it anywhere. — https://inklet.io
- Naive Dev — This is my personal blog + Youtube channel where I would ideally be posting development updates on my projects, what I am learning, and such. However, I have sadly not been as active as I would have wanted. I am getting back here though. I need to reclaim my honor. — https://naive.dev
- SmallStepFX — This is my trading blog and Youtube channel. I primarily post on youtube mostly but intend to post more blog posts too. I don’t charge for any of my content and don’t have any courses. If you’d like to learn to trade, I’d recommend google and a bunch of trading books like Trading in the Zone or Best loser wins to get you going. — https://youtube.com/@smallstepfx
- More projects to come in the future as I tinker and experience life.
My driving force to creating each of this is first and foremost to build something I would be using while at the same time helping anyone who might also be interested in the same stuff. I hope you check these out.
