Azhar Bande-Ali - Doubt the Doubt

 

 

I have a weird relationship with self-doubt. I was sitting down there and I was fine. And then I got to the stairs and I'm freaking out. [audience cheers and applause] That wasn't for sympathy to lead into the next part. [audience laughter]

 

When I look in the mirror, I don't see a happy, healthy, somewhat intelligent man who's loved unconditionally by everybody. I see this Indian dude that tries too hard and smiles too much. I am my therapist's retirement plan. [audience laughter] But all of that stopped one day on a summer morning in the park in Atlanta when my friend took the best picture of me ever. [audience laughter]

 

Yeah, I was 23 years old. I had just lost some weight, and I looked good. I was resting on my elbows, leaning back, the sun in my face. I look like a baseball player that's sliding into base, just casually. [audience laughter] My face was tilted just the right way, so that the profile that looked at the camera I decided was going to be the only profile that any camera would ever see for the rest of my life. It was a good photo. It's the best photo I've ever taken. I saw it when my friend posted it on Facebook, the following Monday morning. I got to work, and I saw it, and I copied the link, and I sent it to all my friends, and I sent it to my mom and I said, “Mom, I'm cute.” [audience laughter] And then I went back to work. I sent some emails and I went to a meeting. I came back to my desk and I had 75 unread emails. That doesn't happen. 

 

So, it turns out, before I went to my meeting, I'd sent an email to a thread with 400 people in America, Europe and India. [audience laughter] The self-doubt came back. [audience laughter] “Uh-Oh, you're about to get fired.” 

 

I sat down and I started going through the email. I kept scrolling, and one after another, again and again and again. I found Photoshop images. Somebody had plopped me, or pulled me out of the park and plopped me on a door in the middle of an ocean at the end of Titanic. [audience laughter] I was in the arms of Rafiki at the top of a rock in The Lion King. Somebody cropped my face and put it on Miley Cyrus in the Wrecking Ball video. [audience laughter] And then my face was the wrecking ball. It's the most creative shit I've ever seen. [audience laughter]

 

It was hilarious. Eventually, people made T-shirts of my face. People started coming to my office and asking for the email guy. I realized I looked good in those pictures. [audience laughter, cheers and applause] 

 

I killed the productivity of an entire office for weeks. [audience laughter] I didn't get fired. I eventually got promoted, which was nice. [audience laughter]

 

Life went back to normal. Next year, I decided I was going to run the New York City marathon as a charity runner, and I needed to raise $5,000. I got to $2,500 and then I hit a wall. No money was coming in. I was training more and more every day, and I was more and more exhausted. I couldn't keep doing the fundraisers. It was stressful. 

 

I used to have these nightmares of 5,000 kids lining up to get food. I would get to the 2,500th kid and look down and I would have no more food, and I would have to turn away each one of those kids one after another. [audience laughter] I would wake up in the embrace of self-doubt, “Ooh, I'm not cut out for this. Ooh, I'm disappointing a lot of people. What if I don't get to run?” [sighs] And then it hit me. 

 

I woke up one day, and I drafted a Facebook post that sounded like a Ponzi scheme invite combined with a kidnapper’s note. [audience laughter] And it said, “I have 50 more of these pictures. I will post the next one when I get $200 donated to my fundraiser.” [audience laughter]I tacked on The Lion King picture to it and I uploaded it to Facebook. Within 30 minutes, I had $200. [audience laughter] Then I did the Titanic one for $500, and then I did Miley Cyrus for $500. Within 48 hours, I had $2,500 and I reached my goal. [audience cheers and applause]

 

I had an OnlyFans before there was an OnlyFans. [audience laughter] Who's cute now? [audience laughter]

 

We raised, we gave the money to charity, I crushed the marathon. You'll be happy to know my self-doubt is cured. Nah, I'm kidding. I doubt myself every day. [audience laughter] But what I do now is I doubt the doubt. If I can survive being memed, and if I can raise $5,000 on a whim and I can run a fucking marathon—[audience cheers and applause]—then what's there to doubt about the 20-page presentation that I have to do this week? That shit's easy, yo.