Not caring about what other people think of you should not be confined to what you do only, but should extend to include what you think as well. It affects your creativity more than you think.

You cannot think freely or to the fullest without being unafraid of being wrong. If you’re afraid of ever being wrong, you will never be able to think truly. You might think that this is some form of thinking, but it’s actually not. It’s just random acts of recalling stuff from memory. Just as you cannot fully articulate your thoughts if you’re reluctant to offend someone, you will not be able to form any thoughts if you’re afraid of being wrong, proven wrong, scientifically inaccurate, or factually mistaken or incorrect. You cannot think at all if you’re afraid of the consequences of thinking what you’re about to think. You won’t be able to think at all in the first place if you’re afraid of any negative consequences that might take place because of you engaging in that thought process. In order to have freedom of thought, and not just speech, you have to exist in a place or environment that supports that kind of behavior and won’t punish you for the content of what you think in the first place. Since most people don’t articulate what they think all the time, they might not suffer because of the lack of support for freedom of thought in their life or environment, but since you’re a creative individual, you will not be able to think something without almost always publishing it somewhere. That’s why, in your case, absence of absolute freedom of speech might render you totally helpless, because you’ll notice that in such an environment, you’re not just losing your ability to speak your mind freely, you’re losing your ability to think at all in the first place as well. In case there are no restrictions on your right to freedom of speech, you can still find yourself held back from any type of free thinking if you exercise upon yourself restrictions upon your freedom of thought that could potentially lead to similar results. If you still have some fear of making mistakes, you will find yourself having no option but to restrict yourself from thinking gradually over time until you cannot generate enough new thoughts to remain significantly creative as you used to be as well. Even though the issue here is still not the absence of your full rights to freedom of speech, the end result of both cases remains virtually similar, at least when it comes to your creative potential and how much you can really think for yourself. As long as you’re afraid of what’s going to happen when you express yourself, speak your mind, or fully and accurately articulate your thoughts, you will not be able to think them in the first place, whether that is because of lack of freedom of speech, or reluctance to say something that turns out to be wrong, factually incorrect, or not scientifically accurate at some point in the future, whether that lack of knowledge was exclusive to you or was also the case with everybody else, because for example this thing hasn’t been discovered or extensively researched yet to the fullest. If you’re afraid of looking bad, you will look even worse than you think, whether you like it or not. If you’re not afraid of being mistaken, there’s no stopping you from arriving at or coming to new conclusions, some of which will certainly be worthy of scientific recognition. This isn’t about making scientific discoveries even if you are totally unqualified to do so. This is about having another form of limiting belief that is adjacent to it, that still exists and holds you back dramatically from being at your full creative potential, even though what you’re reluctant to say has nothing to do with science in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. I don’t want you to start calling your feelings science or something that is more important than or more reliable than science. I just want you to understand that your reluctance to be wrong or say something that turns out to be totally wrong is due in no small part to being shamed heavily in the past for having an opinion when it comes to something that falls entirely and exclusively under the category of science or indisputable scientific facts or theories.

There are more limitations on your creativity than you think. And you are responsible for almost all of them.

Let’s assume you’re no longer afraid of judgment by other people. You are no longer held back by that limitation. Still, there’s something deeper that is limiting you and your creativity way more than fear of judgment is, not because fear of judgment is not going to hold you back significantly, but because you are unaware of what branches or stems from fear of judgment that might be even worse than the mere reluctance to speak your mind because of what others might think of you. One of these branches is the fact that you are still afraid of saying something that turns out to be factually incorrect at some point in the future. And not just out of ignorance, but out of the fact that no one knows the truth about this thing yet, or this thing hasn’t been scientifically discovered or researched extensively enough yet. If science will reveal you were wrong about something in the future, you might think, well, no one else knew that what I’ve said is wrong until then, so it wasn’t my fault. I did the best I could within the limits I had back then. You are likely to be less embarrassed in this case than you would if it was a well-established fact even years before you’ve said it. But that’s not the whole story. You are afraid of using your mind at all, because of the fear of making that kind of mistakes. How you jumped from this to that is astonishing to say the least. The problem isn’t with the fear of making scientific mistakes. It is with the fear of making any kind of mistakes, whether scientific or not. You can avoid making scientific mistakes easily by researching enough about the subject matter that is of concern to you at the moment before you proceed on to discuss anything related to it. The problem is with your reluctance to generate or have any opinion, conclusion, realization, belief, or thought about anything whatsoever, because you’re afraid of being wrong scientifically or otherwise. In the end, you will neither be able to think for yourself, nor be able to understand anything that could be described as scientific, because this is forbidden territory for you, and you’re not allowed to be wrong or make any mistakes whatsoever, and you’re not allowed to think for yourself or question anything because who do you think you are. And for you to stop questioning everything, you’ll have to quit thinking altogether. No one said that whatever you say will be published in scientific journals or taken as scientific gospel or be considered factual without any further investigation. Which means that the only reason you’re afraid of such kind of mistakes is what others will think of you. That’s why it’s only rational to consider this as something that could branch out of your fear of judgment, which you think you’ve totally beaten recently by being unapologetically yourself. Now you know why you haven’t made much progress in this area. You are still afraid of thinking lest you’d end up embarrassing yourself and saying something that doesn’t exist yet, because all you do is regurgitate what has already been recently discovered by science.