Ryan Ross Quotes

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.

I second-guess and overthink and rethink every single thing that I do.

My biggest enemy for the longest time was my head. When I first became successful, it made me anxious because I was overthinking everything, and you hear so many 'fail' stories.

I'm always thinking 'Don't mess this up.'

I thought that when you have more success that you'd feel more buoyed or feel more confident. But in fact my brain has the gift of switching it around and saying, 'Now people are expecting something. Now you're really going to let people down.'

Even when I had a run of successful prime-time shows, I couldn't sit down and enjoy my success. I would beat myself up and scrutinise everything. I'm a natural-born worrier.

I second-guess myself all the time. I make a decision and then wonder if I made the wrong choice.

If you're going to worry about what people say, you're never going to make any progress.

I have a huge editor in my head who's always making me miserable. But sometimes, I try to let my unconscious act out.

The challenge is how strange and different my voice sounds, so I have tried to sound like other people and tried to be something I wasn't. I have tried to be a soul singer because someone else thought that a good idea. Not because I did.

I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.

If I make a wrong decision, I worry what might have been. I stress out over very insignificant things.

I think if you try to tailor your act to anybody, you end up with an act that doesn't work anyway.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

As women, we can over-think things so much that we silence our intuition and only focus on the reasons something won't work.

We started to overthink things in the Dixie Chicks and do things we thought people wanted us to do.

People make the mistake of thinking they've got to perform just because someone has said something about their potential.

When you're doing so much, there's so much on your mind. The bigger the artist you become, you have to think a lot more. I'm trying not to overthink everything!

As a writer, I think the greatest danger would be self-censorship.

At the combine and at my workouts, I tried to be the perfect player. I tried to promote my strengths and conceal my weaknesses, and on paper, I kind of succeeded: I was the first pick in the draft. And with that, I inherited this big shiny trophy that I carried around, and it had one word engraved on it - anxiety.

This constant feeling of, 'I have to have everything figured out' is not going to get anyone anywhere.

If you start imagining an audience for yourself, you don't do justice to the job. You fall into that trap of a self-image.

I am always in self-doubt... every moment of my filmmaking. I am supremely confident when the story is being written and everything is in our head. But the moment we get into the filmmaking, I start doubting myself - from the camera angle to the re-recording to getting the actors to do their shots.

I may as well do everything as if it’s brand new, and if I start to feel that any of it’s a compromise, then I’ll...I’ll be in Wisconsin.

We wanted to wait until the music felt right. We didn't want to do it, just to do it. We didn't want to do it for money, I guess, is the thing that would have just bummed me out so much.