Do the Hard Work, and Damn the Embarrassment
Playing it safe isn’t as easy as is seems, and in the end, it’s really not safe anyway.
Sometimes it’s just hard. Not because we are doing it wrong or because we haven’t found the right method or self-help book. Just because somethings are hard. When faced with the choice between doing the work or not, sometimes the not looks way more appealing.
There are those relationships that we let die because we don’t have the hard conversations. So instead we avoid the conversations in order to preserve the relationship and find that instead, the relationship dies a slow and painful death. That issue, be it big or small, becomes to barrier to all growth. So we settle for surface level relationships or we choose to compartmentalize over intimacy out of self-protection.
Fear of failure will keep us trapped and ineffective.
We can only go so far before we have to take a big chance. That chance may be finishing the book, publishing your work, or at least making an active attempt to do so. Putting your work out there and risking that you don’t get noticed, or do but for all the wrong reasons.
Trying something new, especially when we think we will be good at it, has a certain exciting rush to it. We feel enthusiastic about a new project and get high on the potential. But at some point, we will plateau and that’s when the real work begins. When we realize that maybe we’re not as natural at this as we thought and other less exhausting pursuits call to us, like the sirens of relaxation and consumption.
There is nothing wrong with those things, but if we aren’t careful they can become our safe retreat, the place we go whenever it gets hard to lick our wounds and tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter anyway. But it does, it does matter. Failure is better than never trying.
My biggest fears are not of failure, though I’ll be the first to admit that I hate getting it wrong. Public mistakes are one of those things I dread. But I think I’ve finally come to a place where I’ve concluded that I’d rather make a public fool of myself than remain in the shadows.
Untapped potential is still scarier than failure.
The fear that I’ll listen to my own excuses and always chicken out in the end, that I’ll be haunted at the end of my days with who I might have been and what I might have accomplished if only I was willing to risk falling flat on my face.
No one enjoys looking foolish, but we can’t grow if we aren’t challenged, and no one, I repeat, no one will stand up to every challenge.
If you are passing every hurdle then you need to raise the bar.
Do the big scary thing that you are afraid of. One of three things will happen. You’ll either succeed, in which case congratulations, keep going. You’ll fail but learn and do better next time. Or you’ll fail and that failure will become another reason not to try. You may not be able to control whether the first one happens, but you definitely get to choose between those last two.
