Better to have loved and lost vs the fear of losing.
Lord Alfred Tennyson quipped the lines fantastic “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. I guess he was waxing lyrical over some lost girlfriend perhaps, but the saying is equally true of pursuing your dreams in business at the risk of epic failures.
I’m getting older, and I was starting to think that I’m stuck in a rut because there’s STILL another 20 years of work to go…I thought to myself “can you honestly do THIS for ANOTHER 20 years?”
As I hustle off to work, I constantly find myself reciting the lines of a Talking Heads classic….
And you may find yourself
Living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world
And you may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
I found myself in that same shotgun shack, going through the motions as it were, with a kind of unnerving restlessness haunting my already warped head-space.
Rather than snap like William Foster in ‘Falling Down” and after serious discussions with my partner I chose to forge my own path.
The risk, when you are not a millionaire and married with children is more than losing money and personal time. The risk is losing time with your kids as they grow up. Will they only see me briefly at bed time when my head is in a computer, moodily drinking coffee at 8pm ready for an all nighter, or reading up on ‘How to be a successful Start Up’?
But when I know there’s 20 years of hard labour ahead of me, and that I have the support of my family, I believe it’s an easier task to pursue a passion, to solve a problem, to make a few people happy, to help create a beautiful, simple world and to adventure into the unknown.
As George Bernard Shaw famously quoted “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” However, with success must come sacrifice. What is the sacrifice we are willing to make in our short life on this SMART PLANET?
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