What kept me from starting this newsletter? FEAR of failure!
Most of my life I have had a fear of failure. God only knows the number of opportunities I have missed out on! Starting out early I was always the fat unpopular kid who lacked self-confidence. I was not raised to be a killer or to look at achieving great things. Like most people I was told to work at a job, promote from within and get married.
In the end I didn't learn the key elements of success. Those being hard work, rigorous work, over time, compounding gains and continuously conquering the next hard thing. I recently started working a few mentors on personal development and a key factor to this change in my mindset has been that nobody cares about my feelings. Nobody cares about the outcomes I will have and my future more than ME. Should they? Absolutely not, they shouldn't! Why in this world would anyone care about the outcomes of my less-than-maximum effort. In the end, to tell myself I deserve a reward for anything other than my best effort is to lie to myself. I know why I didn’t get the promotion… I know why I didn’t get the best girl… I know why I am not better off than I am. The answer is ME.
To be successful in life, one has to have a strongly internal locus of control. If you float through life thinking that things just “happen” to you and you bear no responsibility to them, I do not understand you, nor do I want to. The mindset that everything is always someone else’s fault is repulsive to me and off-putting. This is just recent though, I used to be one of “them”. Life tends to reward those that take action, not that wait for life to happen to them. Do you think that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos waited until someone else figured out how to do things and that is how those Billions of dollars made their way into their net worth? Of course not! They took action, they risked everything, they worked endlessly in pursuit of an objective. They put in the work to solve a problem, bring an idea to market, and then further risked it all to keep growing their idea until one day, it developed into the creation they had envisioned.
These men, taking action, changed the world we live in. Do you know what didn’t change the world? All of the men and women who stayed on the sidelines, because they feared failing. They never started the business, they never shared their idea, they never took even the first step toward creating something. Instead, what did they do? They convinced themselves that they weren’t ready, nobody would like the idea, nobody would listen to them, or there wasn’t a need in the marketplace for the thing they had in their mind. If they had taken their steps, maybe they would have created the next apple computer, the next Amazon, the next SpaceX. We might be transacting future financial transactions using a protocol they developed, or voting with a system they discovered that was immutable and resistant to tampering. Do you know why we will never know…. They never started!!!!!!!
So where are these folks now? They are probably just like me. They are probably in an average job, working for an average company, living an average existence. They are average, which in the US is better than being average in Somalia, or Nicaragua, but average is still meager compared to GREAT. Stop desiring to be average, average is terrible compared to what we could be. Take action today, do the thing you’ve been putting off, you know, that thing you’ve wanted to do but haven’t because you told yourself you might fail….. DO IT TODAY! I did… you’re reading the results of it right now. I thought it would be harder, but as I write this, writing isn’t as bad as I feared it would be. These words flowed out of my head and onto the paper as if water from a vessel. Go, now, and DO THE THING!