You Learn How to Live By Living
Which means you don't have to know how to do it before you do it
Editor's note: If you'd prefer to listen rather than read, please enjoy the recording below.
A Creative Giant who’s still in college shared that her biggest obstacle to achieving her top goal was:
"[P]rocrastination, but mainly fear of failure I guess. Fear that at the end of the road, I'll find out I was never good enough to even start in the first place."
I started to respond to her, but then decided to share it here, too.
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First, what would you do differently if you assumed you were already good enough? What might open up for you if you remained curious about what more you could do that you didn’t know you could do?
Second, there is no “end of the road” — there’s just the next project you’ll have to start, regardless of how successful the last project was. That’s one of the gifts of living in Project World, with a corollary being that you don’t have to worry about picking the wrong project and having that choice deterministically drive the rest of your life.
At a deep level, many of us have our own stories about our being damaged goods, but we’re also so much more than damaged goods.
You learn how to live by living. But much as Durant’s summary of Aristotle states,
we are what we repeatedly do.”
If our daily choices place a bias on action, courage, and vulnerability, then we learn how to live a courageous, action-oriented, and wholehearted life. If our daily choices are governed by fear, procrastination, and limited beliefs, then we learn how to live a fearful, hesitant, and smaller life than we otherwise might.
The art of living well isn’t something we’re born with; it’s learned and practiced. This means that at any point in time, we can learn and practice it.
Lastly, perhaps worse than finding out that your work wasn’t judged to be good enough (by whose standards?) would be never doing the work. The pain of failure is felt once; the pain of regret is felt for a lifetime.
I know I may sound preachy here — forgive me for that — but I’m wanting to remind you to feed the wolf you want to win.