Doing and not doing.
That’s where the difference is between success and failure.
It’s not quality and quantity.
It’s not perfection and sloppiness.
It’s not expertise and incompetence.
It’s not 1,000 and 1 (of whatever you want to look at).
It’s doing and not doing. That’s what sets us apart.
Everything ends.
But nothing really does, does it?
Things might end on a material level. A relationship, a job, a moment. But there are threads that keep us attached to things that have ended, and that make them come back. Memories, feelings, thoughts.
It’s the accumulation of everything that happens that makes us who we are. Nothing really ends.
Your choice is whether you want to keep all that in a messy closet or if you want to give it a shape that you can call your story.
Most people are scared, preoccupied, hurt. And until you help them get at the root of what makes them such, they will not be able to move past that behaviour that is bothering you and damaging the community.
The only shortcut to this is to cut the relationship altogether. That’s never progress and very rarely what you actually want.
The effort we put into avoiding difficult conversations.
The energy we invest into keeping that bad feeling at bay.
The thoughts we dedicate to finding ways to reduce uncertainty.
That’s what makes everything more difficult, bad, and uncertain.
When you accept that as a part of being a colleague, a leader, a partner, a friend, a parent, a human being, then the rest of the journey is downhill.
I’m not suggesting that we should cease efforts to alleviate pain, our own or that of others. But as psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp was keenly aware, our “mistaken belief that it can be cured” is what makes pain unbearable.
Ed Batista, Pain Is Mandatory. Suffering Is Optional.
It might be that everyone is out there waiting for you to come out with the new feature. Perhaps your detractors are just waiting for you to trip and your competitors can’t wait to see the sneak peek of your new product. Somebody for sure has also set an alert to track everything that you are doing and beat you to it.
Or maybe not.
The point is that the time you spend worrying about all these unlikely scenarios – let’s accept it, in most cases we are not that important – is time you could invest to put your work out there and get people excited about it.
Caution does not spread.
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