Taking Risks and Doing the Scary Things

As I type this … It’s been 6.5 years since I quit my full-time corporate day job. Six-plus years of constantly trying to play bigger. It’s just as exhilarating and exhausting as it sounds.

I attended a memory-keeping live event recently, and the teacher (Ali Edwards) opened the workshop with writing exercises including a letter to our younger self.

I don’t have a lot of ‘regrets,’ per se, but there are certainly things I would have chosen differently if I had the chance now. Things like recognizing what I’m good at earlier in life, or learning not to care so much about other people’s opinions. There are a lot of mindset evolutions that I would have liked to have had at different stages of my life.

The main advice I kept coming back to over and over in this letter to my younger self was “Do the scary thing.”

It makes me sad to think about it now … how many things I missed out on because too scared. How many opportunities I talked myself out of because even just dealing with the awesomeness was too overwhelming. I could name a bunch of examples, big and small. All the times that I played small and safe and avoided the possibility of failure by also avoiding the possibility of success and adventure.