Be Brave.
Recently these two words have been the guiding mantra in every decision I’ve been making and I hope that this ostensibly simple statement can be a reinforcement of confidence for you when you need it most.
I’m 27 now and just to about to embark on a new stage of my career. If you’re a similar age to me, I hope you’ve been lucky enough to experience lots of different working opportunities so far in your life and when thinking back to the beginning of each of mine I remember feeling exactly the same way.
My gut feeling was that it was the right thing to do but at the same time I was filled with trepidation and an inner monologue questioning whether I had the ability to do it.
It’s all too easy to convince yourself to fall back in to the safety of your old ways and that you don’t have the potential to do something new.
One of my favourite ever quotes from Gary Vaynerchuk (go check him out by the way) is…
“You didn’t grow up driving, but you figured that out!”
In my head I deconstruct that statement to the point that essentially everything we do on a daily basis now, at one point in our life we had no clue how to do and apart from breathing, we’ve learned how to do every little thing we do every single day.
So now whenever I start to question myself and find myself on the fence whether to take a step forward or fall back into comfortable old habits, I try to block out everything except the advice “Be Brave”.
Because it seems to me if you find yourself nervous, you’re probably doing the right thing.
One of things I’m most nervous about is writing this blog. I haven’t achieved yet anywhere near the level of professional, financial or personal success many great authors on this platform have so it feels massively audacious to be writing a blog giving my thoughts and opinions on life. I’m still really young and hopefully have a lot of time ahead of me to figure things out. In my head I’m justifying it again with another thought from Gary Vaynerchuk in that “one is better than zero”. If somehow by writing this article it helps one person to achieve one little thing it’s better than not writing it all and helping zero people do nothing.
So I’m reminding myself of those two key words and carrying on with this series, I hope that in some minuscule way it’s making a positive contribution to your life and next time you have that voice questioning whether you have the capability, the skills or the inner fortitude to achieve the task ahead of you, you’ll want to be brave and find out.
So be brave and I wish you every success,
Jack
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