Grateful to have taken a pause to write again, and thanks to my team for not giving up on me… totally. Assuming they release this on schedule, happy anniversary to my dear wife.
Let’s get to it, Courage… A scarce resource, a key ingredient, for the believer—a command. Anything worth doing takes a bit of courage, or, like a brother once put it, a bit of crazy. So what really is courage? Of the 8 billion of us on the planet, cast your mind on the most exceptional individuals living, the existential sacrifices, and the daunting risks they engaged to reach the very pinnacle of their vocation. They lower their crowns to different attributes, but to courage, they all bow.
Sundar Pichai suggests courage is the ability to do something that frightens one or strength in the face of pain. In brute summary, the timid is barely living. We can end it here, but the question that led me down this road is… What could happen if you defeated yourself?
For context, ignored “latent potential” (powers or possibilities existing but hidden or not yet actualized) really does frustrate me. I have met the most naturally gifted people in my walk and seen people with deposits and gifts that can produce the outcomes they yearn for, but sadly they self-stifle, lacking the life force to release themselves.
At our roots, we sometimes have an unnecessarily inflated estimation of how much of our latent potential we have explored. It’s an ego-bruising line of thought for many, so in advance, I’m sorry to your inner Ernest Shackleton. Everything you desire is clearly on the other side of courage. So if you just wrote that book, started that vlog (Mrs. Adeniyi), learned that new language, started that business, took on that project, or got that degree, only if.
Mark Twain opined courage is resistance to and mastery of fear—not absence of fear. “Now” is most definitively the most expensive word in the English language, and having a clear balanced concept of time and effectiveness is a symposium discussion, not for today.
So what really stops us from moving courageously? Hold my hand. One central fact is a gross exaggeration of people’s recollection or a faulty assumption that we hold a much larger rent-free room in people’s heads. “What will people think?” and “How would I come across?” are the exact same thoughts reframed using personification.
To investigate this, humans in general are born identifiers. So, when a baby is born, as they eat, poop, sleep, and cry their way to understanding and interacting with the world, they start by identifying. Ma-ma da-da is the start of a lifelong habit. As adults, however, a lot of our identification work is not layered and is mostly lazy, as we are challenged with identifying so many complex things with little time.
So if I saw a car (a subject I am very illiterate on), for example, it’s a car, and the farthest I would go is the brand; it’s a Lexus or Porsche car. But if my brother Greg saw that same car, he would likely say some intelligent car nonsense like, It’s a GT V8 Ultra 4WD Hybrid Turbo Cayenne by Porsche AG, manufactured in Baden-Württemberg. Now, this level of rich identification takes time plus knowledge and is not rooted in assumption.
As this relates to our identification of humans, we lack the brainpower and time to identify many people in such great detail, so we cluster and label them using adjectival groups. We build a sparse profile of people as relates to situations and contexts of engagement. It’s really subconscious work, but we are pressured into doing this quickly to dictate how we deal with people. We do this based on “informed assumptions,” third-party suggestions, and unreliable facts. We sometimes change these identification labels where there is sufficient proof of new information.
Here’s social proof… I am with my wife for a brief stop at her tailor’s, and some guy walks in handing fliers for a school. It’s OTG marketing, but you can tell he was not sufficiently paid, so he is disinterested and just wants to hand the flier to you, no comment, and leave; his KPI is distribution across the target area, not a sales conversation. He does this, and Lady 1 says the name of the school out loud, and Lady 2 says, Oh, I heard the owner works for Corona Schools (brand association label for ease of identification).
Lady 1 also goes; it must be a good school (identification assumption), and Lady 2 says yes, he teaches at Corona but has his own setup (unreliable fact). Lady 1 further says it must be an expensive school (identification assumption). We all in the room now consider said school an expensive good school associated with Corona Schools. The marketing trope is that the flier evokes the conversation, and an identity is formed that wouldn’t quite be the same if the school had a billboard out front that says, Our owner works for Corona.
This, my friends, is basic daily identification. So that thing you want to do, that gift you want to explore, that business or project, in the context of a plus or minus ten 80-year life being limited to what people will identify it as is just not a brilliant inference model. It’s the needless juxtaposition of self-awareness vs. self-consciousness, where self-awareness should ideally win.
For example, I share what you are reading with every contact on my phone, from MDs of great companies to Nurudeen, my carpenter, and I don’t spare a thought. In writing this, I share things I believe in, and I can be wrong; I have Rukky as my fact-checker, but some of it is pure opinion. This, however, does not inhibit me. In your frame of reference, I don’t consider it to matter so much, but I don’t think it doesn’t matter at all. I am in the courageous middle, measuring only excellence per time and preventing excellence from bullying efforts.
To draw from this, to some people I am a writer now, and that’s a label; to some others, I’m a marketing guy, and to some, an investment guy. It’s all just convenient identification, and it mostly matters very little because people who really know me will definitely have a richer identification than simply what I do or did for work.
Dear overthinker, one succinct guiding concept should be the philosophy of mission-critical events—as you grow older, the significant moments you hold as critical greatly reduce. Remember aeons ago in secondary school when that boy or girl was all you could think about and how them saying no seemed like such a great alteration to your life’s course? Well, think the same now? An older wiser you will always laugh at the surety of the younger you.
As the much-vaunted and equally deprecated Vladimir Lenin once put it in such light, there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. The charge is to live courageously, with audacity a part of your lifestyle, and not be bound by the fear to try or live in the self-prison of opinion.
I was privileged alongside some brilliant believers to teach a group of teenagers about leadership this past weekend, and some of them bluntly said they don’t want to be leaders. When we investigated why, one said, “I don’t like criticism.” Great awareness but terrible consciousness—we spent half the class fixing that and getting the kids to commit firstly to self-leadership and not shirk at opportunities to lead courageously.
Dale Carnegie said, “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” Please do; we all just might be counting on you.
For faith people, Joshua 1 vs. 9 was not just good advice. So I ask again, What could happen if you defeated yourself?
For the battles you don’t win, your children will fight. Selah.
BTE.
