The Onion’s new Buzzfeed-like mocking site has a perfect deadpan article about success which I might even have linked to if it were real. I wince admitting that.
Life is short. If you wait too long to go out and do what you want with your life, you’ll never get a chance to see your dreams come true. That’s why I tell people to stop letting the fear of failure hold you back.
Take me for instance. For years, I dreamed of just reaching out and grabbing a police officer’s gun right out of its holster and running away as fast as possible, but I never even tried because I was afraid of failing. What if I wasn’t able to pull out the gun fast enough? What if the cop yelled at me? What if he caught me and sent me to jail? There seemed to be an endless number of things that could go wrong, so I never even gave things a chance to go right.
Then one day, I decided to just go for it. I saw a cop standing on a nearby street corner and he was kind of zoned out, so I snuck up on him very quietly and reached out for his gun. Was I afraid? Of course I was—but this time, I didn’t let my nerves get the better of me. I just grabbed his gun and I booked it as fast as I could.