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“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face. … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
“Are your projects as “Mad” as the Mad Times demand?” ~ Tom Peters
I went to interview for a freelance project a few weeks ago. When I dug a little deeper, the project being sold was not a project I wanted though just going through the process of applying gave me an interesting insight. For a moment at the beginning of the conversation, I began to wonder if I could really do the project I applied for. Maybe I didn’t have quite enough experience yet. Maybe I needed to gain just a bit more knowledge than I already have.
I do this a lot. I go to my edge and then get frightened that I’m in way over my head. But it’s those moment when I was way under water that I learned the most about my capabilities and where I gained the most confidence. The mad ideas, the ones that really out there are the ones that made a difference; they’re the ones that gave me the most joy because they were the most fun. They also appeal to my internal rebel.
To really live, to be in this world for the sheer experience of being alive, requires a certain fearlessness in the face of everything we should be afraid of. We live in wild and crazy times, and we need wild and crazy ideas to make any headway. Living at the edge and pushing the boundaries is the only way to grow. We aren’t born with a slip in hand that tells us what our potential is. We won’t know our potential until we really test ourselves and begin the very projects that we think we cannot do, the ones that we think are much too big.
What are the dreams that you think are too mad, too far out there, too difficult to accomplish? Put your energy there.
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Christa Avampato 