There’s a scene in a random Matt Damon movie, We Bought a Zoo, that everyone should watch. I haven’t even seen the movie, but I LOVE the scene.
Damon’s character describes to his kids how he first met their mom. He stopped by a cafe and knew he had to meet her, but was terrified. So he broke it down to just 20 seconds of courage.
You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.
Think about the last time you were scared.
Like actually scared. Take a moment and think.
Everyone has fear, but most people get stuck with the fear of failure (rejection, looking dumb, etc.) instead of the fear of regret.
- Fear of failure → leads to inaction
- Fear of regret → leads to action
There’s no escaping fear, only crossing through it.
Courage is the bridge to cross through fear.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
The number 1 regret of the dying is “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Imagine there’s a long line of dominos stacked next to each other. At first glance, the stack is enormous and you think “There’s no way I can knock over all these dominos!”
But here’s the thing. There’s a cheat code. Something that you cannot unlearn once you learn it.
Here is it…
You can ignore all the dominos except for one. The very first one.
All you need is 20 seconds of insane courage to knock over the lead domino.
Soon enough, you adopt the habit of knocking over dominos. You use fear as a signal to approach through tiny doses of courage.
Will it always work how you expected? Nope.
But two things will happen.
- New opportunities. You see new lead dominos that otherwise were invisible.
- New identity. You become someone who pushes over dominoes and leans into fear (instead of running away from it).
This applies to decisions big and small.
Maybe you feel the fear of applying to a new job, starting a new company, or even going to a random event.
I’m writing this at the Austin Writers meetup and this morning I almost talked myself out of going. But I’ve gone to enough of these types of events where I still go. I’ve developed small evidence of overcoming resistance.
Or even writing this blog post. Instead of thinking about how to make the absolute best post (full stack of dominos), I applied 20 seconds of courage by clicking “add new post” and getting started. Aka, only looking at lead domino.
So the next time you feel fear getting in the your way consider this image:
Add a little courage and do it scared.
Courage has never been easier to implement.
A century ago, courage meant fighting a war or fleeing a country to find safety and a brighter future.
Today, courage is turning on your camera for a Zoom meeting.
Courage creates your identity. It will transform you into the person you want to be.
All you need is 20 seconds of insane courage. Do it scared.