Taking Risks Accelerates Progress

How much sooner do you think you’d arrive at what success is to you if there were no consequences on you or your family for your actions? Not having to worry about providing, about health, about anything – how much sooner would you arrive at success? Maybe you’d say in 3-6 months, compared to the several years otherwise. Your reluctance to behave in that sort of “reckless” fashion is what’s called fear. Thus conquering fear allows you to accelerate your progress. The act of conquering your fears as applied to daily life is called “taking risks”. Taking risks accelerates your progress by orders of magnitude. Being totally reckless, or turning off the fear factor completely, is probably dangerous in the long run. But those who find success, as they themselves have told us, have had to turn up that dial to just above uncomfortable. And watching other species fight for their survival in unimaginably uncomfortable ways has also confirmed this theory for me.

Watching Planet Earth (the original, II, and Life Story) has gotten me to see this clearly. It’s the story of us that we’ve forgotten. The moral of every episode is that life is tough and those who hide in comfort die and starve, while those who make the perilous journey towards where opportunity abides are the ones that prosper. There’s a game to life. A trick. The trick is, those who conquer their fears win. Those who do what is difficult win. And this is not some metaphysical philosophical musing. This is the reality of the nature of existence for biological beings. It’s cut throat competition. Every species fights for their survival. We’ve advanced mostly beyond individual violent fights for survival. But make no mistake about it — we are still on stage. This stage is less physical, but no less real. And the moral of our story, the way a distant documentary might comment, is that those who took the largest risks, who conquered fear, reaped the largest benefits.