The most important quality that we can develop for happiness and success is the quality of courage, Winston Churchill, rightly said, “Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues upon it, all others depend.” Different forms of courage helps us to discover the great forms of success that is possible for us, In other words, we can become an absolute unafraid person by practicing courage no matter what the situation is.
The first form of courage is to dream big dreams and to set big goals, this is where most people stop, the challenge of doing this so over whelming that most people quit before they even begin and they can think of all the reasons why they may fail or all the money they may lose and shut themselves even before they started.
The other very important type of courage is to move out of comfort zone. The courage is to move into the zone of discomfort where we may feel awkward and clumsy. The comfort zone is the biggest enemy of the human potential. When people get into comfort zone they strive to stay in that comfort zone even If they are happy with the situation often their whole lives pass furnishing and enforcing little rut of medium performances.
We need to continually move in the direction of the biggest goals and ambitions we should be willing to face discomfort in order to grow; we need to have faith virtually with no guarantee of success. If every obstacle must first be overcome nothing will ever get done.
One of my friends, Chris, recently shared with me, “I have a dream of starting my own business, but I’m not sure if I’m ready yet. Maybe I should wait. Maybe I need more experience.” He was shocked when I told him, “You don’t need more experience. You’re ready now. What you need is more courage.”
The Myth of Experience
People often think that the more experience you have, the better you’ll be at something. I’ve found that this is only sometimes true.
In all industries (let’s say marketing, for example) you can easily find people with 20 or more years of experience. But does that really matter? What if they have two decades of experience but only one year of learning?
Many people go through their careers and lives doing the exact same thing, in the exact same way. The people who get ahead are those who innovate and blaze new trails, not the ones who repeat old ways of doing things. The people who get ahead welcome new ideas. They listen, they adapt and they are constantly learning and challenging themselves.
Get Started Now
Whatever your dream is get started now. Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Don’t wait for more experience before taking the next step. If you wait until you feel comfortable, then it’s already too late.
Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg said to himself, “I don’t have enough experience to build a company like Facebook. I’m still a college student! Let me wait a few years. I should get some experience at Google or Microsoft first. Maybe then I’ll have the skills to go out on my own.”
If you read the stories of entrepreneurs, such as Sir Richard Branson or Sara Blakely, who have built billion-dollar businesses, you’ll find that most of them had very little experience (or sometimes no experience) when they launched their ventures. That’s because experience is only a small part of the equation.
Yes, today we admire their knowledge and business know-how. But how did they get there? They got experience by getting started.
Courage Matters Most
Anything is possible. But we must believe in ourself before others can believe in us.
We must be willing to get in the game, to make mistakes, to learn from them and then to move on, wiser and stronger.
As Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
Failure Is a Step toward Success
In a recent interview, entrepreneur and startup mentor Steve Blank said, “Do you know what we call a failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley? Experience.”
You cannot have success without failure. The two are inextricably linked.
So if you’re afraid to act because you might make a mistake, stop and think again. Roadblocks and setbacks provide us with the information we need to grow, change and make a move in the right direction.
That’s why we should be thanking our failure.
After all, it’s through our failures that we gain experience. So move forward with courage and know that you are headed in the direction of success.
Courageous people are those who have dreams, big goals, they make a plan and take the first step with no assurance and guarantees of success. The more mistakes we make and more we fail the smarter we get and it’s most likely that eventually we will achieve our goals.
“No one is ever defeated until we accept the defeat as a reality. No one can ever defeat us but us.”
