56: The Greatest Fear | Mid-Week Espresso Shot

Time for your mid-week espresso shot! There are a couple interesting facts about espresso that speak profoundly into what we want to do with this weekly installment, but I just want to highlight the most important one.

Fact
Espresso is brewed by forcing nearly boiling water through coffee beans that are ground very fine. It results in a beverage that is thicker than coffee and, thus, has a higher ratio of caffeine per unit (though less than a regular cup of coffee).

Parallel
We want to give you a small, but powerful, energizing burst in the middle of your week! There may be less content than a full episode, but sometimes circumstances call for a delicacy, like espresso.

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”
-- Francis Chan

Bearing the pain of failure is enough to make anyone curl up into a ball and waste away evenings clutching a pale of ice cream and binge-watching LOST for the 16th time, but, frankly, failure is part of life. Failure, when left to sit and wallow in its own misery, is useless and meaningless as any other unfortunate circumstance. But failure, when reflected upon and repurposed into lessons that came from a circumstance that was not successful, can make it hurt less. And every time we repurpose failure it hurts less.

Oh, sometimes, no matter how prepared we are, it still hurts as much as it ever did. But like most of what we talk about on The Real Brian Show, approaching every situation with the right attitude and a trained mindset of positive thinking and serenity enables us to rise above our perceived failures. We can turn non-successes into opportunities for growth.

But what about the other side of this? What about the emptiness that comes from succeeding at things that don't matter while the true goals, the true ambitions, lie dormant? Fearing failure is easy because it is obvious and sometimes really serious, and it's become clearer to me in recent years how ready I am to allow the most obvious fears to take hold of me. Is failing worse than never trying? It's definitely something I struggle with, trying to evaluate whether taking a risk and failing is worth potentially giving up a hobby that brings me a lot of joy. When I break it down, it seems pretty irrational, but fear is irrational.

The day I knock it into my own head to quit pursuing those things that don't matter... I'll let you know.