Trust30 : Dare To Be Bold

Dare to be bold. This is the prompt from #Trust30 for today.

Our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneurs worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. Its only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.” - Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

This is always puzzling to me, whenever I think of.  Its true, Children have no trouble believing in something. And its true that some of us have no trouble in believing in something even when nobody else. But there is a huge difference between those two. For a child, there are no constraints and there are no boundaries. But for the rest of us, there are some constraints within which we need to work through. In fact, creativity often stems from the presence of constraints and boundaries.

So being aware of constraints and boundaries and sometimes shunning away from pursuing some ideas (say Business ideas for an entrepreneur) over the others is totally practical and in my view is also being bold. We don’t want to live in a world of fantasy where everything is possible. 

I do understand the underlying prompt, to believe in your ideas and dreams even when the whole world may not. But it is imperative to get real about our boundaries and constraints and pursue with full awareness. Sometimes, the boldest step you take is to stop doing something and move on.