A lil sumpin for my granbehbies

(And for everybody else interested)

Of all my most successful endeavors, and I’m not trying to claim omnipotent knowledge here, they all had one common trait: enthusiasm not overshadowed by pessimism. There was energy to spare, because it wasn’t being drained off to hold the pessimist at bay.

And they were mostly based in reality: I wasn’t trying to develop a warpdrive engine using an as yet undiscovered power source to push an imaginary ship across space. Good entertainment, but not reality. No, these were based on real things, usually just out of reach, but by making the extra effort, were attainable. The incentive was personal happiness as measured in achievements; I have stories to tell even if I didn’t gain in material things.

Broad brush moment here: Most people won’t make the extra effort due to risk aversion. We are a ‘security’ minded people; we want to play it safe because safe is comfortable. Risk is dangerous to that comfort.

But if you don’t risk it, you can’t fail, and if you can’t fail, you don’t learn. Not learning is true failure in my world. Not succeeding is part of the learning curve, get back up, get on the bike and try again. Get out of the water, drain the kayak and try again. If you ain’t trying, you ain’t living.

Now, I have my own personal limits of what I’ll try and won’t; I have zero desire to go base jumping for example but would be (am) willing to build a FAR 103 ultralite and learn to fly. Its all a matter of degrees. My current goal is a little more aetheral but still achievable if I stick to my guns amd guts about it.

The trick is to keep the naysayers at bay. They have a way of wiggling doubt into the slightest crevice; doubt that grows like a cancer and destroys willpower. Willpower is what you need . The truly sucessful are more certain of themselves and are more resistant to the negative: I need a little more breathing room than that, but can still pull some amazing things off when I get my steam up.

I’m building that head of steam now.