We all tend to avoid doing things because they seem too hard or too scary or too big. In order to get anywhere, you need to lean into the fear and just start doing. Toddlers learn to walk by first falling, they catch themselves falling and find they move forward. Before you know it they are walking all over the place, one saved fall at a time. They learn quickly to lean into the fear of falling, realizing they can catch themselves and turn it into a forward walk. They turn failure into progress natively.
That natural ability to lean into fear is beaten out of us through successive levels of schooling. We are taught to follow the established rules for fear of punishment. We are taught to draw inside the lines for fear of ridicule. The society we have built is so entangled in the process of blindly accepting what we are taught that by the time we are old enough to venture out and become creative adult contributors, most of that unbound exploratory behaviour is deeply buried under rules, structure and fear.
The power entrepreneurs we adore all know this. Gates and Jobs and Wozniak, Branson and Musk and Bezos and Benioff - these familiar names are in our homes and our lives because they ignored the commonly held paradigms around them and created something unusual and controversial - things that everyone said were crazy and would fail. But not only they did not fail, their creations became the new norm. These great thinkers were brave enough to lean into their fear, swim against the flow and power through with what they believed to be the right path regardless of what others said was "right" or "accepted".
The next time someone tells you your idea is too crazy or too unusual to succeed, lean into the fear and just do it. You may possibly fail, but at least you will do so on your own terms and odds are that if you truly believe in something, it will succeed no matter how crazy everyone else says it is.
