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“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Søren Kierkegaard
I got the thing I’d wanted my whole life and then I stopped growing. I was 23, driving to work, unable to name what was wrong. For the first time, nothing was chasing me.
Up to that point in my life, all I chased was peace and security.
I got both and felt stuck.
I grew up lower middle class, with stretches that ran below that. Getting out took years of doing things I didn’t want to do. They scared me. I did them because the other option was staying.
A courage challenge is a hard thing you pick when nothing is making you do it.
- The sales ask
- The hard conversation
- The call that keeps getting pushed
The years before 23 were survival. My back was against the wall.
Doing a hard thing is a different skill from surviving one.
I never saw those early years as courage. It was what I had to do to make it out, involuntary discomfort.
Once security arrived, that pressure was gone. I faced a choice. I could choose discomfort voluntarily or stop growing.
Without a threat forcing me, I stopped doing hard things. Growth left with fear.
Then I picked up Jia Jiang’s Rejection Proof.
An investor turned down his startup and it flattened him, so he went out looking for a no a day for 100 days. Day one he asked a security guard for $100. Day three he walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts arranged like the Olympic rings.
The shift leader made them and handed them over.
He finished all 100 days.
Around that time I heard Tim Ferriss describe the same practice with a different name. He calls them comfort challenges in The 4-Hour Workweek: hold a stranger’s eye contact, ask someone for their number.
For the first 23 years of my life, discomfort was involuntary. After that, growth meant making it voluntary.
Today I run 8 courage challenges a day.
One was an email I left unopened for a month. Reading it and replying took 30 minutes.
Survival is doing the hard thing because you have to. Courage is doing it when nothing is making you.
🧱
What uncomfortable thing could you do today?
