"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."               - Steve Jobs

Courage.  That is definitely the key. It is amazing what kinds of fears we truly live with every day. We generally aren’t even sure what the consequences of our fears are, we just fear things.

Fear of failure, ok, so what? Fear of disapproval, well, do you have total approval of everything today? Again, so what? I mean really, if we asked ourselves “so what?” every time we talked ourselves out of something, we might find there just isn’t all that much to be afraid of after all.

People fail at things, and pick up the pieces and move on.

Despite what we do, we realize most of our fears anyway. Things don’t work out the way we thought they would. People don’t always agree with us. Someone is going to criticize no matter what you do. So using those fears as an excuse for inaction is ridiculous.

Sadly, it seems we waste a lot of years before we come to realize this. Maybe we have to. Maybe we have to feel the loss before we understand the urgency of following your heart. Maybe we have to reach a place where we don’t have all the time ahead of us to wait. Maybe we have to have lived enough to realize those fears are going to materialize no matter what so we might as well stop trying to avoid it, at the sacrifice of our happiness. Maybe it’s just that we have to have lived enough years surviving the “what-ifs” to understand how non-threatening our fears really are.

I wish I’d gotten to this level of understanding much younger in my life. However, it’s not that late. I still have a lot to do