A couple hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of his success. “Never leave that till tomorrow,” he said, “which you can do today.”
This is the man who discovered electricity. You’d think more of us would listen to what he had to say. I don’t know why we put things off, but if I had to guess, I’d say it has a lot to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of pain, fear of rejection. Sometimes the fear is just of making a decision. Because, what if you’re wrong? What if you’re making a mistake you can’t undo?
Whatever it is we’re afraid of, one thing holds true… that, by the time the pain of not doing a thing, gets worse than the fear of doing it, it can feel like we’re carrying around a giant tumor.
Life is too short for you to live it the way others want you to. We need, at some point in time, to take control of our lives and steer it in the direction we want. How many times have we done things because we want to and not because someone is dictating our actions? Most of the time, we do things because we're required to. Or because it's acceptable. We repress everything inside of us, and we never really let it out.
Some want to sail the 7 freakin' seas, some want to go around the world in 80 days and others want to climb a mountain or do some ridiculously insane stuff. And we never do it. Why? Because we either don't have the time or we're afraid to be different. We let people decide how we should live our lives. For me, I do things because I want to. Fine, maybe not all the time, but at least I'm doing it. Because I know that I don't want to make tapes on my deathbed to release like 60 years of repressed rage. And I don't want to lie there thinking of all the things I should have done but didn't do because I was too stupid to control my own life. I don't want my life to end in regret. Whatever you want to do, do it now or soon. Life is really too short for you to live it by the rules of others.
'The early bird catches the worm.' 'A stitch in time saves nine.' 'He who hesitates is lost.' We can’t pretend we haven’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day.
Still, sometimes, we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug, until we can’t anymore, until we finally understand for ourselves, what Benjamin Franklin meant:
That knowing, is better than wondering. That waking, is better than sleeping. And that even the biggest failure, even the worst, most intractable mistake, beats the hell out of never trying.
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