What are you afraid of?

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In a recent post, Seth Godin wrote about why we tend to do what’s urgent instead of what’s important:

The reason we go for urgent is that it makes us feel competent. We’re good at it. We didn’t used to be, but we are now.

Important, on the other hand, is fraught with fear, with uncertainty and with the risk of failure.

He’s right, of course. We spend our time putting our fires, running errands, and dealing with deadlines, all necessary but not at the expense of our most cherished plans and projects.

We’ve gotten good at dealing with urgent matters. It’s how we live most of our days. And because we’re good at it, or used to it, we seem to go out of our way to find them, even going so far as to create them by conveniently forgetting something or waiting until the last minute to start.

Because we fear doing what’s important (and failing at it), we make sure we don’t have enough time to do them. Our dreams are thus banished to the land of “one day”. Years later, we realize that we’ve run out of time.

Instead of hiding from our fears, however, we should embrace them. They’re telling us what’s important. We need to heed their message. We need to do the very things we fear.

Mark Twain said, “Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.” He might have added that it is also how we give birth to our biggest dreams.

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