I shared this in the Legiit Slack channel this morning but I wanted to share it here too because I feel like it is important.
Here is your daily Think Big challenge.
If you want to succeed, people are always going to try and stop you or tear you down.
I know because I used to let it.
As a kid, I got what would today be called bullied a LOT.
I got constantly teased for being short. Relentlessly. That even happened into my early adult years.
I remember a guy on the school bus who was much bigger than me would pull out clumps of my hair.
I was on a baseball team that was SO BAD that everyone, including the adults, called us the "Pitiful Pirates." I got our first hit of the season (I still have the ball signed by my teammates), but that didn't help.
In Boy Scouts, they dragged me out into the woods, held me down, beat on my chest, and called it an "initiation."
In 3rd grade, I started getting sick a lot and throwing up in class. I didn't do it on purpose, but I was glad when it happened because I got to go home.
As a teenager—and this is a story I've only told two people in my life—I was walking home from my job at McDonald's one night, and a cop pulled me over and told me to stop where I was.
He got out of the car and asked me where I had been recently because I matched the description of someone who had broken into a store nearby.
I was in my uniform... but I was also super scared. For some reason, I went to get my name tag out of my pocket to show him I had been at McDonald's where I worked.
He pulled his gun on me and told me not to move.
He came closer, saw that I was in my uniform, asked me which McDonald's I worked at, how long ago I'd gotten off, asked me my supervisor’s name, and where I was going.
I guess he decided I wasn’t a criminal because he told me to go home and strongly implied I shouldn’t tell anyone about this.
And I didn’t—for probably 25 years.
These and other experiences led me to never take any risks for the first half of my adulthood.
I let these people make me afraid of the world, afraid to take risks, and ended up leading a life of quiet desperation, as the expression goes.
Eventually, I was fortunate enough to find things that allowed me to gain the confidence I needed to break out of that—martial arts helped a lot, and so did making money for myself.
Today, I still experience fear. I still have people try to push me around or drag me down.
But I no longer let it stop me.
I now have a goal, a purpose, and a mission in life, and I am not going to let other people—or the world itself—cause me to let fear win.
It was and is hard... but it is impermanent, and it doesn't matter. You can still do whatever you want—you just can't let fear stop you.
Today, do something that moves you toward your goal, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Growth lives on the other side of fear.