You’re enmeshed in tubes, breathing shallowly, preparing for the bright light.

Your teary-eyed children shuffle into the room.

You have one final chance to convey the most valuable lessons you want them to remember.

What would you say?

That’s the scene I envisioned when I wrote the “Live Extraordinary” manifesto.

“This, my dearest children, is how to live the masterpiece life. This is how to look yourself in the eye without regret at the end of each day.”

Don’t wait for your deathbed to inscribe these consequential lessons into their souls.

Purchase the 16″ x 20″ manifesto now and display it prominently in your home.

Let it saturate their subconscious mind. Watch with pride as it manifests in their actions.

Product Details:

The typographically-designed print is printed on high-quality, non-coated poster paper and fits a 16″ x 20″ frame.

Money-Back Satisfaction Guarantee:

Dissatisfied in any way with your print? Return it for a full, no-hassle refund.

Complete Manifesto Text:

“Trust your flashes of intuition. Ignore the clamoring of crowds. Don’t
drudge through a job. Devote yourself to a Mission. Make every day an adventure. Don’t be a slave to unconscious reaction. Consciously choose your actions. Keep your word, no matter the cost. Who you become tomorrow is determined by the books you read, the friends you keep, and how you spend your free time today. The time to be most vigilant is when no one else will ever know. Privately fix your own heart before marching in public protest. Plant seeds for others to harvest. Choose long-term growth over immediate gratification. Your character is revealed by how you treat those weaker than you and from whom you have nothing to gain. When you’re discouraged, forget yourself and uplift others. Don’t gossip about people. Discuss great ideas. Be an initiator, not a criticizer. Be a player, not a spectator. Above all, keep moving forward, no matter what.

(© Copyright 2012 by Life Manifestos, LLC.

Shun mediocrity. Live with extraordinary passion, principle, and purpose.

And teach your children to do the same by displaying the “Live Extraordinary” manifesto in your home.

As I was watching the movie “Sarah’s Key” tonight (which I highly recommend), this question settled on me like grim ash from Auschwitz:

Who’s more culpable and responsible: the Nazis, or common citizens who stood by and watched the Nazis rip their neighbors away without saying or doing anything?

I think it’s easier to bear the guilt of a perpetrator than of a bystander.

Bystanders will watch atrocities, and try to convince themselves that they’re good people.

Right.

That’s exactly why they’re more culpable than perpetrators — they know better.

Why can’t the freedom movement seem to get any traction?

Why have we lost battle after battle for at least the past century?

It’s because we tend to make the good the enemy of the perfect, the pragmatic the enemy of the ideal.

To be clear, it’s because the most passionate among us have adopted a rigid, dogmatic, uncompromising “either-or” stance in the fight.

Rather than winning hearts and minds in the trenches inch-by-inch, we drop rhetorical nuclear bombs and make enemies of potential supporters.

There’s one critical distinction that explains this tendency and, if understood, can overcome it and make all the difference to our success:

Do we view the fight for freedom as an election-cycle battle, or as a 100-year war?

These vastly different mindsets generate completely different strategies and tactics and produce completely different results.

If we view the fight as an election-cycle battle, the battlegrounds are primarily political and governmental.

The tactics include:

• Public, energetic, and angry marches and demonstrations
• Passionate, vitriolic, and partisan commentary that preaches to the crowd and riles the base but fails to win new supporters
• Literal, logical, and personal argumentation
• Directing energy primarily at getting individual political candidates elected

But in a 100-year war, the battlegrounds are cultural and educational, and the short-term tactics above shift to the following long-term strategies:

• Personal, lifelong, classical education in the quiet of our homes
• Respectful, thoughtful, open-minded discussion with people across the whole spectrum of belief, with the intention of winning hearts and minds, rather than simply spewing passion or proving how smart and “right” we are
• Symbolic, metaphorical, and artful story-telling and persuasion
• Directing energy toward reforming education, building families and communities, and becoming successful entrepreneurs (see the three choices in FreedomShift by Oliver DeMille)

In a 100-year war, we moderate our passion and smarten our strategy.

We heal the roots of our demise, rather than hacking at the symptomatic leaves.

We work from love, rather than anger.

We reform from the outside-in and bottom-up, rather than the top-down. In other words, we focus on fixing ourselves, rather than Washington.

We understand that studying Montesquieu in our homes is far more effective than waving banners in the streets.

We spend our time and energy teaching the rising generation the depths of freedom and political philosophy, rather than debating opponents in chat rooms and on radio and TV shows.

We build successful small businesses, rather than complaining about losing jobs overseas.

In a 100-year war, idealism and pragmatism aren’t mutually exclusive. We’re more concerned with direction than destination.

In other words, we don’t reject particular policies because they’re not ultimate, black-and-white ideals.

Rather, we judge them based on whether or not they take us closer to the ideal, however slight the progress.

In a 100-year war, we learn and teach principles, rather than fight candidates.

To be perfectly clear, we don’t waste time forwarding mass emails about the status of Obama’s birth certificate.

Most importantly, in a 100-year war, independent freedom lovers create an inclusive tent, rather than an exclusive club.

For example, many conservatives denigrate environmentalists, or as they’re disdainfully labeled, “tree-huggers.”

But many of these environment-conscious, thoughtful people are also highly-conscious and passionate about local, organic food production and sustainable agriculture — which is a primary battleground for freedom.

So rather than building on common beliefs and bringing these people into the tent of freedom, many conservatives banish them with narrow-minded labels.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is also a favorite target of many conservative commentators.

But wise freedom-lovers would do well to harness their energy.

The truth is that they raise a critical point that most conservatives fail to see: Vast inequities in wealth distribution and power are, in fact, killing America — every bit as much, if not more so, than governmental wealth redistribution from rich to poor.

The government does favor those with capital over those with little or none, big businesses over small businesses, which creates these unfair and unsustainable inequities.

We don’t have to occupy Wall Street with them, but we can at least be wise enough to recognize where we agree in order to work together toward a more free, just, and sustainable society.

We can start winning more friends and creating fewer enemies. We can be pragmatic coalition-builders, rather than dogmatic clique-builders.

I’m as passionate about freedom as anyone — freedom is my mission.

But passion alone isn’t going to win the fight for freedom.

The war will be won through wisdom.

“We know more than we know we know.” -Michael Polanyi

Feeling overwhelmed by cultural, political, and economic forces beyond your control?

Dismayed that we’re rapidly losing freedom?

Want to make a greater difference?

If so, your power and answers lie in the right hemisphere of your brain, waiting to be activated.

If you’re stuck in left-brain mode, you’re getting left behind.

Read on to learn how to become a more effective social leader, prosper financially, and move the cause of liberty.

1 Brain 2 Brains, Left Brain Right Brain

In 1981, neuropsychologist and neurbiologist Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize “for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres.”

Before Dr. Sperry’s “split-brain experiments,” it was commonly thought that the left hemisphere of the brain was more important than the right.

Dr. Sperry shattered this false view and revealed stunning new insights into how the brain works. As he put it,

“The so-called subordinate or minor hemisphere, which we had formerly supposed to be illiterate and mentally retarded and thought by some authorities to not even be conscious, was found to be in fact the superior cerebral member when it came to performing certain kinds of mental tasks.”

The left brain is linear, logical, objective, verbal, and conceptual. The right brain, visual and perceptual, reasons holistically, recognizes patterns, and interprets emotions and nonverbal expressions.

The left brain is scientific, the right is intuitive, artistic, creative, imaginative. The left brain craves order, the right feeds on chaos.

The left brain demands everything to be literal, while the right brain is electrified by symbols, metaphors, art, and abstractions.

The left brain sees a sentence like “Her heart soared to the heavens” and smirks, “What a load of crap.”

The right brain gushes, “Wow! Cool! Can I soar, too?”

“Good poets make extensive use of ‘right-brain language.’ Forget that sensible, linear, factual, left-brain speech. The language of the right brain is a horse of a different color. A riot of imagery, a cascade of connections, sensations, and associations. The right brain speaks in metaphors, juxtapositions, and similes, using a whole range of poetic devices to express the inexpressible and describe the indescribable.” -Robin Frederick

Clearly, both hemispheres are vital to success in any endeavor. Unfortunately, our society and educational system have traditionally placed way more emphasis on the left.

However, we’re engulfed in monumental shifts.

To navigate these shifts and leverage them to your advantage requires a much higher degree and depth of right-brain thinking than most people are used to.

“Employers are already saying that a degree is not enough, and that many graduates do not have the qualities they are looking for: the ability to communicate, work in teams, adapt to change, to innovate and be creative.

“This is not surprising…The traditional academic curriculum is not designed to promote creativity. Complaining that the system does not produce creative people is like complaining that a car doesn’t fly…it was never intended to.

“The stark message is that the answer to the future is not simply to increase the amount of education, but to educate people differently.” -Professor Ken Robinson of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, a group of neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators committed to educational reform

For social leaders in particular, cultivating your right brain is vital for at least the following reasons:

1. To make more money.
2. To increase your innovation and problem-solving skills.
3. To move the cause of liberty.

Right-Brain Economics

In his phenomenal bestseller A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink draws from mountains of research to explain that we’re moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

“We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again–to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.”

Pink cites three primary reasons for this cataclysmic shift:

Abundance

“Our left brains have made us rich…But abundance has produced an ironic result: The very triumph of [left-brain] thinking has lessened its significance. The prosperity it has unleashed has placed a premium on less rational, more [right-brain] sensibilities–beauty, spirituality, emotion.”

Asia

“If standardized, routine [left-brain] work such as many kinds of financial analysis, radiology, and computer programming can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber optic links, that’s where the work will go.”

Automation

“Last century, machines proved they could replace human backs. This century, new technologies are proving they can replace human left brains.”

To adapt to these forces, Pink offers six requisite senses for thriving in the Conceptual Age–all of which are right-brain aptitudes:

1. Design. Making things beautiful and functional.
2. Story. Appealing to logic and emotion.
3. Symphony. Connecting dots, seeing the full picture.
4. Empathy. As Daniel Goleman demonstrated in Emotional Intelligence, emotional abilities impact our careers much more than our IQ.
5. Play. “Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society–our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.” -Pat Kane, Author of The Play Ethic
6. Meaning. “Meaning. Purpose. Deep life experience. Use whatever word or phrase you like, but know that consumer desire for these qualities is on the rise. Remember your Abraham Maslow and your Viktor Frankl. Bet your business on it.” -Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes

Pink challenges individuals and businesses to ask themselves three questions:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

He then concludes:

“Individuals and organizations that focus their efforts on doing what foreign knowledge workers can’t do cheaper and computers do faster, as well as on meeting the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time, will thrive. Those who ignore these three questions will struggle.”

Get Out of the Box

Change has never been more fundamental, rapid, and disruptive.

More than ever, today’s leaders must learn to recognize, trust, and follow their intuition to connect dots, predict trends, and adapt to new realities.

And where does intuition come from? You guessed it: the right brain.

Roy H. Williams, author of the legendary Monday Morning Memo and founder of Wizard Academy, explains:

“Intellect is linear, putting facts in columns and rows, while intuition is nonlinear, putting all the facts in a big bowl, then stirring them together like soup, watching to see what might ‘connect.’

“…Great leaders have intuition. Explorers have intuition. Inventors have intuition. It is intuition that tells them how to go where none has ever been.”

Accessing and cultivating intuition is how social leaders can successfully navigate change, overcome challenges, and solve problems.

To create different results, we need new ways of thinking, and left-brain thinking isn’t going to get us there.

(By the way, if you want to test your intuition, read this article and connect the dots between Oliver’s thesis and what I’m saying here.)

Fight for the Right

In his eye-opening — and highly intuitive — lecture “The Freedom Crisis,” Oliver DeMille declares that one of the serious flaws of freedom-lovers is that we tend to think and communicate very literally.

The problem with this, as Oliver says, is that

“Literal talk is not what sways the thinking populace. The thinking populace is swayed by symbol, celebrity, and poetry — poetry in the broad sense.”

Literal language is divisive. It repels people with whom we share common beliefs and goals. Symbolism and poetics, on the other hand, speak to universalities. They unite and inspire.

To change hearts and minds and win the freedom war requires us to be artful rather than forceful. In other words, passionate freedom-lovers must take a more right-brain approach to their struggle.

Oliver goes on to explain the difference between sensus solum and sensus plenior.

Sensus solum translates as “one meaning,” while sensus plenior means “multiple, or fuller meanings.”

Sensus solum — or literal — thinking has dominated mainstream education for decades. It trains the masses to think in terms of black or white, right or wrong.

Sensus solum thinkers read things to find the correct answer. It is rigid and, by definition, limited.

In contrast, sensus plenior education — of which poetry is an integral component — explores depth, nuance, multiple perspectives, and holistic thinking. It fosters creativity and innovation.

Bottom line: sensus solum is left-brain thinking, sensus plenior is right-brain thinking.

Which is needed to promote freedom?

Trick question — we don’t need either/or, we need both.

Just as those who cultivate both left and right brain aptitudes will have greater success economically, so will they have greater impact on the freedom movement.

Still, since sensus solum is the dominant perspective most of us have been trained in, it is vital that we cultivate the ability to think in terms of sensus plenior — which means specific and consistent right-brain training.

Get the Right Stuff

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” -Albert Einstein

This isn’t “touchy-feely, artsy-fartsy” stuff — the realities of right-brain thinking are tangible, practical, relevant, and vital.

Nurturing your right brain makes you more creative, imaginative and innovative, and better equipped to solve problems, overcome challenges, and make better decisions.

It helps you recognize, predict, and capitalize on trends. It helps you communicate more effectively and universally.

In short, it makes you a better entrepreneur and leader.

And it’s the right thing to do. Uh-huh.

10 Specific Ways to Cultivate Your Right Brain

1. Attend Wizard Academy courses.

2. Take art, music, acting, and/or dancing classes. Starve your inhibitions, gorge your imagination.

3. Visit art museums and galleries.

4. Practice writing short stories. One valuable and quick technique is to do what I’ve done on this blog. Another is “mini-sagas”–stories consisting of no more than 50 words.

5. Keep a notepad and pen on your nightstand and write down your dreams. Dreams are your right brain communicating to your left; it has no language functions, so it communicates through symbols. Record not only what you visualized, but also how it felt. Try to interpret the symbolism and apply your interpretations to practical things in your life.  Compare your dreams over time to recognize patterns.

6. Read more fiction, fantasy, poetry, and humor.

7. Listen to more classical music.

8. Play more. Seriously. Video games, sports, board games, concerts, leisure time. Intuition kicks in more often and more clearly when you have no deadlines or objectives. Simply play. If you think this sounds silly, consider that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was a huge proponent of play.

9. Meditate at least 15 minutes every day.

10. Read and listen to these books, articles, and speeches:

• A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink
• Free the Beagle: A Journey to Destinae by Roy H. Williams
• “The Freedom Crisis” by Oliver DeMille
• Drawing on the Artist Within: An Inspirational & Practical Guide to Increasing Your Creative Powers by Betty Edwards
• Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ by Daniel Goleman
• Accidental Magic: The Wizard’s Techniques for Writing Words Worth 1,000 Pictures by Wizard Academy
• “CEO Libraries Reveal Keys to Success”
• “A Liberal Take on Hiring”
• “What Would Plato Do?”
• “Think Your Liberal Arts Degree Won’t Get You a Real Job?”
• “The Liberal Arts & Business”

Your deepest wounds are the source of your greatest contributions.

I get the sense — and I feel this myself, to an extent — that most Americans are waiting for someone, something to save us.

Waiting for others to make everything better.

To fix our problems. To make us strong and prosperous again. To restore our freedoms.

Even most impassioned activism is a manifestation of waiting — angry activists march and wave signs to essentially send the message, “Change/fix it!” to the ones in charge.

But what if we’re it?

What if you and I are America’s best hope?

What if a New Founding depends on our knowledge, character, courage, wisdom, and leadership?

What if we’re the new Madisons, Adams’, Jeffersons, Washingtons?

What if whatever renaissance we experience is only equal to what we’re able to produce?

Does that excite you, or worry you?

Are we up to the task?

If not, what will it take? What do we — you — need to do to prepare?

“To every man there comes…that special moment when he is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a a special thing unique to him and fitted to his talent. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared or unqualified for the work which would be his finest hour.” -Winston Churchill

I had 1,252 Twitter followers and 1,056 Facebook “friends” when I killed my accounts.

In the past I’ve been an avid promoter of social media. It’s been a great way for me to drive traffic to my websites.

I’ve been drawn to it as an influence platform — an easy and effective way to spread important ideas.

Here’s why I’m done with social media (and see if any of these reasons resonate with you as regards your mission):

There’s Influence, & There’s Influence

I do believe I had influence via social media.

But it was surface-level influence at best. It may have gotten a few people to read and consider things they otherwise wouldn’t have.

But I highly doubt it did anything to really transform minds and hearts for good.

Which impacts you more: An article you skim from a Facebook link — no matter how important the content — or a profound and moving book you really take the time to digest?

My time and mission are better served and my influence will be deeper by writing mind-bending content, rather than throwing up Facebook links or tweeting 140 characters.

The time I spent on social media will now be spent writing blog articles and books.

If my content is good enough, if it really touches hearts, then it will be found and spread by the right people.

If you have to vigorously self-promote to be found, you ought to spend more time and effort on what you’re creating, rather than promoting it.

World-class products, ideas, and content get found and spread organically — with or without the creator.

Question for you: What serves your mission better — Facebooking, or creating, innovating, and leading?

Social media may play an active role in your mission, and you’re the only one who can answer that.

I’m Tired of Wading Through Frivolous Junk

Can important ideas be spread via social media? Obviously.

But is that what social media is actually used for? Rarely.

I don’t care how much I like you, it just isn’t that important to me to know what you ate for lunch or what you’re watching on TV tonight.

Social media is bursting at the seams with information — and the vast majority of it is trivial, frivolous fluff of no consequence to anyone.

Try this experiment: Don’t log on to any of your social media accounts for a month. Then log in, scroll through the past month’s posts, and see if you really missed anything.

I guarantee it will be an enlightening experience.

I want to spend my time thinking about, creating, and discussing important ideas with earnest, dedicated people, not wasting my life away on self-centered, inconsequential chatting.

Join the Conversation?

All the buzz from social media hacks has been about “joining the conversation.”

Why no mention of being the one that starts the conversation?

Do you want to be an initiator on the edges, or a follower of crowds?

Do you want to primarily be an idea producer, or an idea debater?

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Social media “gurus” and “experts,” which strangely have appeared in droves out of the woodwork like Texas cockroaches during a drought, are adamant that every business should be actively engaged in social media marketing.

As a marketing consultant for 2½ years, I worked with a wide variety of businesses, most of whom were aggressive with their social media efforts.

Not a single one of them demonstrated results worth writing home about.

In almost every business case I’ve ever experienced, they would be far better off spending their time, money, and effort in other marketing channels.

I do believe social media can be an effective tool for the right businesses.

But for most businesses, the social media phenomenon is little more than a case of the emperor’s new clothes.

Don’t Use Social Media as a Crutch

Social media has enjoyed a meteoric rise because makes so much sense to be able to connect with the people closest to us, and find and befriend like-minded people across the globe.

But for the mission-driven, it can become a crutch — an excuse to waste time, rather than doing the hard work of producing and creating.

I’m not telling you to close your accounts.

But I am inviting you to question if it’s the best use of your time and if it’s the best way to fulfill your mission.

Recommended Reading:

• Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• John Mayer, “Manage the Temptation to Publish Yourself”

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post: What are the five most important things you feel you should do to fix America?

Not the things you think need to happen “out there,” but the things for which you feel a deep sense of personal responsibility.

My Answers:

1. Develop and maintain a strong and intimate relationship with God to be worthy of inspiration and guidance.
2. Be faithful to and honor and cherish my wife, and raise my children to be leaders and entrepreneurs.
3. Become a masterful writer.
4. Gain a broad and deep liberal arts education, with expertise in the following areas: economics, monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, constitutional forms and law, Georgics and sustainable agriculture, business and entrepreneurship, personal finance, China, and family forms.
5. Become a successful entrepreneur and Georgics practitioner.

How about you?

Preface: I am politically unaffiliated. This article is not to root for the GOP, but simply to share my thoughts on a message strategy. Frankly, very few of the current candidates offer legitimate change. Regardless, one of them could win if they were to use the following strategy.

When I was 17 years old I bought a Brittany Spaniel — a bird-hunting dog — from my brother.

Bob was a six-month-old pup that my brother hadn’t been able to sell. He had run wild and free on my brother’s property since birth.

The first time I put him on a chain, because he’d never been on one Bob went berserk. Frantically bellowing, careening back and forth, desperately and repeatedly lunging against the chain.

My brother told me to turn my back to him. He didn’t want the dog to associate his pain with me.

If the GOP candidates continue harping on negativity (crumbling economy, meddlesome military strategy, failing entitlement programs, et al), they run the risk of doing just that: associating themselves with the pain experienced by the American people.

Americans don’t need to be reminded of the pain they feel. They don’t need a soapbox orator to feign empathy with their daily struggles.

They want to be rejuvenated by forward-looking, credible solutions.

The candidate who wins this election is the one who runs a consistent campaign of communal and credible optimism.

Message Component #1: Communal Optimism

Here’s how this sounds:

“This is America, and above all, America is a nation that perseveres and overcomes.

“Americans are not wimpy children begging for handouts. We are proud, tough, resilient survivors who meet challenges head-on.

“We meet tough luck with hard work. In the ashes of our darkest failures we cultivate the seeds of everlasting hope. We don’t whine our way through problems — we innovate out of them.

“The American Dream may have dimmed, but it is far from dead. It’s embers smolder hot in the heart of every citizen.

“And together, we can breathe new life into our cherished dream — the dream that every American, no matter how common, has equal opportunity to live an extraordinary life.

“This will require sacrifices, but sacrifice is nothing new to us.

“Through sacrifice we backed up our cherished words written in the Declaration of Independence. We endured the Civil War. We’ve confronted racial prejudice and gender inequality. We halted aggression and vanquished terror and tyranny in world wars.

“We are Americans, and we are up to the challenge.”

Etcetera, etcetera.

Message Component #2: Credibility

Note above the emphasis on credible.

I’m not talking about the phony, demagogic mantra of “hope” and promise of “change” that swept Obama into office.

That worked only because Obama was the anti-Bush; Americans were so tired of Bush and Iraq they were ready for anyone and anything other than Bush.

Running as the anti-Obama — using similar tactics and rhetoric as Obama’s 2008 campaign — won’t work for a GOP candidate in 2012.

Although they’re all trying to, none of them can credibly claim that Obama is to blame for our current troubles.

Obama inherited an intricate mess from his predecessors, and any president would struggle under our current conditions.

Sure, he’s done things that haven’t been popular, such as pass the health care bill.

But independent thinkers know he’s not to blame for the economy.

Running a negative blame-game campaign this election cycle would be cheap, unfair, and disingenuous — and independents will see through it.

Although it worked for Obama, given the circumstances of 2008, rhetoric alone won’t win this election.

The eloquence of hope and optimism must be backed by practical, concrete, easily-understandable, and above all, credible solutions that independent voters will know can make an immediate difference.

Don’t tell us you will work to create jobs — show us how you’ll do it.

Don’t feed us bogus lines supporting the status quo. Give us the hard truth plainly — that the status quo is unsustainable, that sacrifices must be made.

But again, soften that hard truth with the uplifting vision of optimism.

So here’s your bottom-line, winning message: We are Americans, we are survivors, and together we can and we will conquer any challenge.

The GOP candidate who hits that message hard and unceasingly until the election has an excellent shot at winning our hearts and the election.

“…man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.” -Henry David Thoreau

Most of us barely scratch the surface of our potential.

We’re scared to death. We’re imprisoned by our own fears.

Fear is a product of perception. Change your perception and you either dissolve fear, or at least shift it to different perceived threats.

One of our most devastating perceptions is in regards to risk.

False perceptions of risk squander our potential perhaps more than any other factor.

Specifically, the most deceitful perception is that there is a hierarchy of risk, as in one choice is more or less risky than another.

See how this plays out in real life:

• Entrepreneurship is riskier than being an employee with a large corporation.
• Mountain climbing, rock climbing, and canyoneering are riskier than staying at home by a warm fire.
• Trusting intuition to tread new paths is riskier than following the crowd.
• Audaciously approaching that gorgeous girl/guy you’re dying to meet is riskier than sticking with the “comfortable” girls/guys who don’t make you nervous.

You get the point.

What’s ignored in this absurd construct is the biggest, most destructive risk of all: not achieving our potential and dreams and fulfilling our missions.

So we labor under this perception while hating our jobs, watching other people have adventures on TV, seeing our ideas implemented by others while exclaiming from our sofas, “I thought of that first!”, wishing we had the courage to pursue our dream relationships — in short, living mediocre lives.

And we’re stuck because all the motivational speakers and gurus and cultural factors tell us this: In order achieve greatness we must increase our risk tolerance.

Don’t Push Through Risk — Rethink & Revalue Instead

But there’s a much more accurate and enlightened way to overcome the fear of risk, and that is to rethink and revalue it.

The first step in this process is to recognize that EVERYTHING is risky.

It’s not that entrepreneurship is riskier than employeeship; it’s that each carry different risks. And our success or failure depend on how we value those respective risks.

In other words, risk perception is a function of personal values, not perceived results or the true risk inherent to any choice.

You’re not an employee in a job you hate because it is actually safer/less risky to have a job than it is to start a mini-factory.

You’re there because you value comfort and security more than you value growth and adventure and hard decision-making.

Because the reality is that your job is no less risky — in different ways — than entrepreneurship.

Exercise: What Do You Value?

After the first step of recognizing that everything is risky, step two is to sit down and get crystal clear on your values.

By doing the exercise thoroughly, you’ll encounter two things:

1. Accepting the reality that your actions and lifestyle may not align with your chosen values, then fixing that with integrity.
2. You can be more conscious about choosing different, more useful values.

The Fear of Loss

The definition of risk is “exposure to the chance of injury or loss; a hazard or dangerous chance.”

And, based on that definition, people say with a straight face that entrepreneurship is riskier than employeeship?

C’mon, now, let’s be real.

What about the exposure to the chance of losing out on our potential? Why is that not a greater consideration in our risk calculations?

The reason is simple: It’s hard to quantify, touch and feel our personal potential, which makes it difficult to be more conscious about our risk calculations.

Know Thyself

Now we’re getting to the real heart of the matter.

Our risk calculations are flawed when we don’t know who we are and don’t believe that we’re capable of greatness.

To quote from Thoreau again:

“What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

Or as James Allen wrote:

“Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself; he also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.”

Therefore, the most successful individuals are those with the brightest, clearest, most compelling vision of themselves and the strongest belief that they can achieve that vision.

Risk is No Longer a Valid Excuse for Mediocrity

Every possible course is rife with its own particular risks — things that will be lost by choosing one action over another.

Drop the nonsense that your choices are about avoiding risk, because they’re not; they’re about aligning with your values.

Get clear on your values, and align your daily actions with those values.

Create a compelling vision of your best self, from which will flow your goals.

Then, once you’ve identified those goals, consciously choose the values necessary to achieve those goals.

For example, suppose you currently value safety and security more than growth and adventure, but your goal is to become an entrepreneur and build a mini-factory.

Rather than falsely thinking you have to push through fear and accept the “higher” risk, simply choose different values, while acknowledging the risks of not making that shift.

Do this, and you’ll move the world.

Mediocrity will become a laughable dream from a past life. You’ll dance and sing and shimmer and shine while others shuffle through life as dull shells.

Most importantly, you’ll escape the most awful fate known to man: What might have been.

Essential Reading:

• As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
• Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
• Free the Beagle by Roy H. Williams