The Unimportance Of The So Very Important
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 by Mark | Posted in Unconventional Thinking | CommentsWe tell ourselves such wonderfully crafted, artfully presented, seemingly bulletproof lies.
But they are lies nevertheless. And then we swear to them. Such as the belief that we need a certain thing. A sale to a major client. A love interest. A first-place finish in a given contest.
We don’t need any of these things. Want them? Fine. Aspire to them? Sure. But need them? Absolutely not!
One of the keys to maximizing the joys of life, to extracting its beauties,
to waking up every morning with a zest for the day, the future, the promise of what is to come, is to recognize that nothing and no one is a must have.
Nothing is necessary.
This liberation allows us to move on from loss to gain, from mistake to success, from failure to fresh start. Because we recognize that what we told ourselves we had to have, was just a myth dressed up as reality.
An entrepreneur I met some years ago told me he spent a year in terrible depression because he lost half the money he had made in building a world-class business. Chucked it in a dumb, highly-leveraged bet on exotic stock options. And that sent him into a tailspin, sitting alone in movie theaters, pining for the So Very Important money that wasn’t really that important after all.
He still had half his wealth. He still had his wondrous mental powers. He still had his entrepreneurial DNA. And for a year he wasted it on self-pity believing he needed something, had to have something, was not complete without that something.
All lies he told himself.
All lies we all tell ourselves.
When we recognize that the So Very Important is Really Unimportant, we can forego worrying about its loss and look much faster and happier to the future if and when it is gone.
The rear view mirror is a peak only into the past. The windshield is a portal to all the wonders, the discoveries, the joys, the successes yet to come. 
So often I hear people in business tell me they don’t want to start a project for fear it won’t work. It is, they tell me, too important to fail.
Does that mean the US never should have launched the Manhattan Project? That Obama shouldn’t risk the run for the presidency? That Google shouldn’t have tried to build a search engine?
I guarantee you that if you have the drive, the guts, the determination, the imagination, the dreams
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