Fearless Pursuit: The Courage to Rise

“You just need to be smart enough to understand that your success is more about your courage than your intelligence.” — Orange Book

I define success—or greatness—as simply the ability to achieve your medium-to-long-term goals in a decisive, ideal, and sometimes public way. Public because, once achieved, your goals will inevitably attract both admirers and haters. Admirers because these goals are exceedingly difficult to reach. Haters because they will assume you cheated, got lucky, or had an unfair advantage.

How often do we, who were never mentored or groomed in psychology and mindset from a young age, convince ourselves that if we were smarter, faster, or prettier, we would have already attained the success we fantasize about—a happy home in the suburbs, a spot on the national team, a role on TV?

I cannot emphasize enough how detrimental this mindset is, because it blinds us to the most essential traits of success: Courage—self-belief, self-assurance, resilience, tenacity! These are the true cornerstones of achievement—the mental infrastructure required to handle success and the extraordinary responsibility that comes with it.

• With courage, you will show up every day to face your limitations.
• With self-belief, you will not compare yourself to those ahead of you.
• With self-assurance, you will speak your mind and let mistakes and failures pass through you, unshaken.
• With resilience, you will never give in to temporary defeat—you will rise, fiercer every time you fall. In fact, you will laugh at rejection and failure, because you carry seeds of divinity within you. You are one with the stars, and therefore, already successful as you are.
• With tenacity, you will prepare and perform with utmost confidence and aggression, showing no mercy toward internal or external incompetence.

“You don’t need a better computer to become a writer. You don’t need a better guitar to become a musician. You don’t need a better camera to become a photographer. What you need is to get to work.” — James Clear 

— Cancelo Alvarez