If you are anything like me, you have experienced more than a few incidents of self-sabotage over the course of your life. At the time, you thought what you were doing was perfectly reasonable. You just wanted to think things through, develop a plan, avoid mistakes down the road, make sure you don’t embarrass yourself, anticipate problems, avoid conflict, make sure you took care of the details in advance, had everything down pat, knew your subject matter forwards and backwards, talked to the right people, got the right permissions, ran some feasibility studies, grabbed a nice dinner…and, to your great surprise, you never started your project.

Of course nobody wants to look like a fool, but none of us are perfect. We make mistakes. In fact, you might say that the only person who ends up looking like a fool is the person who believes they won’t make mistakes. If something is worth doing, then it is worth taking some chances and actually doing it! We can’t succeed if we don’t start, and quite often it is our fear, not of failure but of success, that keeps us stuck! We don’t know who we would be if we tried something new, so we settle for our current situation. The devil we know is better than the angel we don’t.

And, at the end of our lives, we just might find we never lived. Don’t let that happen.