The Speed Of Courage

Most men are fundamentally daunted by their work.

Not because they dislike their projects, but because they perceive the project’s road to completion to be a long and difficult one.

It’s the sense that any project worth doing will take tremendous time and effort to complete, and may well still prove a failure in the end, despite all their trouble.

So we unconsciously inflate the time required to complete the project.

We pad our projects with “requisite steps” which are in fact non-essential and have no material impact on the end user.

Not out of laziness but out of terror.

We do this to delay and protect ourselves from the inevitable shock of proof of concept–to shield ourselves from the moment of truth at which our project is let loose in the wild, its merit or lack thereof proven out in the market jungles of the real world.

We are lying to ourselves when we say we “don’t have time to do X.”

There is no causal relationship between time and impact.

The work that constitutes your project will, of course, be carried out in and through time, but time is not the governing factor that determines the end result.

The essential determining relationship is not between time and impact, but between COURAGE and impact.

Courage collapses time.

Courage folds time upon itself, relegates it to a minor role.

Think of a current project.

Ask yourself “what is the outcome you want from this project? What is the essential impact this project is meant to render to its audience?”

Then ask yourself “how can I use utmost courage to deliver that essential impact NOW instead of later?”

What is a courageous conversation you could have with your wife, son, father, brother, mother, daughter, or friend right now, this hour, that would heal an old wound, open up a new path, that would transform the relationship?

When you approach your work and your relationships this way, you will no longer be a man who labors at impact through the constraints of time. You will become the man who renders impact at the speed of courage.

Courage is a muscle. And, as with all muscles, if not exercised, it will atrophy.

Exercise courage as often and as punishingly as you can.

Exercise it in all realms of your life.

The rewards you’ll reap are an order of magnitude greater than any discomfort you feel in the expenditure.

And remember as you stare down the barrel of your next project: time is not your master. Time is not your constraint.

Time is merely the stage.

It is your courage that is the player.

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Bryan Ward is the founder of Third Way Man and author of the LIT Black Paper