Be Brave Friday

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

I have known this guy for a couple of decades now. He is a very unhappy human. He took a job at a lab but his dream? To be an astronaut. To be a satirist. To work on something in nature. Or even to make more money doing that same job in a different state.

He’s smart. He’s brilliant really and he’s had a couple of opportunities to do different things, but he doesn’t ever take those opportunities.

He’s too afraid of the risk, the step. He holds tightly to his responsibility to his family, which is so kind and lovely, but I’m betting that his family would like it if he did take a risk if it had the potential of making him happier and less resentful.

This became chaos this week. I’m showing you it anyway.

One of my grandmothers wrote poems. She hid them away for decades—decades. She painted with that dark oil painting style of the early 1900s that just sucks you in. She would only occasionally let those paintings be seen.

How many people could she have inspired, I wondered, if she’d allowed herself that risk—the risk to be seen—the risk of showing her art, her voice, her essence.

Here’s the thing: we only have a limited time on this Earth. We don’t know if we’ll get to live to 100 or to retire or what the world will be like in a decade.

If there is something we want to do, if there is something we believe in, we need to do that thing, become that person who takes some risks.

I completely get it. New ideas are scary. And trying new things is sort of frightening and that’s why most people don’t give it all up and start a new business or become an astronaut or move towns. Or to just show your poem, your art, your want, your dreams.

I’ve been fiddling with this too in my 10-minute moments.

There will always be high performers, average performers, and low performers. There will be those big-time innovators and early adopters. These people have a great tolerance of risk. But most of us wonder and think about what the point of any upcoming change might be, if there’s something in it for us.

In the world of business, there is a theory that you have to get your early adapters, those supporters, those believers. People like author Simon Sinek say that those early adapter people believe in your business or your project or your organization not because of what you do, but why you do it.

When we started the Bar Harbor Story (our local paper), we had people who passionately believed in what we were doing, no questions asked, and supported us.

Those people weren’t my friends, actually.

Most of our friends? They don’t even like our posts on Facebook. Still.

That used to make my heart hurt a little bit.

But then I think about the other people—the supporters—the early adapters. These other people were of another mentality, a mentality that passionately believed in the why of what we are doing.

The why matters.

That’s why for our newspaper, we explain the weirdness of what we’re doing. We’re offering our community really good daily local news for free (plus some bonus typos). That’s not a super typical news model, right?

And it’s definitely not a super typical business model.

But we do it because we absolutely passionately want the people in our community—everyone in our community—to be able to get local news even if they can’t pay.

People scoffed. “Everyone can afford $45 a year or $80 a year.”

They can’t.

Do I wish they could? Hell yeah.

Here’s the thing. Not everyone can afford the news, but everyone deserves to know what’s going on, to make informed choices. That’s what a representative democracy is supposed to be about.

We do this because we care about our community and all the people within it (even the curmudgeons, even the ones who think differently) with all our heart.

That’s our why for the paper.

Honestly, it’s the why for almost everything I do—just with some tiny tweaks.

I added some ghosts here.

Telling people your why—that emotional level of why you do what you do? That’s vulnerable and scary, especially when you’re friends scoff, but it’s what makes change and it’s what makes progress. And it’s also keeps you from resenting your norm, from resenting yourself for being too fearful to make a leap.

Don’t do that to yourself, okay?

Take a chance. Find that why in your life. Be brave. Support others and support yourself, too. Clicking a like on something? That’s pretty damn easy. But how often do we just not do that?

Don’t be afraid of change. Don’t be afraid of your why, okay? Don’t be afraid to be seen.

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