I cannot tell you how much fear of public shaming and disdain has held me back my entire life. I’ve pretty much smalled myself down because I was so nervous about random, anonymous (or not) mean things happening. And I talk about that more specifically in the podcast.
Teddy Roosevelt has this quote from a speech in Paris in 1910 just after he ran for president. There were over 2,000 people there. “Citizenship in a Republic,” or “The Man in the Arena.”
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
TR
The applause lasted more than two minutes. Multiple times.
“The first time I read this quote,” Dr. Brené Brown wrote in the intro to her book Daring Greatly, “I thought, This is vulnerability. Everything I’ve learned from over a decade of research on vulnerability has taught me this exact lesson. Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”
So here goes:
Ignore the noise.
Blow off the haters.
Do your work.
Follow your passion.
Love your people.
Power through or love your way through your insecurities.
RANDOM THOUGHT LINK
We talk about feet sort of, but really facilitated meeting ice breakers. Either one? Totally sexy.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Sparty doesn’t care if people call him a toothless weirdo. He just loves every moment. Be like Sparty.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
