Page 54: "If You Couldn't Fail"

To help identify your dreams, Tim takes away the limitations with the four (ok five if you count the uncontracted words) words: "If you couldn't fail"

Good thing I didn't blog my initial response, or even my first read through the book: awkward, stilting, tripping, crippled, adolescent. You may still find my blog that way :)

It surprised me how fluidly answers came after a few days of reading other things, and scampering after a dataset with elements with "different" coverage than expected.

I'd scuba dive.

Not because I actually care about scuba diving, or that there is anything under the ocean that I'd like to see, or that there is anything particularly enchanting to me about cold dark suffocating and claustrophobic places -- but because I hate to be scared.

And, because, if I blow this fear into shreds, I'm counting on the collateral destruction of several thousand more minor fears. So I'm going to atomize the big daddy of all my fears and take out legions and legions of others in this one task.

I think I know I can do this because Tim (whom I do not actually worship, yet, I just say his name when he is due the credit for a concept) advises to convert the "overcome fear of being underwater without a machine"(I'll go almost anywhere in a machine, go figure) into a concrete achievable goal. For me "attaining a scuba license" is not enough -- I've done that, it was hell, I'm still nearly paralyzed when under water. Nope. Mine is going to involve a nice warm clear water dive. I'm not sure yet what I'll do with daughter, man, job, income, time and expenses, but I now have a yardstick to show my progress and when I've succeeded.

This isn't about fixing what's broke, about whipping myself for being a coward and weakling (it's cold down there) and forcemarching myself into proper behavior. I've tried that so many times. The resulting proper behavior has limited the damage or held steady in a situation until I could do something else, but has never brought me satisfaction about where I was heading or what I was doing - and being.

This is about confronting a fear in a stepwise doable way and glorying in the expansion of all horizons when the limitation of fear is obliterated.