The battle inside your head

# Chapter 140

I need to fail more. Along with those impossibles that I was talking about yesterday. Taking risks and making new efforts with big learning curves, yeah that sounds like lots of failure, and a few impossibles. This would be the recipe of success at any age, but it seems to be especially difficult to settle into this approach at my age, and my stage of life, at my gray beard and thinning hair stage of maturity. This is the shining star of success age, not the risk taking age. This is the peak of your skill and career age, not the failure age.

Well if you need the admiration of others more than you need success, I suppose this is true. You can still have wisdom and gravity and good thinking as you age, while learning an entirely new field of business or study or skills that will make you leaner and sharper and more likely to have a large success, than those who just flow into their peak in their late 50’s or early 60’s. This battle is going on primarily inside your own head, but the desire for admiration and respect are very very powerful forces in anyone’s life, and maybe older folks the most of all. I hope that is not true in my life, but I fear it may be.

Well here I am at nearly 59 years old, with a brand new 30 year mortgage and 359 payments to go, yet I surrounded by my wife and kids and grandkids and have so much, but so much is at risk unless I fail more, learn more, do the impossible and succeed more than I ever have.