what if you're wrong?

It’s so easy, when faced with something big, to choose the worst possible outcome. What if you don’t take the job, or quit the job, and your life falls apart? What if you choose love, and love doesn’t choose you? What if you reach back out, and they think you’re weird now? What if you’re still thinking about it, and they already moved on? What if you show up, and it’s not what you expect? What if you try, and you end up embarrassed? What if none of it matters?

But hear this: what if you’re wrong?

 
What if the worst possible outcome, is you, the worst you, protecting you from change?
 
Protecting you from not taking the job, and finding a weirder, but deeper, path? From quitting, and gaining something? From being vulnerable, and finding comfort?
 
From taking a risk, and being rewarded?
 
This is true in the choices you make for how you are, what you believe, and who you become in the world. For the risks you take, and the ones you don’t. For the things you consider, and the ones you wonder about.
 
The worst you doesn’t want change, because it doesn’t want to be wrong.
 
But the truth is, sometimes you have to risk being wrong, being embarrassed, losing, in order to win.
 
Sometimes you have to be vulnerable in a way you wouldn’t ever have expected, certainly not again, in order to live in the life, and the world, that’s worth living in.
 
Because it can’t exist without that.
 
Now, as you look to the weeks, months, and years ahead: tell the worst you to step aside. And ask yourself about the best you—the one you dismissed, the one that was too irrational or too naive or too hopeful—ask yourself: what would it mean to really give it a chance?