The risk is not that your friends will laugh at you, or that the people who excluded you in high school will think you’re lame.
Nor is the risk that your co-workers will judge you and tell that what you wrote isn’t any good (even if that may be true, but even if it is — that’s okay). The risk is also not that it won’t work and because it didn’t work once or ever that your entire future is ruined.
No. Those aren’t the real risks.
The real risk is that you don’t fail enough to learn from your mistakes so that you eventually accumulate enough experience, instinct, and resilience to figure out what actually will work.
The real risk is giving up early on, and then three years later, when someone else is saying what you had thought about saying two years ago (but you had given up saying anything one year before that), you realize that you were onto something all along. But being onto something doesn’t matter when what matters is having done the actual thing.
And the even greater risk, more real than the last one, is that your current way of being suddenly goes extinct. Then, what you could have had right now — if only you had stuck with it for the past three years when approaching it as if it was practice and play would have been enough to amount to something — has now become an urgent need.
The real risk is mistaking not knowing what real risk is. What feels like a big risk might actually be small. The real risk might be not taking one at all.
