Embracing Courage: The Power of Taking That Leap

If you ask me the character that most needs to have shine at the end of VECON 3, it’s this. The courage to jump is a really interesting thing for me to think about. It’s the cousin to what I was just talking about with fear. I remember going to Jamaica with my friend Joe Minaka, who I’m looking at right now, much to the chagrin of my mother, if she ever knew this. I remember us standing on top of a cliff in Jamaica, and we needed to jump. That’s what the fuck we were doing. I just remember standing over it and being fascinated by how scary that jump looked. But as I literally jumped off, landed, came back up, the thing I was most fascinated by was what the fuck, like, went through my head in the moment that triggered me from, fuck this, I’m gonna talk myself out of this, like always, to I’m gonna jump. It was based on courage. But what you say to yourself when you jump, in real life or metaphorically, is a very fascinating thing. The thing I say with humility is there’s a sheer lack of collective courage at the conference right now. When I look at so many of you, it’s just so obvious to me how capable so many of you are to deal with the ramifications. It connects the two characters. So many of you need to jump, and you’re scared of what will go wrong without Realizing what will go wrong will just require adaptability for you to go back. The fear of going backwards after you jumped is something that I am so fascinated by. As if the people in the crowd judging your misstep have anything to actually do with your life. So many of you are crippled to jump into the courage because you’re scared that if you lose, you have to go backwards, when in reality, you’re already back. Do you understand, bro? You’re already fucking backwards. You’re already stuck. You want it, and yet you can’t jump. And courage should be applauded. Courage needs to be understood. And Courage’s relationship with adaptability is a very big deal. I promise you, you will never. I promise you. I promise you, you will never regret your acts of courage. Ever. When you go and talk and so many of you know my spiel here, you know how much I love hanging out with the ogs. And you talk to the people that have actually lived it. Their regrets are never their moments of jumping. Their regrets are always the moments they didn’t jump. This week I’ve had the luxury of hanging out with the OG’s. Some of them bang Newports like a fucking gangster. That’s you, and I respect it. Fuck. But when I tell you what they focus on and what they understand and what they see. There’s so much power in youth. The saying of youth is wasted on the young. Is very true. Experience is incredibly important going through the reps, and I just implore all of you, if you leave with any part of this key, please take a little courage away from this week and do something. Do something next week that you’ve been scared to do.