Chapter Four: Choosing The Hard Way
Chapter Four
Sticking with it is a boring drone interrupted only by the choice to do what I’ve always done or to tell myself “no”. The payoff seems mathematically sound at the onset, but then loses the energy of likelihood once the journey toward has begun. What’s this all for? Status quo isn’t so bad. What if I get down the road only to fail and lose my path back to the cozy life I once had? It’s a risk that I continually question, but ultimately deem worth it.
I have this crazy idea. This Matthew 25 “double what God has given me” idea. It’s a risk to invest what I have in the hopes to get it returned doubled, but I think that’s what I’m supposed to do. Actually, I’ve been thinking about how to do it for the last year. I’ve had a pretty good idea of how to do it for the last five months. Now I’ve got the ball rolling and I wave between fear and certainty. I try to push out fear, but then get afraid I might be crazy.
I watched a documentary last night about a Silicon Valley inventor who duped almost everybody about her invention that was poised to transform the medical field. It’s called “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”. It didn’t work, at all, and everyone involved had to lie while they tried to figure it out a way to make something that was physically impossible to create. The woman believed so deeply in her idea that she carried long past fraud, wasting billions of investors money, in the hopes that her idea would eventually come to fruition. She’s being indicted and still believes that it’s just a matter of time. She quoted Thomas Edison saying “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
It got me thinking. What if I’m just really good at talking about ideas, I get people on board, and I take this huge leap to start something that won’t work. It’ll set me back so far that it scares me. Fear tells me to sit and appreciate what I have. It tells me not to risk the status quo, the good and happy status quo, for something that may not work.
Then I remembered, God doesn’t speak Fear. He’s not using my emotions to tell me anything.
“There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.”
My approach is to be honest about everything as I try to get funding and make a physical version of my mental picture. “Honest” because of course, and also, I need the financial professionals to asses my risk with all the information. I’m within days of finding out if this is going to happen. I’m writing this for both of us. I’m writing it for me because if it works, I want to remember every part of the story. I’m writing it for you because, A) it’s the only way I can talk about it, and B) it might inspire you to do something crazy, too.