On Balancing Realism And Enthusiasm.

This is a guest post by Kelsey Freeman.

I’ve always had lots of ideas, even when I was a little kid. When I was a kid it was designs for tree houses, mechanisms for a rubber-band guns, and ways to improve the go-kart my dad hand built me. In college I was overflowing with ideas for various garments (both costumes and practical), projects I wanted to do in our fabrication shop, and I had so many different concepts for my thesis that I almost didn’t graduate. In both my childhood and in college, I almost always pursued my projects, regardless of whether or not I thought I could finish them – it was for the sake of trying.

Unfortunately, it seems that post-graduation, I have largely lost this drive, and I’m not sure why. This concerns me deeply.

The other day, while reading about a man who offers sidecar motorcycle tours of Shanghai using a bike similar to the one my boyfriend and I have, I thought “What a great idea! I bet there would be a market for something similar in Washington DC! What a fun business that would be!

I would get paid to drive a motorcycle and meet new and interesting people all day!”. But then…that was it. I didn’t research to find out if it was feasible. I didn’t look up what would be needed for such a business (permits, licenses, insurance, etc). I didn’t even check to see if there is a similar business in any US city. I just sort of sighed to myself and thought “Wouldn’t that be nice…”, and that was it. Not exactly the reaction I probably would have had a couple years ago.

What is the difference between the pre-graduation me and the post-graduation me? I think there are a couple things:

A fear of failure is one of them. Rather than “wasting” time researching a business venture that probably would not succeed, I just wrote it off right from the start and justified it to myself as “being objective”. Not only was I afraid it wouldn’t work, I was afraid to even look up facts that might tell me such! Classic avoidance behavior, right there. In reality, I’m short-changing myself without ever even looking at the bill.

A little research costs nothing but maybe a couple hours of my time, but instead I’d already decided that it wasn’t feasible, without so much as a preliminary search on Google. Fear of failure can be crippling – it’s what prevents millions of folks from approaching beautiful, seemingly “unattainable” men and women standing around at parties, bars, etc.

When you stop yourself from doing something you haven’t even begun, because you are afraid you might discover an answer you don’t like, the only sure thing is that in doing so, your idea is dead in the water. This is bad.

The other thing is that honestly, I now have a better picture of what I want to do with my life than I did during my childhood and even during college, and I tend to disregard opportunities that don’t jive with that vision. I think a lot of my exploration came from a desire to test things out and absorb them in order to figure out if they were “me” or not. During my thesis and my year living in rural Korea, I really developed a very solid notion and image of what I wanted my life to be.

Now that I have a more secure, well-rounded concept of self as well as a more clear and specific vision for my life, I tend to be more critical of ideas I have and think about about how they would or would not fit into what I want my life to be. This is good.

I feel that in a self-designed lifestyle, you have to find a balance in many things, and enthusiasm is no exception. If I still pursued everything with as much fervor and enthusiasm as I did in childhood and college, I would be totally overwhelmed and end up wasting time on projects that ultimately are not in line with my life vision.

If I let a fear of failure start to take hold, I risk never chasing after any of the dreams that challenge me. The trick is to be objective in evaluating the feasibility of my ideas while still maintaining that oh-so-useful childlike zeal. It’s a delicate balance, but an important one.

How do you strike a balance between objectivity and enthusiasm in your own life? Do you tend to be more toward one end or the other? Are there any projects in your life that you never followed up on because you were afraid of what might become of them?

About the author.
Kelsey Freeman is a jack of all trades working odd jobs in the Washington DC area. She has a degree in photojournalism and is something of a nomad, having moved 30 times in 8 years. She’s passionate about inspiring people to find their own path in life and pursue it, and she spends her spare time working on her motorcycle, participating in historical reenactments, teaching herself Mongolian for an upcoming project, and blogging at her site Drifting Focus: Living Life Frame by Frame.

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