Thoughts on courage

You must all think I’m crazy, but I just keep finding boxes with Anita’s papers in them. It’s like she never threw anything away! Tonight I was moving some boxes that I thought had photos and frames in them but a couple had papers too. Some of them were dated around 1999, the time she started working full time at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago.

Now this was a time when she was very early in her walk with Christ. Truthfully, she was not spending a lot of time studying the bible at this point in her life. She has an old bible that she was using – a Zondervan New International Version.

Crap, I just pulled it out and now I find that she annotated the heck out of it. I thought this one was clean and it was the other one (The Life Application Study Bible NIV that she bought in 04-05) that she had really used. Okay, so now I’m thinking I don’t know how much study she did around 1999. Maybe more than I knew.

So this was a wall post that I found in the box:

We must have courage to bet on out ideas, to take calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.

Google shows this was a quote from Maxwell Maltz, an early self-help guru whose classic book (I told you she liked the old ones) Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living out of Life was published in 1960.

Since her days as a paralegal, Anita always wanted to be the boss – or at least her own boss. Even as she was starting a new career as a lawyer, she was dreaming of owning her own business. She went through tons of business ideas, many of them well researched (would you expect less?). She never came across one that seemed right for her.

One huge factor in not opening her own business earlier was the risk involved. There was no steady paycheck. In fact, it was likely more money would flow into the business than out of it, at least for several years at the start. And the steady paycheck – the money – was her safety net. Fear of flying without a net kept her from starting her own business earlier.

I would bet that Anita had not thought about this quote for years. I expect if I handed it to her in 2009, she would have said, “Wow. Yeah, I’m still struggling with that one.”

But she did take a huge step, finally taking that risk to open her own business. I thought working from home would mean she worked less, but it really meant that she worked the same amount but was with her family most of that time. Eventually, she realized that what she wanted was not to be the boss, but to be in control of her own time in order to fulfill her priorities – God, then family, then everything else.

I had often told her that courageous people are not people without fear. They are people who are fearful but act anyway. (I read something like that once.) “Everyday living requires courage.” I try to teach that to my children, do those hard things in spite of your fears.