When I was a grade school kid I judged my worth based on how good I was in sports and how fast I could run, and that led to me feeling quite mediocre about myself. I was either the slowest or next to the slowest boy in elementary school. I was nearly a year younger than most of my classmates and one of the smallest boys. I was very shy, and until the second grade, nobody realized I was nearly legally blind. Even though I was one of the smartest kids I wasn’t smart enough to figure out why I couldn’t see the blackboard and my teacher thought I had some kind of learning disability. Once I got a pair of eyeglasses I became one of the teacher’s pets smart kids. But I was far from cool. Being able to do math brought zero street cred to Boomer generation kids in school. Through junior high (this was before middle school was a thing) I continued to see myself as a nerd. Smart, but lacking much other appeal.
It took until my junior year in high school until things began to change. I hit a growth spurt and caught up with most of my classmates. I gained a lot of confidence after some real spiritual growth and agreeing to star in a musical play that our youth group preformed on a cross country tour. I was accepted by popular kids as a peer for what felt like the very first time. I fell in love with a gloriously attractive girlfriend and worked some good paying part time jobs. All of that led me to a major insight into life. There are no cool kids! I had envied and day dreamed about being the high school quarterback with the head cheerleader beside me at the prom. I thought those popular teenagers had it made, and that it was pretty unfair that the genetics fairy had blessed me with a nice brain but not enough of the stuff that impressed other teens. But when I got to know some of the “in” crowd it was glaringly obvious that they were at least as insecure and self conscious as I was. They were good at projecting what they thought everyone expected to see, but they were as angst ridden and imposter theory beset as I was, on my worst day.
I learned that all it took to be cool was to act as if you were cool and confident. As Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. And although I didn’t have much self confidence at first I really was a natural when it came to acting. And I found that by focusing on the things I had done that seemed impossible at the time such as acting, dating, making a sports team and excelling in school, that I was able to build confidence to shore up my performance and give it bones. That carried me through college and then when I landed a job that let me leverage my intellect, my life really took off. It wasn’t about being the fastest or the strongest anymore, but the most mentally agile and intuitive. Suddenly I was winning and winning big in the work world. They hadn’t seen an engineer with more talent and I was fast tracked to bigger things. I truly had a joyful career.
I’ve often wondered, if I had never acted in that play because of the fear I felt, would I have taken a different path. If I had never had that amazing girl friend, so out of my league, would I have been an underachiever for the rest of my life? Without the confidence that I could be as good as any of the cool kids would I have stepped out into the high risk high reward situations that made my career successful? It was more than just those two choices, but they started me on a path to consistently say yes to things that felt terrifying. Because I could look back and see that almost every time I took the big risk I got the big reward. And when I did fail, it was never fatal, and usually taught me something very valuable.
I’m not sure why, in my senior retirement, I thought back to my adolescent and teen years today. But I’m glad I did. Life turns on the smallest of decisions. We lie to ourselves when we say, “It doesn’t matter if I turn this opportunity down. There will be others.” Because just like acting with courage makes you courageous, acting in fear makes you a coward. And every time you let fear stop you from stepping ahead you slip further behind. There is a point, I think, where you will no longer even notice the opportunities because you have turned so many away. Conversely, I don’t have to weigh the fear of failure or embarrassment any more when an opportunity presents itself, because I’ve conditioned myself to grab on to opportunities. It’s a habit anyone can build. It’s starts out as the scariest thing you’ve ever done, but the rewards are bountiful.
There are no cool kids who are destined from birth to have it all. We all face fear when opportunities show up at our door. And we all get to decide to push past fear or to surrender to it. What are you going to do?
Do you think that some people are destined to be popular, wealthy and outrageously happy with no effort expended? The Cool Kids?
Or are the Cool Kids just the same as the rest of us. With the same fears, and perhaps not a bit happier than everyone else?
Did you ever grab on to a frightening opportunity and have it change your life for the better?