Audacity – Enemy of Apathy #1

The definition of Audacity from dictionary.com
1. boldness or daring, especially with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.
2. effrontery or insolence; shameless boldness: His questioner’s audacity shocked the lecturer.

By glancing over the definition, it may not seem complementary to call someone audacious or to say someone “has” audacity. I am going to tell you exactly the opposite. To achieve and aspire in this world you need audacity. This idea has been communicated in subtler ways; “positive thinking brings positive actions”, “you have to believe to do”, and other derivatives of similar ideas. They don’t go far enough.

When you are trying to accomplish something significant, do you try to be great at it? Why do it if you are going to half ass it? I say great is not good enough, your goal, to borrow from gaping void, should be to be “totally fucking amazing”!

Amazing-ness does not come by simply having positive thought or believing in yourself. It doesn’t reach far enough. You need to have a level of self confidence that propels you through your doubts. “I think I can” is great for the “Little Engine” and it may get you started, but for amazing, you need to be thinking know that “I am going to accomplish my goal and nothing is going to stop me”.

I know Oprah believes in the Secret, but to accomplish what she has the Secret is like the first flight of steps on the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower. She had to have a belief that grew into a boldness to become one of the most important people in television, and then equally amounts of that audacity to shut it down. I am not an Oprah fan, but looking at what she has accomplished, largely on her own terms, it is pretty inspiring, and awe-inspiring.

Enough about Oprah, For the rest of this post, I am going to use myself as an example. You should use yourself in relating to these concepts. Everyone has accomplished something amazing that started by first conquering your doubt and apathy. I am going to break down the definition of audacity from earlier in the post, boldness or daring, especially with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.

Boldness or Daring.
When I started my company 4 years ago, I was leaving a very good job. I actually even liked my job well enough. House prices were starting to drop and we were at the beginning of recession. I also had a 2 year old son and my wife was 7 months pregnant with our second child. I think you can see why I often say that the hardest thing about starting my company was deciding to start it. Everything after that just flowed by performing a series of small actions. That initial decision was the most difficult one I ever made.

Looking back, I realize the amount of boldness that I held to think I could do any better than the current situation. I often wonder if I was in that same situation now, 4 years later, if I would make the same decision. It ended up being one of the best decisions I have ever made, but it took “guts”, brass ones.

Confident or Arrogant
I have often been told that I was confident, arrogant, or even cocky. I think a lot of the time it was meant to be an insult, not a complement. Regardless, I have always taken it as a complement. I have always felt that one of my biggest assets was the confidence to try, even if it led to failure, just about anything. Confidence is not necessarily the feeling that you are going achieve, but rather lacking the fear of failure when you don’t succeed.

If you lack self confidence in something that you want to do, you need to start acting. I have a goal someday of writing a book. I don’t know why, I just want to. That is the primary reason I started writing this blog. I knew that I needed to practice writing on a regular basis to get better at it. What I didn’t realize was the amount of confidence that I lacked in my writing and how people around me would accept it. To be honest, I often feel like writing this blog requires a large amount of audacity. Who am I to dare think that I have anything worthwhile enough to write to interest anyone? I didn’t share a post on Facebook until after my 10th post and after my wife had already begin sharing it. I still have some doubt if my posts are any good, but I am slowly building that confidence that will hopefully grow into audacity (and a book). If I fail, who cares, I have found that I enjoy writing.

Disregard for Safety, Conventional Thought, or Restrictions
This is the most important part of the definition. Audacity is not simply being boldly confident (or daringly arrogant). It is using those emotions as power to enable you to overcome the restrictions that we put on ourselves, or put on us by others. For many people, it is very hard to start a company because most of us have been ingrained with the idealism of getting a good job. We go to college and follow the trodden path because that is the conventional method of “success”. You have to be insane, in a very good way, to break out of the shell that we all have around our actions and thoughts.

So be audacious. Do something that is not easy or expected. Go back to school. Quit your job. Have kids. Paint a masterpiece. Jump out of an airplane.

Be bold. Be confident. Defy convention.