Life is all about momentum. Aka the direction you’re headed in and how hard it might be to stop the veritable hamster wheel of your life at any given moment.

Changing course takes effort. Always. Basic physics tells us that an object will remain in motion, the same motion, until it is met by an opposing force. (P.S.- Mrs. B from 11th grade, if you’re reading this, know that I really enjoyed making you eat your words that I would fail the physics NYS Regents exam with my 96 point grade.)

The trick, and also the incredibly difficult part, is figuring out if the juice is worth the squeeze (to pull a quote from the classic, The Girl Next Door). Will your life be that much better after changing course? Are the possibilities endless for how good it can get after making this life tweak? Or are you only limited to a potentially small to mediocre window of happiness even after going through all of this effort of shifting gears? Is it worth going through all the trouble of stopping your current life momentum to potentially throw it all down the shitter instead?

Weighing your potential amount of happiness can be tricky at best. Most often we think we know what we want, but really we are just telling each other what we think we should have or what others in our life have told us we need or what we legitimately think we need even though we are woefully misguided. Sometimes we even see our friends doing x y and z, so we feel the need to do x y and z as well, even though our personalities and likes/dislikes/needs could not be more disparate.

The fear of doing whatever it is you’re contemplating can completely cloud over any shred of possible future happiness in your mind. Fear is for sure something that fucks us up big time. Being afraid to lose, to mess up your life, to mess up someone else’s life. Being scared to look stupid, or dumb, or to fail at something that you took a chance on. The fear thing is very real. It can however, be an asset as well.

I love doing things that scare me. To me, being scared to do something often means it’s something worth doing. In those terrifying moments, your resulting happiness is more often than not amplified ten-fold than it would have been if you did something less crazy (or scary, or intimidating, or potentially humiliating, etc.). The best things I’ve done in life and the ones I’m most proud of are those that scared me in the moment. They are the ones that took trusting myself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to reach some crazy goal and cross that terrifying chasm.

I regret everything I thought about doing but was too chicken to do. Everything. All because I doubted myself in that moment for whatever reason and had that little voice in the back of my head that said “you can’t do this” or “you shouldn’t do that” or “you don’t deserve this” while trying to work out the pros and cons. You know what I think? Fuck that voice.

Often times in life, we only get one shot. One shot to nail that job interview, ace a test, tell someone you like them, take the perfect photograph, be there for a friend when they need you most, etc. Sometimes the universe grants us a second moment to correct a wrong, but those times come far and few between. If you spent long enough thinking about something in the past, chances are you should do it when the moment arises, even if it seems slightly insane.

Even if I end up embarrassing the fuck out of myself in one of those otherwise regrettable moments, I’m 9.5 out of 10 times always happy that I took the leap anyway. Someone once told you me ‘you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ - notwithstanding the fact that this was mentioned to me in the context of hitting on girls, or that the originator of this particular idiom is Wayne Gretzky and that is for sure not who I was having this conversation with - this statement is still more than accurate.

If you don’t try and take that leap and say fuck that fear, you’ll never know the potential happiness you might get as a result.

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