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The ones who stopped are failures
Ones who will not start are not brave
If I would be the one who conquers
Perhaps my wretched life I will save

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What is bravery? Google’s definition of bravery is the quality or state of having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty. So, I am in the Navy, and some people when I tell them that, say “oh my goodness, you’re so brave, I could never do that.” I don’t see it as being brave unless we’re going to war, but to be honest, I haven’t experience much in the military in these last 5 years that would make me afraid of anything… the only difficulty I have experienced is the difficulty in getting other people to complete my paperwork in regards to pay… so, no, I wouldn’t call what I do in the military “bravery.” Perhaps initially joining was brave because I had never experienced it before, and when you are about to do something, make a change like that, your subconscious starts posing the question “what if I fail?” Then your past failures will put thoughts like this in “there’s no way you’re going to make it through this, you might as well quit now before you make a fool of yourself.” Now, when it comes to doing new things, sometimes I just do them without thinking, and it is not an act of bravery on my part… so in hindsight, even joining the military, I do not consider brave. Fear or danger has to be present. Now, in my case it was not bravery, but in some cases, joining the military is brave. I believe it depends on the mindset you start in. My mindset was “I’m bored, I guess I’ll join the Naval Reserves… why not?” with a shrug to complete the image. I did not even really care if I failed, I just did what I felt like I could do. Some people go into things taking it more seriously. I think my brother, who joined two months after I did, was brave. He did care, and he did seem to take it relatively seriously. If you look at the past 5 years, my brother and I had different experiences. I will say that no one’s experience in the military is the same. In conclusion to that particular thought, joining the military is not an act of bravery for everyone.

Everyone has the capability to be brave, but I think not everyone knows this. There are many areas in life where we can be brave, such as an introvert extroverting himself to a girl in order to get her phone number. In his case, he was demotivated by fear, and he motivated himself by deciding to fight that fear and go for it. He may have said to himself “what’s the worst that can happen, she says no?” In that guys case, if she says no, then he’s no better or worse off than he was before, but on the chance that she says yes, if he had done nothing it would have been a no, and he would have reason to forget that he didn’t take that risk.

Another example, and this one is personal, I feared making this website. Honestly, I am like one of those people that just does things spontaneously, on a whim, but I have been trying to focus on changing that about myself. I have been trying to teach myself to learn to pause before I do things and assess the situation and figure out logically if it is a risk, I am willing to take. So, how the idea for this website started was I came up with my writing name, which funnily enough, I already had a different Facebook page under the name Lilianna Rochet because I wanted to look someone up and I knew that I was blocked. Then I decided that I wanted somewhere to record my thoughts. I’m a very private person normally, and I see my closest friends posting their thoughts and feelings on their Facebooks, and I just don’t want my thoughts and feelings out there like that, but at the same time I do. I decided to use the Facebook named Lilianna Rochet for making statuses about what I think (mind you this whole process only lasted about a month, so I didn’t do a whole lot of thinking before I did these things). So, in my head it went to Facebook page under a writing name to blogging platforms to me deciding to make a website for my work so that all my work could be found in one place. The idea for the website, I only gave myself 5 days to think about it once the idea was formed. I tried, I really did try to give myself sound arguments for not doing it, but I could not see any downfall. I did get the thought once “but what if I fail?” but I immediately quelled it in my head and said “if I fail, then at least I KNOW that its either something that I can’t or won’t want to do, or I can learn from my mistakes and try again.” I bought the URL on Friday, April 24, 2020, and I started to learn the system… that entire weekend, I only slept 3 hours. I slept on Friday had 3 hours of sleep, woke up on Saturday at 8AM… and did not fall asleep until Monday at 4AM. I spent the entire weekend dedicated to making this website, learning the program, and trying to make it work for me on how I wanted it to go. The entire time I was jumping from frustration to frustration, emotion to emotion. There were moments where I regretted it and said to myself “man, I shouldn’t have done this.” But then I said right back to myself “well, it’s too late now, you’re in, you’ve committed to this, you can’t give up now.” I kept at it and I posted the website at 4AM Monday morning and then passed out and did not wake up until 12PM. I woke up, looked at the website and saw that I had made all kinds of mistakes, but since I was rested, I was able to fix them easily. So yes, that is the last act of bravery I think I have done. I took a risk, and I could still fail, but that is okay. It is okay if I fail, because at least I can say “I owned a website.” Not many people can say that.

So, if you want to be brave, you have to create a dialogue in your head. For some reason, the human brain just lives in a negative place all the time, you have all these negative thoughts that come in and in order to be happy you have to fight them… You know the thoughts I am talking about; we all get them. REJECT the natural way of thinking, and maybe you will be more successful in life… Bravery is not the lack of fear, instead it is the ability to overcome your fears. People are always going to fear something, whether it is fear of rejection, fear of pain, fear of failure… no matter what it is, I believe it is important to conquer those fears, and the only way to quell that fear is to do the exact opposite of what it wants you to do. Commit to the task at hand no matter what difficulty arise or what dangers you are facing. Do not allow fear to hinder you in completing your goals or in taking a risk. You cannot avoid fear altogether, that’s impossible, fear is something we all have to face in life but being able to fight that fear even though you are terrified, that is where your value lies. That is where you are considered brave.

If you live your life without risks, your life can either stay the same or get worse. Here is the logic in that statement, so let us say you have two choices “To buy a house, to not buy a house, that is the question.” Buying a house is a huge commitment, an investment. If you choose to buy the house, you will have a mortgage, you will have property tax, property insurance, you will be responsible for fixing anything that breaks, it would be yours to do with as you will, but you will have the responsibility of owning a house… or you can continue renting, and not have to worry about a lot of that stuff… but let’s say this, yes, buying the house is a risk, but continuing to rent is a risk too. Both places you could lose in a flash due to life circumstances, so why not strive for the decision that would make you happy if it worked out. No one keeps their lives the same, and someday you are going to want different things in life. Why not fight for what you want now? Do whatever it takes to pursue that happiness, because let me tell you, life will throw curveballs at you, and I know it already has… there’s no point in staying where you are, it can either get worse or stay the same, you HAVE to take risks if you want to improve your situation, it’s extremely rare to win the lottery… and the lottery of real life is a dirty trickster.

But what if you fail? Okay, the golden question, look, failure is not something to fear at all. We all fail. Sometimes I fail to put my shirt on the correct way in the morning. Failure is inevitable. I was having this conversation the other night with a group of my writing friends and we were just throwing out stories about how famous people failed a lot before they succeeded, and some of the stories were super depressing and discouraging. Einstein died before a lot of his work was realized, you know, while he was alive, he was only recognized for maybe one of his theories. It was not until many years after his death that they realized he was right, but you know, at least he was recognized at some point. Look, a lot of people go through their entire lives not doing anything to change it, and those are among the poor people who never strived for anything better. Fearing failure is a mistake.

I was talking to a military buddy of mine the other day and he is introverted, so he does not talk a lot, which gives me the opportunity to use him as kind of a guinea pig and bounce ideas off of. I will tell you, if you ever let me talk, I will not shut up. I was telling him that babies do not fear failure. When a baby is born, it has this innocence about it. It is watching everything, learning from who takes care of it. Eventually a baby will start to crawl, and then walk, but if babies learned the ability to fear at that young age, the baby would say to itself “I fell down, I can’t do this I give up.” What if babies did that? Children learn fear from their parents. As you grow up, you learn to be afraid of things because someone teaches you. Prime example: I was a very fearless child. I would play outside and play with all the bugs I could find. I would pick up spiders with my bare hands and play with them for hours. One day, I go up to my dad to show him the bug that I found. I said, “look dad, a bug!” and my dad replied, “no, honey, that’s a spider.” And I said “nuh-uh it has six legs!” and he said “no, it has 7 legs and that’s because you tore one of them off!” After that experience, he had to explain to me that spiders were poisonous and I could die from a spider bite, which instilled fear into me. I am not really that afraid of spiders, even to this day, but needless to say I don’t play with them with my bare hands.

If we change our mindset into that of children, fight fear that has been instilled in us due to past rejections, past failures, past pain, then perhaps we can do something with our lives. Set goals and complete them no matter how hard it is, no matter how much you fail, no matter what you do, make it a point to change your life. Take risks, educated risks mind you, but risks just the same. My goal in this is to help motivate you to do SOMETHING anything really. Commit to bettering your life, and you will find success in your path!