Failure is not having the courage to try, nothing more and nothing less.
It is not failure itself that holds you back; it is the fear of failure that paralyzes you.
She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar.
Acting is therapeutic. I say I'm not shy, but... Acting is a very vulnerable experience, and you've got to be really confident to put yourself out there to be judged.
Some see risk as a reason not to try. Some see it as an obstacle to overcome. The risk is the same; to try or not depends on your perspective.
It's taken me a long time to learn to accept the risks and just be willing to try it over and over again.
Failure is ultimately very liberating. Once you come out the other side of it, you just might have faced one of your biggest fears and lived. The other side of failure is a big elimination of fear of failure. Trust me, that is an amazing gift.
The emotionally sound person should be able to take risks, to ask himself what he really would like to do in life, and then to try to do this, even though he has to risk defeat or failure. He should be adventurous (though not necessarily foolhardy); be willing to try almost anything once, just to see how he likes it; and look forward to some breaks in his usual life routines.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?
As long as you've got your courage of conviction, it works for you. I think that the same applies, too, even where you don't, because in today's world, financial resources are the least important. World has moved to the power of ideas.
It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
