Nothing in this world is ever absolutely certain or guaranteed. Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk—-and to act.
We often think of courage in terms of heroic deeds on the battlefield, in a shipwreck, or similar crisis. But everyday living requires courage, too, if it is to be effective.
Standing still, failure to act, causes people who are faced with a problem to become nervous, feel "stymied," "trapped," and can bring on a host of physical symptoms. I tell such people: "Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise—and go ahead. If we wait until we are i absolutely certain and sure before we act we will never do anything. Any time you act you can be wrong. Any decision you make can turn out to be the wrong one. But we must not let this deter us from going after the goal we want. You must daily have the courage to risk making mistakes, risk failure, risk being humiliated. A step in the wrong direction is better than staying "on the spot" all your life. Once you're moving forward you can correct your course as you go. Your automatic guidance system ! cannot guide you when you're stalled, "standing still."
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