Writers, Takes Lots and Lots of Small Risks…
How to Be An Anti-Fragile Writer — Part 3 of 5
There’s a major difference in risk and perceived risk.
Real risk means something that if lost, you may not be able to recover from it — financially, emotionally, whatever.
Perceived risk, in many cases, is just fear.
Fear to publish something personal.
Fear to take a chance on yourself.
Fear to abandon your comfort zone.
But, once you realize fear is not risk but the perception of risk, you can start to take more and more small chances.
And then you realize there’s nothing on the other side of fear.
Whatever you were afraid of — acceptance, approval, making mistakes — these things don’t matter.
Because here’s the thing…
You will fail. You’re supposed to fail. That’s how you get better.
To be anti-fragile, you must take lots and lots of small risks.
Publish your poem. Ship your book. Make your film.
It’s all “risky,” but not really.
Artists need to tinker with ideas and move through a quantity of mistakes to discover what type of quality they can create.
The risk…
The rejection…
The failure…
These things make you anti-fragile, so you can stop worrying about them. If you’re really a writer, you’ll experience all of them.
But then, and only then, will you become anti-fragile.
[Stay tuned for the next post: No Single Point of Failure]
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