Why Fortune Favours The Bold
In this session we contemplate the saying, 'Fortune favours the bold', using it as a starting point to discuss how we should approach our lives. The importance of taking action, making decisions, being decisive, and the positive impacts of doing so. This track is taken from my course, ‘Live Your Most Fulfilling Life’, available now via my profile.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the session.
I invite you to take a seat or lie down and get yourself comfortable.
You can close down the eyes if you wish and take a deep slow breath in through the nose and out through the mouth.
In a moment I'm going to share with you a proverb,
Aphorism,
Idiom or saying for you to contemplate.
And I invite you to do so as deeply as possible,
To look beyond your initial default reactions to it and to consider it from all sides,
To be open to it guiding you,
Encouraging you and informing you of potential knowledge,
Insights and wisdom that might be lying just below the surface.
Our goal with each of these daily contemplations is to acquire a deeper understanding of ourselves,
The world and our place within it.
So let's take another slow deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth and consider the following.
Fortune favours the bold.
Fortune favours the bold.
So this saying,
Fortune favours the bold,
Is a call to action,
It's a call to do,
To step,
To move,
To be,
To embody.
It is encouraging you to do something rather than nothing.
To have a default assertiveness,
Aggressiveness,
A mindset of taking action,
A mindset of taking action when you could otherwise stop.
And there's a lot of evidence to support this attitude as the correct attitude to have if you want to be successful in a variety of different fields and industries.
In business,
In sport,
In art,
In learning,
In a whole variety of things,
Being stationary,
Being still,
Not taking action results in decline.
The best way to attain success,
To learn something,
Is through iterations.
You try something,
You get 10-20% success,
You learn from it and you try again,
You learn from it,
You try again,
Each time improving a little bit,
Getting closer and closer and closer to optimal performance for whatever it is for you.
But that's through iterations,
That's through practice,
It's through repetition.
But the only way you can get the benefit of that learning is to act,
Is to be willing to fail,
Is to move and step without full knowledge of where you're going or what you're doing.
The best analogy in my life is writing a book.
I could write and rewrite and rewrite the first page of my first book over and over and over again.
It's tempting to do so,
And had I done so,
That first page would have been immaculate,
It would have been perfect.
But I would never have written any more.
Thus all of the benefits,
All of the quote-unquote fortune from doing so,
From doing so,
That's knowledge,
That's wisdom,
That's book sales,
It's a whole variety of different things.
But all of that wouldn't have come because I wouldn't have stepped into that space.
If I wasn't bold enough to continue to move to act,
That wouldn't have come.
And indeed whilst that first page would have been brilliant,
My skills as a writer wouldn't have developed because by moving on,
By finishing that first book and the next and the one after that,
I'm developing and I'm learning as a writer,
As a person.
The growth could,
If I chose to,
Enable me to go back and rewrite that first page to be significantly better than what I did.
I'm not going to because we just,
You know,
Continue and move forward,
But the point still stands.
The iterative learning of practice has improved my skills.
Every session that I create a classroom in this context improves my skills.
Every rep a sports person does on the field,
In the practice hall,
Improves them.
Every brush stroke,
Every pen stroke,
Every word sung improves.
Fortune favours the bold.
If you are waiting to feel like you are perfectly fully capable of something,
You will never act and you will never acquire anything because here's the thing,
You are never going to feel fully 100% perfectly ready to act.
That's an impossibility.
You need to do things before you feel 100% ready to do them.
If you're looking around and going,
Why isn't this being done?
That's your sign to step into that space and do it.
Now yes,
You don't fully know what you're doing yet,
But you will learn on the way.
You will grow,
You will make mistakes,
But if you know that that's going to happen and you know that you will learn from those mistakes,
Then that's all part of it.
That's the point of it,
Right?
Fortune favours the bold.
If you're looking for opportunities,
Entrepreneurially,
Business-ly,
Life-ly,
Life-ly,
Relationship-wise,
Right,
And you are open to things arising,
You're more likely to see them.
If you've got an attitude where you're willing to be approached,
You're willing to approach people,
You're willing to make conversations,
To forge new relationships,
New dynamics.
If you've got this open sort of attitude where you're approaching life,
You're more likely to see those opportunities and therefore you're more likely to take them.
If you've got an attitude where you say yes when there's a 40% opportunity,
Yeah,
There might be failures,
Yeah,
There might be issues,
And yeah,
Things will go wrong.
But when it goes right,
It will go right and you will reap those rewards.
You're basically giving yourself more at-bats.
If you are looking to find a romantic partner and you ask one person out and they say no,
You're done,
Right?
But if you keep yourself out there,
Keep sort of searching,
Looking,
Being open,
Trying,
Eventually someone will say yes.
It's a numbers game,
Right?
Same thing for business opportunities,
Same thing for creative work,
Same thing for most everything.
The more chances you have,
The more opportunities you say yes to and try,
Yeah,
The more you're going to fail,
But eventually the more you will be successful.
Look at any successful person and you'll see that what they're famous for,
Their big success,
If you added it up numerically,
They're 99% failure.
It's just the 1% that they succeeded on really succeeded.
Why?
Because they kept trying,
They kept trying,
They kept trying.
They said yes,
They attempted it.
They are bold and fortune favors the bold.
Can we look at this from the other perspective though?
When is it not good to be bold?
When is it not good to act?
When is it not good to take action,
To step?
Well,
If there's an emergency situation,
Stepping instantly might not be the best idea,
Yeah,
Because you're going to go based on like this initial response.
So maybe taking a breath,
Maybe taking a moment to step back,
Detach,
Assess the situation,
Work out what's needed,
And then be bold about your action.
I'm not talking about like stepping blindly into anything with this saying here,
But if you find yourself in some sort of emergency,
Doing nothing won't change the situation and indeed could make it worse.
Doing something thoughtless could certainly make it worse.
So the intersection here is to detach,
To step back,
To observe the situation,
And then to go.
Now,
Yeah,
It might not produce the exact best results,
But it's better than nothing.
Fortune favors the bold.
If you move,
You cause change,
Change changes the situation obviously.
And from that changed situation,
You can keep things happening.
It's like the law of relativity,
An object in motion stays in motion,
Keeps things moving,
Keeps things changing,
Keeps things growing.
If you are able to step,
To take,
To move,
To grow,
Things will respond in kind.
Opportunities will arise.
In most every situation in my life and in the people I've worked with's life,
Taking action,
Any action,
Is positive.
There's a placebo effect that shows that taking action that on its own,
You know,
Statistically,
Significantly doesn't impact the person's health,
Mental health,
Or their physical health,
But the act of acting itself triggers positive change within the person.
Triggers positive change within the person,
Right?
I'm not sure if I explained that properly,
So I'll try again.
I'll go a little bit deeper with this.
Action,
Doing something,
Produces positive internal results.
There are plenty of self-help ideas.
Pray this way,
Meditate this way,
Use these items,
These crystals,
These whatever,
Whatever,
Whatever,
All with different and sometimes dubious scientific evidence behind it.
Sometimes none.
Sometimes literally the only impact is the placebo.
As in,
You do this because you believe it's going to work and that makes it work.
But the thing is,
Is that's eagerly discarded for the critical thinkers,
The rational thinkers.
They're like,
Oh,
It's a placebo.
It's not real.
But the thing is,
The placebo effect is a real effect.
And it's a real effect because you believe it's going to be working.
You believe that doing this action will change something and therefore it changes something.
And it's so easy to go,
Oh,
It's a placebo effect.
It doesn't work.
But it does.
It works on people.
Now,
The caveat here is that if you know something's a placebo effect,
You don't apply that same intervention to everyone.
That's folly.
But what it is,
Is the way you use the placebo effect for your benefit is to be bold,
To take action and to go,
Okay,
Well,
This may or may not work.
It may or may not be scientifically proven.
But if I believe this thing to be working,
Then I'm going to do it because it's going to help me to act.
And from that place of action,
From that place of improved self-efficacy,
Agency,
I can then take more action.
I can then take more action and more and more and more.
And eventually I will be moving myself,
Turning myself upwards,
Right?
I've gone through downstages in my life.
And the response to those downstages,
Like what intervention should I do?
And the answer that I always come back to is all of them.
Do it all.
Therapy,
Exercise,
Meditation,
Self-care,
Social interventions,
Doctor-based interventions if necessary,
Right?
Take all of the action because something's going to change,
Something's going to grow.
What should you do in business?
How should you promote your work?
What should.
.
.
Do it all.
Act.
Try all of the different things and whatever starts working,
That's the thing you push down as long as you enjoy it,
Of course.
But keep going down those paths because fortune favors the bold.
So let's consider this.
Let's consider where you can be in your life,
Where you can be bold and how that might impact your life,
Where fortune might come from you yourself being bold,
Yeah?
Because fortune favors the bold.
Fortune favors the bold.
So well done.
This brings us to the end of the session.
At the bottom of your screen you see the option to view the classroom or to ask a question.
Before moving on,
I invite you to take a moment to click through and share your insights,
To read the answers from other students and to hear my replies.
Remember to start your responses by restating the contemplation.
In this case,
Fortune favors the bold,
So we all know which one you are referring to.
This is an opportunity for deep learning,
Further introspection and insight,
So please don't miss out.
I look forward to seeing you in the next session.
Thank you.
This track is taken from my course,
Live Your Most Fulfilling Life.
It's out now on Insight Timer and is available via my profile.
I invite you to check it out.
See you there.
