I did a nice thing last Friday. I bought an ebook for someone. Not because they asked me to. Not because they even wanted it. I bought it because I thought they would find it interesting. I bought it because I wanted to encourage them to hit the go button on a great project they have lost enthusiasm for.

Sure, it was nice, but was it helpful?

No.

I got a ‘thanks but no thanks’ email in my inbox today. The nerve! They have been sitting on this project for nearly a year waiting to send it off to the forces that be and they haven’t. They have let it collect dust on their hard drive and have withheld from submitting it out of fear. Fear of rejection.

We are all afraid.
I have been re-reading Linchpin by Seth Godin, which might be making me sound like a broken record these days but he is just so right it hurts. The number one thing that kills our good ideas isn’t our busy schedules, it isn’t creative block, it is our own fears. Our unwillingness to hit publish when it matters because we are afraid of what might happen. Our lizard brain as Seth calls it.

Doomed.
Right now, I don’t believe this great project will ever see the light of day, and when it does it will sputter and fail because it has no champion. No one to root it on. No one who believes in it enough to make it happen. It will go to the receptacle of great ideas that died on the vine with millions of other projects just like it.

That is until someone else who is braver, who isn’t letting doubt win, does it all on their own.

Go them.