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Taking the Leap

Often, the most daunting task is the one that needs to be taken. Most people know this, either intuitively or explicitly. And yet, most people don't do what they know they should. Why? The simple answer is that "doing" is incredibly scary. Instead of actually pursuing the things we want or even know will get us closer to the best outcome for our lives, we choose to spend time in turmoil, agonizing over every detail and somehow never feeling "sure" enough. None of what I'm writing is new or novel, but due to circumstances in my own life, I've been forced to grapple with this phenomenon more. 

Ultimately, everything has a risk, some are bigger than others, of course, but what I've had to remind myself of multiple times over the past couple of weeks is that inaction also carries risk. But even if one were to completely ignore opportunity costs, in reality, the position you are in today is as similarly unguaranteed as the position you could be in if you were to do the thing you know you should. 

As someone who is extremely risk averse, this has always been an incredibly difficult idea for me to grapple with. But the uncomfortable truth is that along with nothing ever really being guaranteed, there is also no real substitute for the experiential knowledge that comes with "doing." 

As I've written before on this blog, you can spend all the time in the world researching something and talking with people who have done similar things, but there is no substitute for gaining the knowledge of knowing what you don't know (as opposed to the knowledge you know you don't know). 

The annoying part of knowledge that you don't know you don't know is that it often can't even be given to you by others who have traversed similar paths. Because you have no context to understand the information, there is no way for you to properly utilize information about it until you actually do it for yourself. This is not the case with everything, of course, but often seems to be the case with the things I've found myself involved in over the past couple of months (this is Hussayn's musings after all :). 

TLDR; Take the leap (this is mostly to myself), You begin to understand what exactly you don't know and therefore can create a roadmap to gain the skills that you need (if you're doing it right). 

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