I had an appointment with a flabatomist this morning for some routine labwork. I was feeling a little nervous as I was getting ready to go there. I am not a fan of needles and I was tiny veins and they're not able to find it the first time. And I was fasting so was a little hungry. And I forgot my water bottle at home so I didn't have anything to drink if I felt a little woozy afterwards.
All in all small things. Not a big deal at all. Routine stuff. Not like I'm donatinga kidney or something. There are bigger more important things to feel nervous about, definitely. (But I felt nervous about this. I even thought about canceling. This was in the important-but-not-urgent category so I could have).
An interesting thing happened though. I was feeling nervous beforehand. But I felt brave afterwards. Brave to the point that it made me want to do other brave things. Like more consequentail brave things. Things that most people feel nervous about like giving meetup talks and recording podcast interviews. It's interesting how that works. My brain likes this feeling of going through with something (important/meaningful) despite feeling nervous.
This reminds me to something related I read "courage is going from failure to failure without lossing enthusium". The failure could be a real complete failure or it could be an undesirable outcome. Or it could be a smaller success (in numbers) than you were expecting. The without loosing enthusium seems to me the important part. Because when you are brave I imagine things don't actually work out 100% of the time. Sometimes your fears do come to pass. They could've taken a while to find my veins, could've given me a bruse that took multiple weeks to heal. I could've fainted or felt too out of it to drive myself back home. None of that happened this time but it could have.
For the work things that are in the important-but-not-urgent category some form of courage is what is required to get over my mild but pesistent hesitation. All of these things have to do with talking to people, networking as it's called. I will record my daily dev log and make it public on the codecurious channel. I will interview other developers and share those. I will record audio versions of my conceptual posts and share those. I will pitch to be a guest on other podcasts (once I have enough content on cc.dev to feel legitimate referring to myself as "founder, codecurious"). I will go to in-person local meetups. And I will go to Railsconf. And I will actually talk to people and make friends.