This blog is a continuation of yesterday. This week I had a session where high school students asked me many questions, so before I forget, I'm going to write about that session. Yesterday I talked about "how did you study English".
Question 2: How do you get the courage to try new things?
Maybe you mean cycling around Australia, going to university abroad or starting your own business. To put it bluntly, I don't think I thought about it too much. When you do something that you really want to do, you have to do it, and you don't think about courage. That's how I am, but that's not very versatile for the type of person who wants courage, so I explained it differently.
People tend to say, "you should have a vision and act on it". Unless you are a person who doesn't think much like me, it's impossible to imagine the future, believe in it and act towards it. Usually, they don't know if they can do it, so they don't believe in what the future holds, and then, they don't move forward. For those people, it's good to have little experiences. New experiences are hard, but they can be done with a hundred times less effort than you imagine. For example, my hobby is building with old houses and using recycled materials, which I have to do because I am an amateur. Suppose you are a professional architect or a carpenter. In that case, you can imagine what the finished building will look like, and you can build without any materials. Still, I am not an experienced architect, so I have to have the experience of actually holding and looking at old houses and recycled materials to build or renovate them.
When you have a small experience of anything, you can imagine a bit further ahead. I think you can build on that and move forward. So, I think "have a vision" should be "have a direction". At first, you can go 180 degrees in the opposite direction of the direction you don't want to go. After that, if you focus more and more on that direction, you will find that you have to do it.
It's the same kind of problem; it's difficult to say "do what you love". To tell someone to do what they want to do in the future, to do what they like is synonymous with "have a vision", which in most cases is a fantasy. In some cases, what you don't like is also a fantasy, but more often than not, it's something you've actually experienced that you don't like. If you stop doing things that you don't like, you'll be doing things you do like. Either way, when you do what you love as a professional, you don't have the same enjoyment as an amateur. Still, you do enjoy a high level of achievement—for example, getting a paper accepted or finishing a UN project with a good result. There is a feeling that I have to do it, and it's not that I don't like what I'm doing, but I don't have the pleasure of being an amateur. But more than that, there is a sense of superiority when I am done.
To sum up my answer to the question of how to have the courage to try new things, I would say that 1) by having small experiences, you will be able to move one step further towards your vision, 2) the vision is just a direction, and you should start with something that you don't dislike. To put it another way, it is a way of moving forward that does not require courage. If possible, don't overthink it (^^;)