I don’t remember when the change occurred exactly, but sometime in my early twenties, I realized the fear of the what-if and maybe was a helluva lot scarier than the fear of striking out.
I started chasing stories, no matter where they led, because I knew if I only tried, I’d at least get a good tale out of the deal—regardless of the outcome.
And boy, I’ve never told this one before, but when I first got a job down at the power plant, there was a girl in town I had my eye on. But I didn’t want to do the typical small-town thing. Ask her out on Facebook or win her mother over in a preliminary strike.
Hell, naw! When my future children asked me, “Dada, how’d you meet mommy?” By god, I wanted to be able to tell them a love story. None of that pansy shit all the sissy boys do now when it comes to the scent of a woman.
Nope.
I knew the girl worked at Victoria’s Secret, so I drove the 40 miles, walked my country ass three-quarter trot across the Governor’s Square Mall, then blasted through the entrance of the most intimidating assortment of women’s undergarments I’d ever seen.
My confidence melted instantly, but I knew if I didn’t drop the hammer in the next six seconds, my abort button would initiate a full siren. And so, room by room, I darted through mannequins and sexy supermodel pics until my face flushed bright red with embarrassment.
And as if things couldn’t get any worse, I found my target standing in the back room folding a table full of the skimpiest thong underwear known to all of humanity.
The setting was a complete disaster, but I couldn’t back up now. She’d already seen me and pretended to hide in her work, but there wasn’t enough material on the table to make a single bandana handkerchief, much less a curtain to hide behind.
And so, I did. I asked out the prettiest girl in my town while she held a pair of thong underwear in her hand. And to this day, I honestly believe if she could have crawled under the table to hide, I think she would have, just to spare us both the awkward humiliation of what happened next.
“Would you like to go out with me?”
“Uhhhhhhhh. I’m…. I’m already seeing someone else…. Sorry.”
“Ok. Thank you! Bye.”
And so, I reversed, ejected myself into the safer area of the mall, and to this day, I’ve never walked into that panty place again. Bad vibes.
But the key takeaway here, is once a person intentionally puts himself in a doomed-to-fail situation in Victoria’s Secret, that person realizes failure ain’t so bad after all. And maybe, just maybe, when I look back on all the “learning opportunities” that have helped me along the way, perhaps experiencing a healthy dose of rejection, then getting over it with a laugh, might just be the secret sauce for any person who is confronted with the overwhelming fear of failure that comes with managing their own investments.
Food for thought….
-Tweedle
