GABE SUAREZ FEAR AND BEING THE FIRST MAN

FEAR

Gabe Suarez http://www.warriortalknews.com/2011/04/fear.html

Fear! and being the first man

FEAR! It is the life draining emotion. It is what keeps you from accomplishing and doing and starting. It is excessively protectful. It is how animals think...the kind of animals that get eaten. Seth Godin calls it the "lizard brain".

Fear is destructive in that it prevents you from doing anything at all other than running away or hunkering in a fetal "down and cover".

Fear thrives on pessimism and complaint. The man that wakes every morning, walks outside and smiles at the bright sun and blue sky and cinches down the ruck, and moves out to a day of promise with a straight back and head held high is neither pessimistic nor fearful. I didn't say a "safe day" without challenges, but rather a day filled with opportunities.

Contrast that with the man who slouches in the couch watching one program after another advising him of the coming calamity of the day. He moves through his day defeated and almost mournful, neither noticing nor appreciating the beauty around him...nor the opportunities those seeming calamities present.

The first man makes sh*t happen...the second one watches as sh*t happens to him. Which are you? Which do you want to be? The choice is not in the circumstances, it is up to you.

My father lost everything he owned to communism in 1960...the year that I was born. Had he chosen to be the second man, and he had every right to be, he would have no doubt died out of grief as so many Cubans his age did. Instead he chose to be the first man, in the sort of environment that few americans...even those who like to roll around naked on a bed of TEOTEWAWKI, could imagine.

Think of depression era environment coupled with a Nazi Germany level of oppression. That was post revolution Cuba where a man who was suspected of being anti-Castro could find himself writing a goodbye note to his family while the firing squad got their rifles ready.

In that environment he became an outlaw. Yup...not a law abiding sullen defeated man, but a bright eyed, opportunity seeking black marketeer. Seeing the limits of the Cuban pond, he moved his entire family to the USA leaving his aging brothers and mother in Cuba (she died a couple of years later). He was 53 when he left with nothing to his name and began building from the bottom.

He built a business and regained much of what he had lost because he was the first man and not the defeated complaining and whinie second man. My dad's kids, and wife never lacked a thing...never went hungry, never were homeless, or without education, resources or opportunity. And that through Communism, Lyndon Johnsonism, Nixonism, Carterism, and all the other isms that have come and gone and come and gone.

So you can see my disatisfaction with the incessant doom and gloom hopelessness that I am seeing discussed at Warriortalk from time to time. Good grief men....we have seen it all before...get over it and get moving!

If I was R.Lee Ermey I'd say something to the effect of "stop being a crybaby, grow a pair, and make some sh*t happen TODAY".

But instead I will simply say be the first man.