You’ve heard it time and again: the two greatest motivators are love and fear. I have a lot of experience with fear, but here’s my story about how I harnessed that overbearing “fear monster” to take on the challenge of love.
I was a weird kid. Half tomboy, half wanderer, it took only a moment for my mother to lose me as a child. She would find me walking heads down along a beach, looking at what had washed up, watching the neighbor’s horse run around a paddock, or wooing honeybees into jars. I could spend hours listening to 45 RPM records of classical music or Bible stories, placing plastic circus animals on the record just to watch them go round and round.
I didn’t know it at the time, but all this behavior fell into the rather large category of observation. Seeing what was around me, how things worked, what changed from day to day. From an early age, I was hooked on novelty, patterns, and wonder.
I spent decades making my living in the safe world of business writing, that “almost” dream place right next to the world where I really wanted to travel. I was still a writer, right? I made enough money for a comfortable lifestyle, didn’t I?
But it was never a perfect fit.
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