The Case for Boldness

"Let us seek, in the depths of our experience, the point where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life." - Henri Bergson



Boldness is a semantically loaded word. It conveys a number of things. To the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, boldness was said to have "genius, power, and magic." Boldness is specifically an action taken that is outside the typical realm of common experience, highly risky, and simultaneously highly profitable.

Boldness involves no inherent guarantee, only that of a new experience; which in and of itself is valuable. Boldness, however, I suggest is the one principle that has produced the highest reward in each of our lives.

In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin he begins the story of his noble life with such a bold stroke:

"I sold my books to raise a little money, was taken on board the sloop privately, had a fair wind, and in three days found myself at New York, near three hundred miles from my home, at the age of seventeen, without the least recommendation or knowledge of any person in the place, and very little money in my pocket."

Peter Drucker, the 20th Century Management icon, boldly gave up a promising and lucrative career in finance to pursue his dream in management consulting, when such a practice was still in its infancy.

In a more personal commonplace scenario; through our surveying of our current life and personal history, we can probably locate an act of boldness that initiated a train of events to lead us to who we have become today.

To add to Goethe's description of boldness I would further suggest that boldness is absolute faith in oneself, an uncompromising desire for success, and that which breathes divinity into the present. Boldness expands our boundaries - whether mental or physical.

To boldly commit to acquiring a new competency opens a new dimension of experience. To boldly exert ourselves through rigorous exercise makes our bodies adapt to a higher level of function and performance. To boldly speak when shy, to boldly ask when afraid, to boldly do when unsure, and to boldly give when someone's in need...this is life - unapologetic and free.

Angel Armendariz

The Sodden Routine Factor

"An ideal...must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious....and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal...Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality..." - William James

The pursuit of ideals is the central theme in every story. We pursue the ideal mate, ideal body, ideal family, ideal career goals, etc. The sustenance of every story, play, and endeavor is a certain ideal. The place we find ourselves versus where our ideal lies is the storyline of every living being.

C.G. Jung, the Swiss born psychologist once said, "Without psychic depth we can never be adequately related to the magnitude of our object." I believe that he referred to a relation that exists between our ideal and ourselves. This relation is ongoing until union with the ideal exists. It means that before our ideal becomes manifest we have to become greater than or equal to the task.

Our ideal exists in two points. First it is latent within us as a seed, potentially capable of fruition. Second it exists beyond us in the not yet manifest future. We further can conclude that an ideal is antagonistic to, as William James put it, "sodden routine." After all "sodden" or, a more common word, "habitual" routines actively stifle growth. And, by this fact we can figure that they will actively prevent us from creating or becoming our ideals.

The path to our ideals lie in novelty. Imagine a child habituated as an infant. An infant that doesn't become, an infant that stays within its own "sodden routine." The infant would be enslaved to babble cries and crawling. Novelty is embedded into our nature for a reason. That is to grow. Only by means of seeking new experience and new information is novelty alive within us. Only through this method can we be called alive and develop our ideals.

The embrace of sodden routine has all too many times led to a premature psychic death. Benjamin Franklin, once recalled, of a man who he had known of that died at the age of 25, but was not buried until the age of 75. Benjamin is referring here to dying by means of succumbing to a sodden routine that contradicts novelty.

Through novelty, the psychic depth that we develop, will breed the confidence within us to prepare and act on our ideals. Without the arduous pursuit of our ideals we simply become the spectators of our wishful thinking.

Angel Armendariz