Act Boldly

Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid.

--DorotheaBrande?

For those who may not understand or accept the above, here is some additional commentary:

Often, an organization seems plagued by inertia. Everybody acknowledges that the current situation is bad, but nobody wants to change. Any tentative efforts made by anyone are quickly quashed. Change seems impossible. But then somebody makes a committed effort, diving in and ignoring all resistance. Something interesting happens--suddenly all sorts of other people join in and support the effort. This often includes people that the initiator may not know, or who the initiator assumed would not be willing to help.

There is also a "Fortune favors the bold" effect. That is, those who take risks may have a lot of failures along with their successes, but in general, the successes outweigh the failures. Some see this as the effect of supernatural entities who reward courage, but a rational explanation is that the worst-case outcomes associated with risky actions rarely occur, and opponents are usually surprised by bold action, and so anyone who is constantly trying to effect change is more likely to make progress than to crash-and-burn or to meet effective resistance.

Finally, whenever you throw yourself into a difficult situation, you have to deal with it. Pushing your limits will uncover talents and capabilities you didn't know you had.

This theory can be very easily asserted in online games, e.g. CounterStrike. My aiming skills in CounterStrike are lame, but I always rush and try to sneak into enemy territory and pop up in unexpected places. Many times I get killed in laughable ways, but sometimes it works (I get a couple of kills) and, sometimes, it even makes the team mobilize and play together as one team again, and not "everyone by themselves". So I act bold individually, and magically the game starts to get easier too.

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