Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them... they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight.
Interpretation
Obstacles are often intimidating, but confronting them head-on can diminish their power over us.
This quote by Orison Swett Marden highlights the nature of obstacles as intimidating yet ultimately cowardly. When faced with challenges, acknowledging and confronting them directly can reduce their perceived threat, allowing individuals to overcome fears and assert their resilience in the face of adversity.
In practice
During a motivational speech to encourage students to overcome their fears.
Opportunity is latent in the very foundation of human society. Opportunity is everywhere about us. But the preparation to seize upon the opportunity, and to make the most of it, is to be made by every one for himself ... he will be self-made or never made.
We lift ourselves by our thought, we climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always, everywhere - your ideal of what you long to attain - the ideal of health, efficiency, success.
You know from past experiences that whenever you have been driven to the wall, or thought you were, you have extricated yourself in a way which you never would have dreamed possible had you not been put to the test. The trouble is that in your everyday life you don't go deep enough to tap the divine mind within you.
You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them.
Something greater than wealth, grander even than fame — that manhood, character, stand for success, and that nothing else really does.
Many a man has finally succeeded only because he has failed after repeated efforts. If he had never met defeat he would never have known any great victory.
Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today's warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.
PTSD occurs following a trauma that was so awful that in retrospect you don't understand how you survived. What that causes is an extreme feeling of vulnerability that you get past but that doesn't go away.
The terrible thing about free soloing difficult routes that are within one's capacity, is the chance that faced with ultimate danger and need for ultimate self-control, one's nerve might fail and cause an error. That's irony of it - that fear could short-circiut skill, that one would die as a direcy result of being afraid to die.
White collar conservative flashin' down the street,_x000D_ Pointing that plastic finger at me,_x000D_ Hoping soon my kind will drop and die,_x000D_ But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.
Danger is very real but fear is a choice.
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.
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