“Half measures availed us nothing.” — Bill W., the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous
There’s a particular kind of failure every man learns to protect himself from, and it’s not the one you’d expect. It’s not failing in public. It’s failing after you gave something everything you had. That one cuts to the bone. So we learn, quietly, to never quite go all the way in. We inch forward on five things instead of committing fully to one. We tell ourselves we’re keeping our options open. What we’re really doing is building an escape hatch. If it doesn’t work out, we can say we never really tried.
I know that move. I’ve run it for most of my life.
The thing that scares me most right now is putting myself out there. Being open and vulnerable in a public forum, where the old belief still lives. The one that whispers I’m not good enough. I’ve spent forty-four years building a business. That’s something I know how to do. This, building something with my name on it, something that requires me to be the thing and not just run the thing, that’s a different gate entirely. The half measure is the defense. If I never pin the throttle, I never have to find out.
Picture a rider at the starting gate. The gate drops and he has a tenth of a second to decide. Commit everything, or ride the brake. The man who rides the brake tells himself he’s being smart. He’s guaranteeing the loss, and he’s doing it to avoid the pain of losing while trying. Here’s what took me decades to see. You feel like a failure either way. Give it everything and fall short, you hurt. Hold back and fall short, you hurt. Same result. Only one of them leaves you a shot at a life beyond anything you could draw up.
Here’s what drove that home for me this week.
My fifteen-year-old son trained over a year to qualify for Loretta Lynn’s, the biggest amateur race in the country. He lived at a training facility for months. Ate, slept, and breathed it. Along the way the engine blew up. He took a concussion. Setback after setback, and he kept dropping the gate anyway. We got to the final qualifier, the last step before the national stage, and it came apart. Crashes. Inconsistency. And I had to have the conversation I didn’t want to have. He was still holding on, telling me maybe he could sneak in somewhere as an alternate. I looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, bud. You’re not ready. We’re done.” We weren’t driving to Loretta’s to take thirtieth. He broke down. I broke down with him. Then two days ago he told me something. After that loss he didn’t want to think about the sport for weeks. He needed to mourn it. And I thought: that’s a boy learning he can pin the throttle, lose, and survive it.
I saw myself in him. For years my version of riding the brake was not picking up the phone. A real opportunity would land in front of me, the kind you’re supposed to seize, and something inside would say I didn’t deserve it. So I wouldn’t make the call. Three weeks would pass. The opportunity would quietly disappear. And I got to keep my story clean. I didn’t really go for it, so it doesn’t count.
There are two voices that ride along with all of this. One says God put a real gift in you and your only job is to bring it into the world. The other says you’re not good enough, you never were, so why bother. Every hour of every day you choose which one you feed. The more I act, the more I make the call instead of waiting, the louder the first one gets. The podcast. The book. This newsletter. Every one of those is a throttle pull. And each one I’ve made has made the next one easier to decide.
Men, the half measure feels like protection. It’s not. It’s the slow leak that drains a life of everything it could have been.
This week’s lesson: the failure you’re actually afraid of is the honest one, the kind that only comes from going all in. It’s also the only kind worth risking.
