Courage is something I’ve struggled with. I never know if I have the guts to do something but I had a bit of an epiphany recently as I worked on my family’s little business. We have an Amazon store which started out as a scattershot approach just trying to find stuff that would sell. When we started, we were buying in $50 increments random things we thought would sell. It was not fun spending $50 because many times, we suspected that it was $50 down the drain. If someone had told me that in 6 months, I would spend a few hundred and not blink, I would have thought they were pulling my leg. And even worse, if they told me that a year later, I would spend over $2,000 a month and be excited to do it, I would have called the men in the white coats with butterfly nets.
My point is that in the beginning of any venture, we don’t have the courage or experience necessary to tackle problems that are further down the road. What we need is the courage to handle the problems that are right there on our plates. In my opinion, the final analysis of courage is not whether we have what it takes to do some specific thing. The thing required to do any task is experience. We gain experience as we do the tasks that we have every day. As we do those tasks, we grow in experience and can do more. Courage is measured by whether we do the task that we have that day. Courage is pushing forward every day.