The Nerve
Sean Moore
Four in the morning courage? How about fifteen-minute resolve.
Courage isn’t the right word.
Courage isn’t the wrong word either. Courage certainly has its place in life. When you’re thrown into a lion’s den, for example. Or fighting the 7-foot-tall champion of an invading army armed with nothing but a slingshot. Courage is awfully useful then.
Still, courage isn’t what you necessarily want or need to be a first-world success. It doesn’t take courage, for example, to wait until the last night before a paper is due, and then spend the next six hours sleepless and mainlining caffeine in order to finish aforementioned paper. It doesn’t take courage to spend fifteen minutes, or hours, or days, banging your head against the wall to trying to build a wearable body monitoring system. And if I may be so bold as to be self-indulgent for just a moment, it doesn’t take courage to find an hour every day to write and publish to a website.
In situations like these, you need the nerve.
The nerve is a much more subtle thing than the oft-heralded courage. The nerve is not accompanied by boldness or bravado. Instead, having the nerve is most needed to accomplish the most ordinary of things, the things in our lives that don’t require war-paint or battle cries, but are instead fought in our mind. The nerve wages it’s battles against inertia, against entropy; staying at the keyboard for another fifteen minutes versus the allure of the couch, the remote, the pint of ben & Jerry’s in the freezer.
It certainly isn’t brave or courageous to sit at a keyboard and write lines of code or paragraphs, to spend the night teaching yourself something new instead of sleeping like a normal human being. But it does take resolve. It does take nerve. Because afterward, after a day of gathering up the nerve to write 500 not-quite-terrible words, the only thing that remains is the knowledge that tomorrow you’ll come back and do it all over again. After a week, there’s nothing but knowing that another week of more of the same is in store. A month. A year. A lifetime.
It takes a lot more than courage to wake up every day and do more or less the exact same thing you did the day before, knowing full well that you may fail just as badly as you did yesterday.
Courage is great when you’re hunting for dragons. Courage is great for that moments in your life when you need to make a last stand. But the nerve is what you want when you need to make an every day stand. It takes the nerve to do something incredibly ordinary. And it takes a hell of a lot of nerve to take a whole lot of ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary.