A simple technique to make you bolder

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Fear of mistakes, misunderstanding hinders many people, stops them on the way to success. The teacher and trainer Andrei Yakomaskin will tell how the white sheet technique helped the young writer to forget about fears and gain world fame.

American writer Elbert Hubbard wrote:

The biggest mistake you can make in life is constantly being afraid to make a mistake.

As I listen to the stories of talented people, each time I notice to myself that they are mostly woven from the conclusions made after repeated mistakes. We all understand how important it is to be able to make mistakes, because this is what will teach us to be wiser in the future.

M. C. Asante, a contemporary writer and youngest professor at RL Morgan State University, once discovered a wonderful way to realize the full value of the fear of mistakes.

When he was a troubled teenager at an alternative school in Philadelphia, an English teacher put a white sheet of paper in front of him and said:

- Write.

- Write what? - he asked.

- Whatever you want.

This simple answer changed his life.

Recalling this incident, Asante wrote: “I was looking at an empty leaf, a glowing white ocean, in which an opportunity lurked. Its emptiness called me to tell my story. But I couldn't. I got scared and froze. There were things that I wanted to tell, but my hand did not move, and the words were stuck like water under a layer of ice."

Then the teacher spoke the most important words in his life:

You don't have to be great to start, but to become great you have to start.

At that moment, he realized that the white sheet is himself, this is every person who is stopped by the fear of making mistakes and being misunderstood.

Already famous, Asante traveled to a Pennsylvanian prison to conduct a writing workshop with the inmates. There he met young guys who decided to completely change their lives.

On his way out, he found that one of the seminar participants, named Jordan, had no mattress in his cell.

“I have it, but I don’t sleep on it,” Jordan explained.

- What are you sleeping on?

- On a hard floor, on a steel frame. Anywhere, but not on the mattress. You see, - he went on, - I cannot sleep on this. Too comfortable, and I don't want comfort in a place like this.

A comfortable mattress would have reconciled Jordan to the irreversible consequences of mistakes. And then he would not have been able to break out of these conditions in order to achieve more.

At that moment, Asante gave Jordan a clean white sheet.

Each of us is the same sheet that is waiting for new successes to be recorded on it. Write your story every day. And remember: only fear of a blank sheet makes a great work out of ordinary history.

I wish you success!