There are no radical creative choices that do not carry with them an inherent risk of equally radical failure. You cannot do anything great without aggressively courting your own limits and the limits of your ideas. […] There is nothing more powerful than failure to reveal to you what you are truly capable of. Avoiding risk of failure means avoiding transcendent creative leaps forward. You can’t have one without the other.

~ Aisha Tyler

Sometimes it’s a single word that makes me pull a quote. In this case it was that “aggressively”.

There are times, in certain situations, where aggression is what’s called for. I’m often reflecting and journaling about how I need to temper my, well, everything. Moderate my ego. Moderate my thoughts. (“The snow globe that is my mind,” as I often put it.) Moderate my activity. Moderate my assault on grammar, even. But there are times when the right course of action is to start getting shit done, taking down names, and delivering letters to Garcia. (And, yes, I’m aware that the whole thing about delivery of a letter from President McKinley to Gernal Garcia is false, but the point of the essay is still patently clear and useful.)

Until I’d read that quote from Tyler, I’d never really thought about “aggressively” courting my own limits. Courting them, sure. But not aggressively.

So, yeah… come at me ‘bro!

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