Everyone has fears. Fear is a fact of life because humans are fearful creatures. People often fear things like heights and snakes and reading out loud. But these are surface fears. These are fears of the mind. There are also deeper fears humans have. There are fears of the soul. They are your greatest fears.

But sometimes those deeper fears can be good for you. Greatest fears can be motivating.

For example, loneliness is a fear of the soul. Some people’s greatest fear is never getting married and/or never having children. But that is a fear that can motivate you to find a mate.

Being unstable is a fear of the soul. Some people’s greatest fear is being financially unstable or uncomfortable. The fear of reaching retirement and not being able to retire. It’s a fear that can motivate you to work hard and save money.

I have a fear of the soul. My greatest fear is being normal.

This fear has always motivated me in many ways. It’s probably the reason I’ve always despised anything cool or mainstream. I see cool as the normal choice, and I hate normal.

It’s one of the reasons I collect stories. It’s the reason I love adventures. I want to be able to tell a story about the time I was in Africa and had to pay shepherds with machine guns because we took pictures of their camels. I want to have a story about visiting Hawaii on a whim and hiking a volcano. I want to be able to talk about Jesus by telling stories about the time I walked where he walked. I want to be able to spin a yarn about the time I was drifting down the Amazon river in a dead fishing boat. I want to be able to talk about locations by saying, “when I was there…”

My fear of being normal also means I want to be remembered. Or more specifically, I want to make a difference that will be remembered. It’s one of the reasons my wife and I foster children; we want to make a difference that will last beyond us. It’s one of the reasons we went to Brazil and Ethiopia. Because you cannot make a difference in the world that will last forever by being selfish.

My fear of being ordinary is one of the motivating factors behind my love for setting goals. It’s one of the reasons I workout so hard every day and it’s one of the reasons I live in Los Angeles. It’s the reason I’d rather fail at something that’s too difficult than succeed at something that’s too easy.

It’s also one of the reasons I like to write. Benjamin Franklin said, “If you wou’d not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.” My goal in life is to do both.

I imagine life as floating down a river. The water is comfortable and the pace is slow. It’s easy to just float and go wherever the river takes you. But eventually, if you want to have something different, you have to wade over to the side of the river and dig a new pathway for the water. But you have to do it sooner rather than later because the longer you float the harder it gets to change course. The current gets stronger and you get carried downstream faster. Eventually circumstances will make it almost impossible to change your trajectory.

And if you do make the decision to create your own path, then it gets even harder. Because it’s hard to dig. Standing in the current and digging in the mud is difficult. And making a new pathway is scary. You could run into unforeseen problems and you might even hit a roadblock and end up as a total failure. Your new stream could even lead you to a worse place than the old one might have.

It’s very difficult to wade over and dig a new course for your life. But it’s the only way to become something besides ordinary.

So if the choice is between a lot of hard work with the high probability of failure or doing nothing and being normal, then hand me a shovel.

I would rather be a failure than be normal.

As a matter of fact, when I was young I even wrote poem about my fear of being normal. I’ll mercifully spare you the whole thing, but in it I imagined a man who is being courted by the character “Normal.” This character  is trying to convince the man (or woman) to be completely ordinary. I imagine Normal at the man’s door when the poem starts: “Normal is knocking, can you hear him pounding?…”

The character “Normal” continues to knock, yell, and then whisper at the man’s door trying to convince him to open up and become ordinary. But then in the last line of the poem the character “Normal” goes silent. The line goes like this: “Normal is waiting, all you have to do is nothing. Choosing not to answer is an answer the same.”

The truth is if you want an ordinary life all you have to do is…nothing. Just comfortably float on down the river and you will end up with a normal life. A life that isn’t remembered. A life that doesn’t make a difference for anyone else. A life without stories. A life that looks the same as a million other lives.

Normal is knocking. Can you hear him?…