Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
by Brené Brown
Goodreads link
New York City, circa 2013. It’s a cold and rainy day, and so I’m taking the subway home from work rather than biking. I live in Williamsburg and thus am inevitably shoved onto a packed L train. I stand face to face with a cute girl around my age, and she laughs at my jokes, and we strike up a short conversation.
My stop is coming up, and so, being single, I have a decision to make. Do I ask for her number? Here, on a crowded subway train where I would struggle to even get my phone out to save it? It seems like an unwise choice for a girl to give her number to a stranger she met on the subway just a few minutes earlier. The odds are not good.
What guy asks a girl for her number in a situation like that?
This guy.
Daring Greatly
The title of Brené Brown’s book comes from Teddy Roosevelt’s Citizenship in a Republic speech, and specifically the notable Man in the Arena passage, which is so good I’ll reproduce it here in its entirety:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
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