Lessons - Why Living Scared Is Actually Killing Your Dreams | Kara Goldin - Author of 'Undaunted'

In this lessons episode, explore what it truly means to live undaunted in the face of fear, uncertainty, and rejection. Discover how taking relentless action transforms curiosity into momentum, understand why self-belief and persistence create the foundation for lasting success, and uncover how embracing failure as part of the journey leads to genuine growth and resilience. It's a very important story. I think I'm going to ask a couple of questions out of that, but the one thing that I noticed that really is such a great trait that you have is you mentioned a curiosity, but also just taking massive action. Like every single thing that you said you did in your life, it was a new job, it was figuring out how to get hands into whole food. It's just you just you're curious and you just do stuff. You just do a whole bunch of shit like that's it and you're and eventually like not everything's going to work. But if you if you take enough action, if you do enough activities towards the thing that you want to do, start things start to fall into place. Things start to start to come together right and that's really that's I think that of course, you know, being successful. There's a lot of different things that contribute to that, but I think that that's probably one of the main things that I pulled out that you just do continuously that probably got you a lot of the things that you are you have right now just taking that action again and again and again as opposed to just ruminating on it, thinking on it. In whole foods, you know, like instead of like worrying about the process, you just went up to some guy who's talking shells and you're like, Hey, how do you do this versus trying to like cold email, you know, maybe trying to figure out like filling out forms or like I don't even know what the process would be if I even had to start, but just like that. Why not? Why not ask the guys out in the shells, right? Like why not do that? I love that. I think even writing a book, I think you start to think through a lot of these, you know, these things too. And, you know, people had asked me for years, just in interviews for hint, like, you know, how, how were you fearless, how were you, you know, so brave. And I think early on. Look, my parents were 40 back when they had me the last kid and that was old. I mean, that was like nobody had parents that were as old as my parents and, and I think they always let they gave me a lot of rope, right. They basically said, you can do stuff, but you, you know, you have to think about it, you have to explain it, you have to go and kickstart it in some way, like I remember even signing up for gymnastics classes. I would figure out like there was nobody who was going to sit there and say, okay, well, here's your choice. You have my near way. I'd be like, I need your checkbook, like now, because I just, I need this, I need to get in this class now. And I was always used to advocating for myself that I could make it happen, but I didn't have the helicopter, you know, parent open me saying to me, here it is. Instead, I, I just, I would always look at life is, you know, I can probably figure it out. It wasn't that my parents weren't there, that if I needed help figuring stuff out, but I also got a lot of pride and actually going and figuring stuff out when other people waited and I think that, you know, it's something that I think about today when, when things just seem a little, you know, tough or hard and in some way. I, my, my next step, I guess, is to go and talk to people go and figure it out, like, how do I make it happen? I am constantly, I do not allow the minute I start watching that wall. And it still happens to this day in various, you know, situations, but when I see the wall starting to build and it starts to get higher and it starts to get scarier. I stop it. I try and figure out, how do I, you know, knock it down? How do I demystify it in some way? Yeah. I want to ask you, I want to, this is a good, this is a good spot to just ask about undaunted about that word that you chose, because you describe all these other emotions. You describe fear, you just, like a little bit of imposter syndrome mixed in their confidence, tenacity, persevere, like all these things that have allowed you to be, and anybody to be successful really. But what, what is, what does undaunted mean to you? Why did you choose that word for your book versus something like fear, maybe a fear this is already a book, I don't know yet, to choose something else. Well, I mean, even when I turned in my manuscript, I didn't have a word for, I didn't have a title for the book. I mean, I had been, you know, tossing around fearless, relentless. I mean, think words that people had called me over the years and had called me or who had sort of shared what I do that is different than what they can't do. And I would always have these, you know, one or two liners that I would say to people, you know, whenever I'd hear people say, oh, I could never do that. I think back on things like, yeah, I've thought about that too, like, you know, getting over a fear of heights, you know, I'll go and hike the Grand Canyon and people are like, whoa, you're afraid of heights, like, why would you choose to do that? Because I don't want to live in fear. I don't want to not understand finance. So I go and take classes. I'm constantly looking for those things that I fear. And I think over time what those things do when, when you take on situations, when you take on things that scare you and you go achieve those things, they don't necessarily always turn out the way that you thought. But what they do do is allow you to know that it wasn't as bad and it wasn't as scary as you thought it was. Right. And so I think over time people, people would say to me, but, but how do you do that? And, and that's what I really thought about. You have to be undaunted. Right. You have to sort of like purposely push yourself into that position because no one else is going to push you to do it. Right. You don't push somebody who is afraid of heights to go and hike the Grand Canyon. It has to start with you. And it has, and you have to do it because it's something that you, you know, want to get over. Right. And I think it's the same thing about people are like, how did you decide to be an entrepreneur? Like I think for me, I saw it as I'd seen other people do it, which I think was helpful, but I also It just, it didn't seem as scary to me because I had watched these other people, but I thought every single day I'm waking up and thinking about doing this and I'm making progress. You know, I go to Whole Foods, I barely start talking to the guy stocking the shelves and then he hooks me up with this guy that, you know, is talking to me about their local program. And I thought, and then I, it was fairly easy to connect with that person. And then I get like the next steps. And then every day I start on those steps. And I find that like two weeks before I didn't know what I was doing. And then I just got in and I started moving it forward. So again, if you don't choose to live undonted, you're not going to hike the Grand Canyon. You're not going to start a company. I have a lot of entrepreneurs, especially female entrepreneurs who say to me, like, I can't raise money. And I'm like, it starts with you. Right. I'm a female entrepreneur. I've raised a ton of money. Has it been easy? Do I meet with twice as many people that a guy meets with, I don't know, because I've never been a guy. I don't. But you're saying, but you're saying, you know what, if you do, you just do it. You're doing it anyway. It may not be, it may not be the, it may not be perfect. It may not be the best. But you're doing it. You're getting it done. You're next step, you know, one foot from the other. You don't believe that you can actually achieve anything. Then it doesn't get done. Right. If it starts with you and people can read it, they can, if you don't believe, if you walk in to go raise money and you believe, like, oh, you know, very low percentage of women, you know, are able to raise money. And whatever it is, if you have that in your head, it's never going to happen. I can guarantee you it will not happen. My daughter is in, is in college now. She'll kill me for talking about this, but she's, she's majoring in storytelling. She's at Brown. She's an incredible writer. And she's tried out for a few things and hasn't gotten them and, you know, she's, she's chosen to live undaunted, picked a profession of storytelling and feeder and, and wants to do this. It's a choice. And it's, it's hard because rejection is really hard, but I think that what I'm sharing with her to is you have a choice. You can actually, it's a numbers game. You gotta just keep going. Or you can just decide, I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm not going to try out for any more plays. I'm not going to submit my manuscripts to festivals anymore to try and, you know, get money. I, she was really bummed out at me. By the way, what I, she was talking to me about this last night. I said, you know what, you'll get exactly what you want. You'll get the play where you'll act in, you'll, you'll get your script picked up, but then you know what will happen. And she said, what? And I said, you'll be happy for a week. And then somebody will, somebody will review it and they'll say it was terrible. Right. And I said, and, and this is the world. Right. And, and if you let these things take you instead of appreciating the journey that, that you're on. And continuing to figure out, how do I keep going? How do I keep moving forward? Then you won't live the life that you'll be totally happy with. Instead, go figure it out. Go figure out what you want to do. Try it. And if nothing else, I always said to people when people, people would say to me when I was launching a beverage company. You don't stay out of tech for very long because you'll never get back in. You'll never, you'll be, you know, people think you're, you know, not focused. You, you don't have experience, whatever. I'm like 10 minutes ago, you were telling me I'm awesome and you were quitting me for a job. I like all of a sudden you've decided, you know, based on me telling you that I'm going to go and start a company. All the skills, all the things that I learned along the way, if it doesn't work out. And they're like, well, I don't know. I mean, those stay out for more than six months. I'm like, why six months? I don't know. Like, I'm like, have you, are there statistics about six months? Maybe it's a year. I'm like, you have no idea what you're talking about at the, at the end of the day. And anyway, I just think like the, the challenges of, of, you know, building a startup. Some of these stories that I'm sharing. Now I, are things that I really wanted to write out in, in my book, too, because I think no matter what you think about entrepreneurism, it's way harder. Then you ever are setting out to, to think about, and, you know, there's, there's plenty of unicorns out there, but there's way more, way more failures. And the journey, even if you're a failure, it, it could mean that you had a product that didn't do well during the pandemic. You could have supply chain issues that, you know, you relied too much on Asia, which, whose factory shut down for whatever it is, could sink your company. I think that, that's another thing that I talk about too. It's just, it's not, it's not black and white. It's not that you've got the unicorns or you've got the failures. It's the people that get back up again are really the ones that you have to watch. .