Ever so often something comes along and completely changes our culture, and is labeled “Great”. Whether, Twitter, Cell Phones, or the world wide web, all of these ground breaking adventures have one thing in common. So what is the main difference between tons of good work, that mostly goes unnoticed, and the few that are labeled as “great”?

I think its courage.

Courage is the key ingredient to the secret sauce of great. It is what is takes to pursue risk and distinction. From new consumer products to new non-profits, we have the privilege of being agents of change for an array of new entities and organizations, and the result is usually contingent on the ability to manifest courage.

What causes “great work” to slip into the category of just “good work“?

I think it’s fear.

The opposite of courage is fear. At a conference I attended last week, called Q, a presenter talked about fear and how it is directly related to vision and brain activity. Research has shown activity in the Amygdala, which is commonly associated with fear, when an unknown stimulus is introduced. Basically, we are preconditioned to fear things we haven’t seen before. This is why we gravitate to the familiar, lean towards the common, and stray from the unknown. This is instrumental in understanding our lack of courage.

The rare few, however, who preserve and uphold the truth of courage, achieve remarkable results.

At Matchstic we want to strive for the courageous.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.