How many of us have a project or a task that we have been meaning to get to but simply haven’t. Maybe we even have all of the resources at our disposal to get it started and we just haven’t made it happen yet.

Understandably, if money or skill are lacking in order for us to make some magic happen, we have a problem that takes a bit more than placing some encouraging You Can Do It! notes around our apartment or office. Solid planning and strategy are critical in those cases to ensure that we have everything in place that we need to in order to move those ideas forward successfully.

But, what if we don’t take action at all? Imagine all the incredible things that might have been, the projects that may have gone undone simply because of a lack of motivation or confidence — or because we just didn’t know if anyone would care that we made the effort in the first place. Maybe we were afraid the expectations were too great for the outcome to warrant the amount of work we would need to do to make it happen. We certainly do get in our own way, don’t we?

But, what if that dream that we didn’t make come true for ourselves, could have led someone else to start to follow a path to their own most amazing future ever. What if everything was waiting on exactly that moment, at exactly that time, for exactly that one thing to happen.

We plague ourselves with What If? scenarios until we stop ourselves in our tracks – but maybe we should be thinking more along the lines of What If We Don’t?

So sit down and focus. Make that phone call, write that email — or even that book. Start a magazine. Go for the audition. Pick up that paintbrush, or clay or camera. Maybe just start with a clean page from a notebook — a blank slate if you will — and see where it takes you.

The infinite opportunities that potentially stand before each of us won’t always wait for the courage we have been hoping for to suddenly appear out of nowhere. Sometimes it’s just taking a leap of faith — jumping and knowing that the world will be there to catch you.

Michael DeVellis
Editor/Creative Director, On Makeup Magazine