What Ships Are Built For

Imagine you won the genetic lottery: born tall and handsome into a wealthy family, you go on to create a fortune of your own. Seeking your next adventure, you buy a state-of-the-art sailboat so you can live in style, wherever and however you please.

The safe choice is to dock your boat at a fancy Yacht Club, where other wealthy people keep theirs. You stay in the harbor, use the motor to run errands, visit friends, and enjoy the good life. The highlight of the year is the Fourth of July celebration, when you unfurl your sails to remind everyone who owns the biggest boat in the harbor.

American author John Shedd once said, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

Our protagonist has another option: to sail into the open sea, where there are no guarantees, only changing winds, shifting currents, and endless horizons. In doing so, he discovers that growth begins where certainty ends.

Our lives are much the same. We can play it safe by building a career, raising a family, saving for retirement, and comfortably enjoying life until the angel of death comes calling. Or we can venture beyond our instinctive need for security to experience life as a continuous miracle of our own creation.

We have the choice to either live in a predictable Newtonian world of cause and effect, measured by our five senses, or to embrace a quantum universe of possibilities, where new realities emerge from uncertainty itself.

The secret to success is not about striving harder; it is about resisting less.

Take a walk on the wild side.

— Sina.