Brave Enough
Letters on fear, courage, and meaning — by Ryan Combes

I said I was an atheist before my baptism. I lied.
I was religious. I just didn't know it yet.

It began at college in a tucked away corner of campus, where rays of sunlight poured gloriously through the skylight.

While my peers slept or joked in the dining hall, I devoured my scripture: High Performance Habits.

Pen scribbling madly, I noted everything it would take to reach salvation: self-actualization.
I was an inductee into the religion of self-improvement, well on my way to high priesthood.

Wealth, influence, total freedom — these were my end goals. And I was hell-bound to reach them.
A quiet obsession had possessed me: the determination to live an extraordinary life.

But what began as an invigorating belief in the potential of my life morphed into something darker and even more powerful:

The fear of a mediocre one.

Maybe you’ve felt it too — that quiet panic that being average equals failure. For me, it was more than chasing goals; it was the terror of doing nothing at all.

That fear produced an anxious ambition — one scripted by others. If this religion had confession, mine would be simple: I don’t know why I’m doing this.

It’s a confession many of us carry, even if we never say it out loud.

I hit many targets, then moved them so joy never arrived. The question always returned: What’s next?

I named this restlessness in a recent letter titled Achievement Isn’t Enough, where I admitted that success never gave me what I thought it would. It left me with questions I couldn’t quiet.

In time, I realized the voice wasn’t mine. It was my fathers: mediocrity wasn’t mere failure — it was death.

Then my mother-in-law said something that cracked the whole script.

She made a passing comment that felt like heresy one moment, and blissful freedom in the next.

Sometimes it's enough to just be normal.

I was stunned.

Every fiber of my being, hardened by hours of grinding, flared with defense.

But I kept silent.

Because underneath all the fury, I knew it was true.
The question was whether I had the courage to admit it.

Fear doesn't always look like running from the apocalypse. Sometimes it looks like pushing endlessly at school or work, convinced it's never enough.
The hollowness of success, the exhaustion of sprinting toward a finish line that never comes.

The self-improvement gods say: be more perfect.
Faith has been teaching me something else: you are loved, despite your imperfection.

One creates fear — we run from insufficiency.
The other creates peace — we run toward joy.

And it's only from that peace that the deeper things can grow — the ones that look like distractions but turn out to matter most.

Creativity. Literature. Not tasks on a checklist, but rebellions against it.
Practices that refuse anxious soil, but flourish in slower ground.

Fear makes ambition a cage.
Peace makes ambition a compass.
When it points us toward what matters, ambition becomes joy.

What would ambition look like if you already knew you were enough?

With love,
Ryan

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P.S. Did this letter land for you? I’d love to hear about it. Please hit reply and let me know.