It’s one of those pieces of advice – one of those “hurrah motivational be a man and just do it sounds good in theory but people will be too scared to apply it in real life anyways” type of advice.

But the concept of burning your bridges of retreat and just going for it definitely does have its merits.

The basic logic behind it is that if you MUST do something, you WILL do it.

If you should do something, chances are, you’re probably not going to do it.

Burning your bridges implies that it’s a MUST. There’s no way back. There’s no retreat. The only option you have is to move forward.

It’s a concept that most people first hear after reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and the account of General Cortez burning his ships, showing his soldiers that there was no going back. They would have to fight the Aztecs and win or they would perish and of course, they won.

Fast forward to today, and you hear similar stories, although on a less dramatic scale, of people who have quit their jobs and successfully started their own businesses or stories of people who travel thousands of miles to Hollywood, burning their bridges of a normal life to become a famous actor/actress, etc., and it sounds very glamorous and all, but for every person who has “made it” when they burned their bridges and went for it, there are many others who don’t.

So what separates them?

Why do some succeed in burning their bridges and going for it while others fail?

Before we answer that question, first off how do you even do it in the first place?

How do you burn your bridges and just go for it?

It’s simple really and I’ll let Bill Cosby handle this one.

“Your desire for success must be greater than your fear of failure.”

Fear of failure keeps people in check. There’s no need to retreat if you never go for it. Fear of failure will stop people from taking that first step.

In order to cure this paralyzing disease, we need the antidote.

The antidote to fear is DESIRE. It’s the polar opposite of fear.

It can be said that everything we do in life is done out of fear or out of love, with love being obviously, the ultimate, most potent form of desire.

Think about it and you’ll find it’s true.

Look at the choices and decisions you’ve made it in your life and you’ll inevitably find that they were done out of fear or out of love.

So instead of focusing on fear and giving it more weight and strength, focus on your desire to succeed and that will cause your fear to shrink.

Your desire must “outweigh” your fear and then you’ll find yourself “free” to burn your bridges of retreat and to just go for it.

Now the question is - how do you sustain it?

Fear of failure will rear its ugly head over time and try to get you to retreat so what do you do then?

Three concepts to keep in mind.

#1. You never know what tomorrow will hold.

People tend to project way into the future based on very little experience over a very short period of time and that’s when our active imagination can sometimes work against us. We burn our bridges and go for it and things aren’t turning out as we expected early on, so we take that short piece of experience and plaster it as what’s going to happen down the line in the next few years. You never know what tomorrow will bring, let alone 3 years from now so stop the doomsday projection off of very little data. You don’t know what will happen. All you can focus on is what you can do today.

#2. That being said, action taken today sows seeds that will reap when you most need them to.

The more action you take, the more “offense” you take toward your goal, the more seeds you plant. Seeds in the form of people you meet, people you help, little things you do, books you read, etc., and all those actions you take open up possibility after possibility after possibility and it’s up to you to see them and take advantage of them, thus enabling you to plant even more seeds and to reap even more than what you sowed, helping you to achieve your goal. What you’ll find as you look back is you’ll be able to “connect” all the actions you took, see how this one action led to that, which led you to meeting this one person, who gave you an idea, which when applied, led you to another person who introduced you to another, etc., etc. Keep on sowing and you will keep on reaping.

#3. Last, but not least, keep your fire of desire burning.

Fear of failure starts growing bigger when your focus shifts away from your desire, the very thing that got you to burn your bridges of retreat in the first place. Moreover, there’s something about a person who’s determined to do something that lights that person up on everyone’s radar. In a day and age where people are bounded by fear, it’s rare to see a person freed by desire. And the stronger a person’s desire is, the greater their “gravitational pull” in life becomes. People will be drawn to help them. Opportunities will gravitate toward their direction. Serendipity will send help their way because after all, life tends to help those who are on a mission.

With all this being said, it’s pretty easy to tell why only a few out of the many who burn their bridges of retreat and just go for it, make it.

Obviously, each person’s situation will be different and there may be extenuating circumstances that are out of their control that force them to go back but broadly speaking, those that succumb to fear of failure will not make it. Those that forget to put their focus on their desire to succeed and shift their focus to fear of failure will inevitably bring about exactly that into their lives.

And sometimes, those who burn their bridges and go for whatever it is that they’re going for - they find that they don’t want to anymore. The desire isn’t there. It’s not that they succumbed to fear of failure; it’s just that they find it’s not what they were looking to do.

If that happens, it’s fine. It’s foolish to force yourself to desire to do something you don’t want to because all you’ll be doing in the end is fighting yourself and that’ll take you nowhere. But maybe there’s something you realized along the way on your journey of burning your bridges and going for it that can help shed some light toward a new direction you DO desire to go toward.

I want to end this with a quote from a movie that most people have never heard of. It’s from a movie called Gattaca (which I highly recommend watching) that pretty much flew under the radar in the late 90s. It’s set in the future where social status is determined solely by your DNA. Babies are genetically engineered to have the best genes, thus enabling them to succeed in life (for the right price of course), whereas those born naturally are not so fortunate when it comes to the gene pool, thus making up the bottom rungs of society.

There’s a scene in the movie when two brothers are playing a game of chicken, where they both swim out into the ocean and the one who gets scared and swims back toward the shore loses.

Now one of the siblings (the protagonist of the movie named Vincent) was born naturally so he wasn’t pre-engineered to have the best genes suited for athletic ability.

His younger brother though was genetically designed to have the best genes suited for athletic ability and because of that, it was no wonder that the genetically superior brother always won the game.

But we come to this one scene, where the tables turn and it’s Vincent who wins the game of chicken because his younger brother starts to fatigue and drown and it’s Vincent who must rescue him. The impossible happened and here’s the voiceover from Vincent on that day.

“It was the one moment in our lives that my brother was not as strong as he believed and I was not as weak. It was the moment that made everything else possible.”

How did he do it? How did Vincent beat his genetically superior brother?

It’s a question that Anton (the genetically superior brother) asks when they play the game again many years later, this time as adults.

Vincent matches Anton stroke for stroke as they swim toward the horizon but Anton finds himself getting fatigued and no longer able to continue after some time.

He’s at a loss to explain how his genetically inferior brother is able to beat him so he finally asks:

“Vincent! How are you doing this Vincent? How have you done any of this?”

“You want to know how I did it?! This is how I did it Anton!

I never saved anything for the swim back.”

The human drive, the human spirit, the will to act from pure desire – it’s enough sometimes to even will Mother Nature into submission. And that’s just not in Hollywood movies either. You can find it in many inspirational stories around the world.

And to be able to understand the FULL impact of that quote and to really appreciate it, you have to watch the movie in order to understand the context of it, but even if you didn’t watch the movie, it’s still a great line to end this article with and something to keep in mind as well if you DO decide to burn your bridges of retreat and to just go for it.

Never save anything for the swim back.

  
     

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