What is your teddy bear?
While finishing my first book, it is fairly difficult to keep enough motivation for writing a blog. Yet today I want to share a small story about comfort — and the price we pay for it.
Every child has a teddy bear: the object that makes the dark bearable. Adults have them too, we just rename them. The safe job title. The market we already know. The meeting format we always use. The strategy that worked five years ago.
The problem with teddy bears is not that they are soft. It is that they are quiet. They never challenge us, never embarrass us, never ask whether we have outgrown them. Growth begins the night you sleep without the bear — in business, that means shipping the imperfect launch, having the overdue conversation, entering the market where nobody knows your name.
So, honestly: what is your teddy bear? Name it. Then decide, deliberately, whether you still need it — or whether it has been holding you instead of the other way around.