Do you welcome the unknown? Can you wander into the mysterious future with a sense of excitement? Or do you carry a sense of foreboding with you? Everyone you meet can feel, in subtle and not so subtle ways, your attitude toward your own search for security. If you need it very much, the irony is that you won’t find it. Your intensity of need will make people around you not want to help satisfy the need. Your sales will suffer because you won’t be really present at each moment.

But, when you realize that there is no security, you free yourself from anxiety and allow your creative self to flower. Security is self-defeating. Security is dull. What do you want it for anyway? Who wants to know what’s coming? You may as well not be there at all if you know what’s going to happen. Once you realize that only insecure people need security, you will begin to be able to live fully without it.

Secure people know that security doesn’t really exist – that there are no guarantees. Whatever security you find in life comes from within when you know you can handle anything. Suppose a helicopter were to swoop down right now as you are reading this, and snatch you up, tear your clothes up, and drop you into the middle of Afghanistan. What would you do? Would you say, “Hey, that’s not fair. I’ve got my rights. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. I didn’t expect this. I wasn’t prepared. I have no long johns.” Of course you wouldn’t. You couldn’t do that and survive. You’d have to say, “Hey, this is Afghanistan and I’m here now and I’ve got to survive somehow. Now how is the best way to do that?”

Wandering into the unknown, testing out new territory, moving into new relationships, that’s what makes life full and rich and important. If you are intimidated by anything that you’ve never tried before, then you are consigned to staying the way you are. If you have never wandered into territory because you are prejudiced against it, remember that prejudices are most of the time attitudes of fear that something is different than I am. And because I don’t understand it, I fear it. Fearing it, I dislike it. Disliking it, I stay away from it, and limit my life.

Limiting my life may fool me into thinking I am more secure, but what it really does is make me dull, and lifeless, and more insecure. A person who is looking for security will never find it because it is always – first and last – within. If you want new friends, you must crawl out of your shell to discover them. If you want new accounts, you must go out and seek them. If you want a sense of security, look at your own inner resources and use them today, right now, in this moment.