A speaker reflects on overcoming fear instilled in his childhood, recounting how he walked onto the Notre Dame football team as a test of mind-over-matter. He credits his grandfather's gift of Frank Gifford's book about Rocky Bleier with sparking the courage to confront fear, arguing that living in fear leads to lifelong regret.
You can do amazing things when you get past fear because fear's just going to hold you up and that doubt is going to work against you. And then one day you live with serious regret. Like, man, I should have, I could have, I would have. That's just no way to live. If you ask me, life isn't true life if you're living in fear. So we've got to get beyond that. And again, going back to my early programming as a child, I was trained to be afraid, and as most of us are. So I had to figure out, well, how do I get through that? How do I get through the fear? So by walking onto the Notre Dame football team, one of the scariest moments in my life, I proved something to myself that, you know what, I can do mind over matter. So the one book was by Frank Gifford on courage. The one chapter was about Rocky Bleier. If he can do this, maybe I can too. But the one man, people were surprised when I said this, you know, they thought it'd be Rocky Bleier. And actually it was, no, it was my grandfather. My grandfather. Why? Because he gave me the book. And a gift can be that simple to somebody.
