Keyword: courage

  • Beyond the Bathtub

    “Beyond the Bathtub” by Jason Kotecki. 20 x 20. Oil on canvas.
    Original is available 🟢 Shop this art!

    I could have stayed in the bathtub.

    Way back when, after completing my schooling and earning a degree, the safe path was waiting for me. A decent job in my hometown. It wasn’t particularly exciting, but it was close enough to what I went to school for that I could rationalize it as making sense. I could have taken the job, gotten married, bought a house, and started collecting benefits.

    It was tempting, and by most standards, the smart thing to do. The only problem is that I knew exactly what life in the bathtub would look like for the rest of my life.

    I may have been shy and quiet, but I grew up observing people who decided to stay in the bathtub. Whether they rationalized it as a smart choice or insisted they didn’t have any others, I could always sense a certain sadness, simmering just below the surface. 

    Life outside the bathtub is fraught.

    The ocean is vast. The edges disappear as the shoreline fades from view. The waves toss us around until we’re seasick. At times it feels like we’ll drown—or be swallowed by something much bigger than ourselves. The current carries us in directions we never would have chosen. It’s disorienting. Terrifying. Unpredictable.

    Of course we prefer to remain in an environment we can control! 

    The problem is that it’s not much of a life. 

    The bathtub is safe, controlled, and predictable. But it’s also small. Constricting. Eventually the what-ifs become impossible to ignore. What’s outside these walls? What am I truly capable of? Where might I go if I ventured beyond the edge of what I can see?

    I was the kid my relatives called a scaredy-cat. Honestly, not much has changed. I’ve never become especially brave or outgoing.

    I just knew there was life beyond the bathtub.

    Although I’m just a tiny rubber duck, I sensed I was made for a bigger shore, farther away than I could get to on my own.

    So I put my trust in the One who made the water, the waves, and the wind.

    That choice came with no certainty, no safety, and no benefits package. There were seasons when I felt lost at sea. Driftless. Doubtful. Overwhelmed. Afraid.

    You know what? I still feel that way sometimes. There are always temptations to pull into a safe harbor somewhere and settle down. To quit while I’m ahead.

    But I can’t go back now.

    Since giving my life to the Creator of the ocean, I’ve seen things, accomplished things, and experienced things I never would have known had I stayed in the bathtub. I’ve been swept up in an adventure that’s been wonderful, beautiful, and breathtaking.

    The decision isn’t to become adventurous.

    The decision is to leave the bathtub.

    Everything else follows.

    We’re destined for a life beyond the bathtub. 

    Of course it isn’t safe. But it is good.

    Is it time for you to experience what life is like beyond the bathtub?

    process

  • One of One

    “One of One” by Jason Kotecki. 20 x 20. Oil on canvas.
    Original is available 🟢 Shop this art!

    When I was in art school in the late nineties, the goth look was in. A significant segment of art kids wore all-black clothing, Doc Martens boots, and fingernails painted with dark colors. I found it fascinating to observe that the ones intent on bucking the system, sticking it to the man, and expressing their individuality all looked…exactly the same.

    It’s scary to stand out.

    We learn this at a young age, when simply being our weird, unique selves can lead to us being shamed and ostracised at recess, on the school bus, or even across the dinner table by a sibling or parent.

    And so, much of life is a careful effort to blend in.

    Just look at the cars we drive, most of which are either black, white, or some combination of the two.

    Or how we take fashion cues from tastemakers and trendsetters because getting caught wearing something out of style is akin to death.

    We must be careful to curate what we say in public for fear of being cancelled.

    In the case of my art school companions, we even blend together in our rebellion.

    Now, some would explain this as an evolutionary feature, not a bug. There’s safety in numbers, after all. We’ve learned to blend in because there’s danger in straying too far from the herd.

    The thing is, we’re not here to sink to our base animal instincts. We were created for a higher purpose. We were made for greatness.

    We are born originals. The problem, as St. Carlo Acutis observed, is that most of us die as photocopies.

    As an artist, I sell prints of my work. Some of them are timed releases, some are limited editions, and some are open editions (available all the time). 

    I sell a lot of them, but they’re all really just fancy photocopies. 

    And none are worth as much as the original. A print sells for less than a hundred dollars. The original can sell for thousands.

    Ask anyone who has purchased one of my original paintings, where you can see the texture of the canvas, feel the brushstrokes with your fingers, and observe the luminosity that emanates from dozens of thin layers of oil paint, and they’ll confirm: Nothing beats an original.

    Sadly, too often we settle for being photocopies.

    It’s been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

    Maybe if someone else is imitating us. 

    But if it is we who are doing the imitating, then imitation is the sincerest form of boring.

    It is good to learn from those who came before us. It’s possible to find a measure of success by imitating someone else. 

    But the best you’ll ever be is a second-rate version of them.

    This is not a call to stand out for the sake of standing out, or to pretend to be something you’re not. It’s about having the courage to be more of who you are. It’s a reminder that safety should not be our highest virtue. 

    You are free to opt for the safe path. Most people do.

    But you will not be able to escape the gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, the quiet desperation, the ever-present sense in your soul that there’s more to life, and this ain’t it.

    The reason I made the hero in this painting red was because of the lesson I learned from red shoes. After years of wearing safe, plain, predictable shoes, I started pining for red ones. The people I saw wearing red shoes always seemed to be so brave and adventurous, somehow getting more out of life. I wanted that, but I was afraid. I was afraid of standing out too much, but mostly I was afraid that I’d be found out as a fraud.

    Adultitis tried convincing me that I wasn’t one of those “red shoe people.” I wasn’t fun enough, brave enough, or free enough. 

    Eventually, I stood up to Adultitis and got the red shoes. The fears ended up being empty threats. I’ve worn red shoes on stage for every speaking engagement for about two decades now. I love ’em. They make me feel more fun, confident, and free, like a guy who decided it didn’t matter what other people think. 

    Of course, red shoes are not the secret to defeating Adultitis.

    Being brave is.

    What are your red shoes? There is probably something in your life you’ve always (but probably secretly) wanted to own, do, or be, that you’ve talked yourself out of. Maybe Adultitis sold you on the idea that you’re just not “that type of person” and it would be safer to blend in.

    But maybe you actually are that type of person.

    Maybe the fear is a smokescreen keeping you from becoming all God created you to be.

    Maybe twenty seconds of embarrassing bravery will open the door to a new level of confidence and unimaginable opportunities.

    Maybe your example of standing out from the herd will be the spark that lights the way forward for someone else, giving them courage to be brave, too.

    “To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

    —E.E. Cummings

    Is any of this safe? Hell no. Of course not.

    But it’s the only way to feel alive.

  • Born For This

    “Born For This” by Jason Kotecki. 12 x 12. Oil on canvas.
    Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!

    The Wright Brothers were the first to fly, but they weren’t the first to try.

    Not by a long shot.

    For more than fifty years, humans had been actively working on the problem (after thousands of years of dreaming about it). Many brave people tried for years in vain, often at the cost of their very lives. Most considered it impossible.

    But when the Wright Brothers succeeded, they became a match that lit the way forward.

    They shared the joy of flying with others. In his first public demonstrations in Europe, Wilbur would take a passenger into the air with him. The brothers also eagerly trained new pilots. Soon after their success, countless others followed, and in short order, aviation boomed across the world.

    After fifty years of collective failure, the work and the example of the brothers opened the floodgates. Orville himself lived to see aviation transformed by jet propulsion, the introduction of the rocket, and the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947. On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in western Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.

    It reminds me of another pioneer named Roger Bannister, who was the first to run a mile in less than four minutes. People said it couldn’t be done. Doctors suggested you could die in the process of even attempting it. And yet after Bannister proved it was possible, Australian John Landy did it himself just six weeks later.

    You can just do things.

    But sometimes we need someone to show us a something can be done for us to believe we can do it ourselves.

    One family Kim and I knew before having children was a match that sparked our own belief that we could travel with kids. Our daughter Lucy ended up on 34 flights before her first birthday.

    And all the homeschooling parents we encountered who had raised successful children doing amazing things in the world were matches that gave us the confidence that maybe would could, too.

    What if someone is waiting for you to be the example they need?

    You and me, we’re like matches.

    A match is not made to sit in a box, unlit, forever. It was designed to create a fire, but not one kept to itself.

    You were made with specific talents to achieve a specific purpose. Part of that purpose in life is to make a difference in the lives of others. And just like a match, you get one shot. You have to give it your all.

    Of course, it’s scary!

    You have the option to embrace the status quo, like the other matches in this painting, preferring comfort and protecting themselves. But they are not fulfilling their potential.

    That is not why they were made.

    If God planted a dream in your heart, you have the moral imperative to chase it. Because your example might be exactly what someone else needs to achieve theirs.

    Your spark can enflame and bring life to others.

    As St. Catherine of Siena said, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

    You were born for this.

  • The Greatest Showman

    “The Greatest Showman” by Jason Kotecki. 16 x 20. Oil on canvas.
    Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!

    The absence of fear is not bravery.

    The absence of fear is a terrible life.

    If you stay exactly where you are and never try anything new, you may be able to avoid fear. Maybe.

    If you want your life to matter, however, fear comes with the territory. You’re going to have to figure out how to tame it.

    The good news is that our fear is never as ferocious as we make it out to be.

    Most adults don’t consider themselves to have a robust imagination; that’s the realm of children and fairy tales. However, there is one aspect where most adults actually have an overactive imagination, and that’s when it comes to our fears. It doesn’t require any effort at all to picture our portfolio going belly up, our project crashing and burning, or ending up penniless, homeless, and living in a van down by the river while eating Spam out of a can. We can picture all of these things easily, in vibrant, living color, just as easily as a child imagining a personal tour through Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

    We easily dismiss any vision of an ideal (but as of yet unrealized) future, but give total credence to even the most far-fetched worst-case scenario. 

    A better strategy is to stop pretending that our imagination has gone missing, realize how powerful it is, and start using it to help us. Whenever I am freaked out about something, I like to do a little activity that only requires three steps, but requires full use of my imagination.

    The first step is to imagine the worst-case scenario in your situation. This is the easy part, because we probably already have a head start. It’s helpful to write it down or say it out loud, because the mere act of shining some light on it helps us to see how ridiculous it is.

    The second step is to imagine the best-case scenario. This might be a little harder, but it’s a lot of fun. Enter Mr. Roger’s Land of Make Believe and visualize the most preposterously positive scenario that you can possibly imagine. The sort of thing that would make you say, “If you wrote this into a movie, no one would believe it.” You will notice that you begin to turn the tables on fear and plant a vision in your head that can have an eerie way of coming to pass.

    The final step is to imagine a likely scenario. This will likely land somewhere in the middle of the first two. Your job is to pretend that you are a Las Vegas oddsmaker and draw up a picture of how things will most likely go down. It’s not ideal, and might be uncomfortable, but it’s surely nowhere near as bad as the worst-case scenario. Meanwhile, ideas will start to surface about some practical things you can do to help your cause.

    This activity helps you use your imagination for good, and also reminds you how it can trick you into seeing your situation as more terrifying than it really is.

    When I was a teenager, I worked at a car dealership. I was a good worker, but I had never received a raise. And I was trying to save up for a car. I decided to ask my boss for a raise. He was the owner, a smart, no-nonsense, sometimes gruff kind of guy. I put it off for weeks. I carefully planned the argument that made my case. I rehearsed my speech, prepared to list my accomplishments and call in lead witnesses if needed. I debated the proper time of day to ask: first thing in the morning? At the end of the workday? On a Saturday when the service department was closed? It went without saying that the beginning of the conversation was crucial. I needed to float a trial balloon to gauge his mood. Any sense of irritability, and the mission would have to be aborted at once. More than once, I considered what to do if he fired me on the spot for being an ingrateful little peon. 

    Eventually, I decided that the day had come. I screwed up my courage and walked up to his office, prepared to handle any possible rebuttal and ready to deliver an impassioned speech about justice and landing on the right side of history. 

    “Excuse me, Ron…can I talk to you for a second?”

    “Yeah, what is it?”

    That must have been when I blacked out. I probably mumbled the word “raise” at some point, but there was nothing close to the memorized inspirational speech I had practiced. 

    He let me flounder for about seventeen seconds before putting me out of my misery and saying, “Yeah, that sounds fine.”

    I walked back to my wash station on cloud nine. I had no idea that conquering the world would be so easy. 

    Sometimes the tiger we’re fighting is nothing more than a house cat.

  • Leap

    “Leap” by Jason Kotecki. 20×16. Oil on canvas.
    Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!

    Why is it that so many of the people who have found success in America are first-generation immigrants? One big reason is that many of them came from a place that is not so great. They saw America as the Land of Opportunity, and they pursued it with a definitive focus and relentless persistence. They were willing to leap from the known to the unknown.

    A big reason people don’t chase their dream is that where they are now isn’t half bad.

    They give up the dream and settle for the dreamsicle.

    A dreamsicle is sweet and alluring and very tempting. It’s the option most people go for, with its safety, comfort, and surface-level perks. Because of that, you wonder if you’re crazy to even consider abandoning it.

    The dreamsicle is the lifestyle that ensures you need to keep your current job for as long as possible.

    It’s the boyfriend who checks all the boxes except for the one that matters most.

    It’s the job that impresses your parents but gives you Sunday Night Dread.

    But eventually, it leaves an unsatisfying feeling in your stomach. Like maybe you shouldn’t have settled for something so easy.

    When I first started my business, the prospect of dealing with taxes, paying for my own health insurance, and being solely responsible for the revenue (or lack thereof) felt daunting. Turning down a steady job with killer benefits and staying in a crappy apartment for eight years seemed ill-advised at the time. Now it’s clear that it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

    Any time you break away from the crowd and do something different is scary. The leap into the unknown requires us to be the leaders of our own destiny.

    But nothing is ever as rewarding or satisfying as chasing the dream in our hearts.

    The dreamsicle is not the same as the dream.

    Is it time for you to leap?

  • Like a Boss

    “Like a Boss” by Jason Kotecki. 16 x 20. Oil on canvas.
    Original is SOLD 🔴 Shop this art!

    Life can feel like a high-wire act. You’re doing your best to juggle everything on your plate: your job, your family, your finances, and just when you think everything is going pretty well, you glance down and see someone whose yard looks way better than yours. How do they get those flowers to flourish like that?

    Or someone’s kids who are in way more activities than yours. Will my kids be less attractive to colleges? 

    Or someone who just drove up in their new car. Should I be thinking about getting a better job?

    For instance, my neighbor cuts his grass every six minutes. Okay, maybe it only seems like that. It’s probably more like sixteen. The point is, a perfect lawn is apparently important to him. I’m not here to judge, except I often do judge…myself. 

    Our lawn usually looks pretty shaggy compared to his, especially if it’s been more than a week since we cut our grass. And the fact that we hire that out makes me self-conscious. Does he think I’m less of a man because I don’t cut my own grass? Does he think we think we’re better than him because we hire someone to do it for us? Do the neighbors see our weak landscaping game and think our house is bringing down the home values in the neighborhood? It’s kind of embarrassing to say all this out loud, because I have no reason at all to think anyone is thinking any of this, but it does pop into my head when I lose focus on what matters to me.

    I appreciate a nice lawn, but I value the extra time to spend with my family. One of the reasons I work so hard on my business is so I can spend more time doing what I love and pay someone else to do the things I hate.

    Please understand that I’m not saying my way is the best one. After all, my neighbor friend is retired with kids who are grown. He has a lot more time to spend on keeping up his lawn. For all I know, it might be a therapeutic escape for him. It’s like comparing apples and mangosteens. Which is completely my point.

    Television and magazines are filled with examples of people who seem to have it all together. They gracefully glide through life as the perfect mom, perfect wife, and perfect employee.

    It’s all a facade. We don’t ever know the whole story, whether it’s the celebrity with the flawless teeth or the neighbor right next door. We all have different priorities and are fighting different battles (which often stay hidden from the camera’s lens or our surface-level observations).

    I’m not here to tell you what’s important to you. I’m just here to remind you that it can’t ALL be. 

    The people who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to keep up with an impossible standard of balancing everything perfectly, are making a huge mistake. Not only is such a standard impossible to attain, but they’re also allowing the busyness to distract them from what’s most important. 

    The people who are doing life right are the ones who are mindful of what kind of life they want to live and are focused on that.

    How do you tackle life like a boss? 

    Stay focused on what’s most important to you. Ignore the rest.