Jason and his Argonauts set out on a long, dangerous journey to find the Golden Fleece, said to have belonged to a magical winged ram. They had no guarantee they would find it. They had no guarantee they would even make it back. They simply believed the prize was worth the journey.
The Argonauts encountered one problem after another. There were the women of Lemnos, six-armed giants, the Harpies, and the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks that could crush ships trying to pass between them.
And somehow, they kept going.
Now, like the story of the Trojan War, this is all a myth. But what I love about it is the ambition.
You see, Jason and his team had a prize worth chasing, and enough madness to believe they could get it.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf once said, “If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”
Maybe that is what the Golden Fleece really represents. Maybe it is something big enough to scare you a little and big enough to pull you out of the harbor.
Maybe your Golden Fleece is a business you want to build, a career you want to change, a book you want to write, a problem you want to solve, a skill you want to master, or a life you want to create.
But sometimes, the things worth chasing are more personal. Maybe it is a marriage you want to leave, the truth you have been avoiding, an apology you need to make, a relationship you need to repair, a fear you need to confront, a habit you need to break, or the courage to finally admit that you messed up your life.
But we often want ambition with certainty. We want to know the route and the destination before we begin.
Sadly, that is not how big things work.
You rarely get the whole map. Sometimes all you have is a direction, and the rest of the route reveals itself along the way.
So, find your Golden Fleece, something worth the uncertainty and the long journey. Change your perspective and make the sleepless nights and the sea monsters part of the story rather than a reason to turn back.
Because without something worth chasing, you can spend your whole life sailing in circles.
