Eleanor Roosevelt: Famous Last Words

"You Must Do The Thing You Think You Cannot Do"

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My old friend Lucy once gave me a quote sometime in my early twenties.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

I felt the truth of those words land in a way you sometimes hear something and know, immediately and without being able to explain why, that it is going to stay with you. Those words have stayed with me for almost three decades.

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The quote is often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, but exactly who said those exact words has been debated. So when I decided to write a newsletter on that quote and sat down to dig a little deeper into Eleanor’s life, I found another cracker of a quote. Something we know she did say. Something that summed up how she led her life.

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

Not the thing that makes you mildly uncomfortable. Not the thing that stretches you slightly. The thing you genuinely believe is beyond you. The thing that when you imagine doing it, some part of you says no. Not possible. Not me.

That is the thing Eleanor was talking about. That’s where the treasure lies.

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Eleanor Roosevelt was not born courageous. She lost her mother at eight years old. Her father, whom she adored, died two years later. Orphaned before she was ten she went to live with her grandmother. She described her childhood as one long battle with fear. Shy, anxious, told repeatedly she was plain and awkward.

Her marriage to future US President Franklin Roosevelt was complicated in ways she rarely spoke about publicly. When he contracted polio in 1921 and lost the use of his legs, her entire life shifted. She stepped into a public role she had never sought and was terrified of.

She stepped in anyway, and what followed was one of the most remarkable second acts in modern history. She became the First Lady to hold press conferences, to write a newspaper column, to speak openly on civil rights at a time when doing so was genuinely dangerous. She championed human rights on a global stage. She redefined what a woman in public life could be and do and say.

Her biographer David Michaelis wrote that her true identity didn’t really emerge until she was in mid life. That everything before that was preparation. Held back again and again. Learning, painfully and slowly, that the only way out of fear was through it.

“Eleanor just kept opening up. Her life kept opening outward.”

That opening didn’t happen despite her fear. It happened because she kept doing the thing she thought she could not do. Again and again and again... courage practiced until it became the shape of her life.

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This makes me reflect on the moments in my own life when I instinctively chose fear as my compass.

At sixteen, I was almost too scared to attend my first audition for a theatre group going to the Edinburgh Festival. I walked in and got the role. That decision led me to discover I had a talent for entertainment.

At twenty six I started my own film production company. Plenty of people told me setting up a company with so little experience was a mistake but it led to over a decade directing films as a living.

Aged thirty eight, I founded a drone display company a tonne of trepidation about how to fly hundreds of drones safely in front of people. A couple of years later Celestial was on national TV flying the countdown show for London New Year.

And more recently, I trained as an end-of-life guide and now I am building a mainstream wellness practice around the one subject most people firmly refuse to discuss. The ultimate taboo: Mortality. The very thing that becomes a catalyst to a life fully lived when we stop avoiding it. The key to Aliveness.

The challenge of normalising the conversation around Death felt so incredibly vast (and still does), I spent months too nervous to tell anyone what I was up to. In fact, the day I released the first newsletter, and went public with my vision, I was so scared of being judged I spent most of the day crying.

None of these ventures seemed possible before I tried. But if I didn’t I knew I would regret not trying. And the more projects I have attempted, the more confident I become at creating something out of nothing.

I realise on reflection that I have experienced the truth in Eleanor’s words… and I trust in this wisdom now.

Fear is not a stop sign, but information pointing at something that matters. If you walk toward your fear rather than retreat, fear has the potential to open your life in ways you cannot yet imagine.

Roosevelt understood this not as a philosophy but as a practice. Something you do every day. Not waiting until you feel ready or the conditions are right. The thing in front of you that your mind is already finding reasons to avoid.

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself... I lived through this. I can take the next thing that comes along.” (Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living, 1960)

Courage is not a personality trait. It is a muscle. It grows the way muscles grow. Through use. Through being pushed slightly past what it has managed before. Through doing the thing, and then the next thing, and discovering each time that you are more capable than you knew.

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Roosevelt lived to seventy eight. By all accounts she never stopped opening outward. Never stopped doing the thing she thought she could not do. Growing.

The quote Lucy gave me years ago may or may not have been Roosevelt’s exact words. But it came from the spirit of everything she believed and everything she lived.

And what she definitely did say cuts even deeper.

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

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One question this week.

What is the thing you have been telling yourself you cannot do?

Not the thing that makes you uncomfortable. The thing that when you imagine it, some part of you says... not that. Not me.

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Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.

Live happy,

Hoppy

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Go deeper: Chat with Paul Musso PhD / Schools Don’t Teach Kids How To Live / The Aliveness Practice