Taking Risks in Life

I read a great profile on Jeremy Renner in "Men's Health" of all places. Here's an excerpt:

"If you don't know who you are, how the hell are you going to be able to...?" Renner leaves the thought unfinished, but it would be easy to fill in the blank with a million possibilities, most of them more profound than becoming a movie star. "So I made a very conscious decision to be fearless, to live a life of fear-freeness. I decided to do something every day I was afraid of." Like?

"I swam with sharks," he says, recounting a scuba trip off California's southern coast. "I was terrified of sharks and I'm still terrified of sharks, but at least I was taking action--and not being squelched by something I don't know about."

It's pretty brilliant strategy for becoming a better actor if you ask me, although apparently the idea is nothing new:

Do one thing every day that scares you.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

It seems, that if one wants to play a character on the edge of madness, you must expand your threshold for risk. So I have unofficially undertaken the project of consciously doing things that scare me. I'll be cataloging this risk taking under the "Something Scary" tag.