I like to describe The Old Man and the Sea as Ernest Hemingway’s Moby Dick. After all, it’s about an old man going after a giant fish. Am I right?

The first time I read it, I was in my early twenties. I didn’t like it much. The second time I read it, I was in my early thirties. I liked it a little better that time even though reading it was a little like eating sauceless boiled spaghetti – as is.

But there’s this one killer paragraph that I keep coming back to. This paragraph makes the whole novel worth reading. It will sneak inside your soul and slowly, very slowly, change you.

Actually, I opened the book today looking for this paragraph that I’m telling you about. It was like I needed to read it.

The paragraph says:

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

What do we learn from this?
Well, let me put it this way and motivate you as I simultaneously motivate myself:

Go after what you want.
Go after something big, something beautiful, something noble.
Go after it with all you have – mind, body, and spirit.
Do everything in your power.
And then, do everything in your power again.
Risk everything.
Do it.
When you inhale, it’s this dream that fills your lungs.
Do it.
It doesn’t matter if you come out of it a winner.
If you give it all you got, if you really give it all you got,
it’s all that matters.

As you chase your dreams, it’s okay to say, “You are killing me, fish.”
Because, like Charles Bukowski once put it, “Find what you love, and let it kill you.”
And as Samuel Beckett once put it, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”