The Paradox of Fear: The More Scary Stuff You Do, The Less Scared You Are
“You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.”
Fear is the greatest enemy of wealth creation. If you are not naturally courageous, you have to work much harder to constantly push outside your comfort zone.
And the paradox of fear is that the more stuff you do that scares you, the less scared you are.
Fear Is A Natural Remnant Of An Older World.
Fear, at its core, is meant to keep you alive. It’s an automatic response that protects you from danger, often before you’re even aware there’s something to be afraid of.
If you’ve ever touched a hot burner, you know what this is like. Your hand flies off of it before you realize it’s hot or you feel any pain. That’s your natural fear / danger response protecting you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains this in his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder:
“Neurobiologists who have studied the emotional system show how it often reacts to the presence of danger long before we are consciously aware of it—we experience fear and start reacting a few milliseconds before we realize that we are facing a snake.”
Our brains aren’t much different than those of humans who lived 300,000 years ago. But back then, the world was a much scarier place to live. It was a lot easier to die.
Today, you don’t really have to worry about getting killed by a snake. Or getting killed at all. But the fear is still there.
And as the late entrepreneur, Felix Dennis, writes, that fear is what keeps most people from getting rich:
“After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than I fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth. Trust me on this.”
The problem is simple: fear of an unknown future is what holds you back.
The good news is that the solution is just as straightforward: do more stuff that scares you.
Do More Stuff That Scares You.
The more scary stuff you do, the less fear you’ll carry around and the further you’ll be able to push into the unknown.
I experienced this when I quit my job. Before I did it, I was terrified. I was stricken with anxiety, doubt, and fear of giving up a steady paycheck that I’d relied on for years.
But once I did it, the fear was gone. And it’s still gone to this day.
Because the opposite of fear is not courage. It’s action. The more scary stuff you do, the less fear you feel.
If you’re scared of something, go try it. See what it feels like. More likely than not, it’s not as bad as you think.
You Fear A Downside That Doesn’t Exist.
What you’ll quickly learn is that the downside you were anxious about is not nearly as disastrous as it looked from afar. Here’s Naval Ravikant explaining this:
“Realize that in modern society, the downside risk is not that large. Even personal bankruptcy can wipe the debts clean in good ecosystems. I’m most familiar with Silicon Valley, but generally people will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high integrity effort.”
When you really look at it, your “worst-case” scenario isn’t actually that bad.
Most of What you Fear Will Never Happen.
Once you take action, you also learn that the vast majority of what you fear most will never come to pass. Your worst nightmare rarely becomes a reality.
This doesn’t mean you ignore the possibility though. Do what you can to protect yourself from serious downside. As Taleb says in Antifragile, fear should transform into prudence, not ignorance:
“The modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
Fear should never stop you from taking action. And the Paradox of Fear is that once you do take action, that fear disappears.
Start now.
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SOURCES
Dennis, Felix. How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Naval Ravikant: How To Get Rich: Every Episode
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.