Fear

Fear nothing.

Don't be stupid about risks, but never allow fear to stop you from taking action.

Never.

We are taught from childhood to be careful, but the training tends to make us confuse fear and caution. You can be prudent and cautious without being fearful. For example, most of us (with one exception we both know) can plug in an electrical appliance with reasonable care and caution without being petrified of the activity.

And then there's all the crap on TV and in the movies that massively exaggerate the danger of -- well, everything (wasn't there a horror film about "The Tomato that Ate Cinncinati" ? How stupid and gullible can we be?). Bugs, snakes, bees, wasps, spiders, scorpions, etc end up throwing too many people into a panic when a simple "whap" and concomitant "crunch" with a magazine, newspaper, shoe or even fist will rapidly dispatch the concern -- well, sometimes you have to use a shovel on the snakes.

Heights, enclosed spaces, elevators, flying, dark, etc. are fears based on short circuits in one's brain. Some of those circumstances warrant caution and care but the fear tends to based on an exaggeration of the fear of the unknown and unexpected.

Fear of the unknown, unexpected, unfamiliar, unidentified are simply mechanisms for justifying staying in comfortable, or maybe uncomfortable or even dangerous but familiar surroundings. It is the same as having a fear of knowledge, and fear of experience, a fear of discovery -- and when it phrased that way it sounds as silly as the fear is.

Most people vastly over estimate the negative impact of risks and vastly over estimate the prospect of succeeding at a beneficial opportunity -- which is why Lotteries make billions. But as a result, circumstances that have both positive and negative potential outcomes tend to be avoided for fear of the negative result. For example, lots of people play the Lottery every day -- but suppose each mega-lottery winner was required to roll dice and if the dice came up 2, or 3, they would have that many fingers cut off; if the dice came up 10, or 11 their winnings would be doubled. Think about how many people would even take a chance (generally a 1 in 14 million or greater chance) by buying a ticket -- innately people react out of fear to the negative consequence much more strongly than they are attracted to the positive outcomes.

From this also comes fear of public speaking/performance, fear of approaching attractive women, fear of standing up for yourself, fear of asking for a raise, fear of asking for a client's/customer's business etc etc. -- and in these cases 95% of the time the only downside is the embarassment you feel inside (you still have all your fingers).

Broadly, a lot of this can be characterized as a fear of failure. But failure is nothing to be feared -- for you learn much much more from failure than success. Enterpreneurs who are successful in their first efforts invariably believe they are somehow 'gifted' with universal 'rightness' in all possible decisions and businesses. They confuse being lucky with being good -- and sooner or later luck runs out. You get good by figuring out how to develop skills and resources and contacts and abilities that enable you to overcome luck -- and often that comes by not succeeding, figuring out what went wrong and why, and trying again. Virtually every major success in business has had to sustain dealing with failure to one extent or another. Few ever trumpet their failures or talk about them much, but if you look close, they are there in the background, or they've learned from other's failures.

One thing to bear in mind is that you haven't lost until you've quit trying.

Believe it or not, you taught me some simple lessons in this regard when I was first starting to do consulting and facing a lot of unknowns and potential embarassment and potential failure.

Lesson 1: If it's important to succeed; NEVER stop trying. That was driven home watching you as a early toddler just learning to walk. I'd had some conversations over the earlier weeks with people who had commented how they had tried twice to learn to do X and given up, or had a diet that wasn't giving them the results they wanted, so they gave up. And I was watching you pull yourself up and try to take a first step or two and started recalling all sorts of times when I and others had decided that 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 attempts was enough and wondered, "when do we tell him not to bother trying to walk anymore...that it's clearly too difficult?". The answer, of course, was 'never' -- you keep trying until you succeed. Period. Why should anything else that is truly important to you be any different?

Lesson 2: In facing the unknown be specific about what you are trying to avoid -- when you do that, it often ends up being embarassment (which is not important enough to stop you from trying anything). Or, in your young words, the "Or what?" test.

You were probably three and for some reason you were questioning what alternatives or consequences you were facing. So for a couple of months if I told you to eat you peas, you would innocently look up as ask "Or what?"

There was no confrontation in your question; no sarcasm or innuendo; just an innocent and almost comically naive inquiry of potential consequences. "Or you won't be healthy"; "Or Dad will be upset"; "Or the Spaghetti-o's won't taste as good"; almost any response was satisfactory for you. You just wanted an answer to "or what?"

And it struck me that grown ups often tend to convince themselves that horribly terrible, yet totally ambiguous and indeterminate stuff justifies their fear of getting out there and doing what they need or want to do. And when you really focus on answering honestly the "or what" question -- most of the time the true answer is "or I might be embarassed".

Embarassed? Big deal -- get over it and get on with it.

Almost every other negative outcome you can think of can be managed to one extent or another to minimize it's impact.

So when your afraid of moving into unfamiliar territory, just ask yourself "or what?".