The Moment You Stop Living in Fear Is the Moment You Come Alive
To stop living in fear doesn’t mean you’re fearless.
Steve Jobs committed suicide.
And most people don’t know that fact about the Apple Co-Founder (I certainly didn’t). Before he died Steve told Walter Isaacson he had regrets about not starting chemo sooner. What held him back is he had a fear of surgery.
Getting cut open felt worse than losing a billion dollars.
Dr. Barrie Cassileth says Steve’s faith in alternative medicine to cure his cancer “likely cost him his life.”
What’s more bizarre is Steve had the type of cancer that’s easily curable. So his decision to handle his cancer the way he did – with juices and rest – was basically a form of suicide.
The bottom line is Steve’s fear of needles and surgical knives cost him his life when he could easily have overcome them. He’d beaten much bigger fears before.
This is what happens when you mismanage fear. It creeps up on you and can even cause death. But the moment you stop living in fear is the moment you come alive.
It’s one of the best feelings in the world, and I have it right now.
The biggest realization I had about fear
Writer Visakan Veerasamy said something I’ll never forget:
"I've been living in fear of getting it wrong, but when I look back I realize I’ve been doing it wrong the whole time anyway, and I'm still here"
I highlighted this sentence more than a year ago. It describes the exact feeling I’ve had for much of the last 3 years.
I quit my job. And I decided to stop living in fear. The whole time I’ve been managing the day-to-day stress I could do something wrong that forces me back to a job.
When professionals look at my online business they laugh.
I’m doing so many basic things wrong. Even though this fear has plagued me for so long, the quote above reminded me that I’m still here and still writing.
When I look back on my entire life, I’ve been doing everything wrong all the time.
Yet my life still works. I still have a business. I still have a wife and one year old daughter. I still have food on the table and a warm place to stay.
That’s despite all my fear.
Once you realize you’ve always been doing most things wrong despite your fear, you finally come alive.
None of us are fearless
To stop living in fear doesn’t mean you’re fearless.
This is what most people get wrong. Being unstoppable in life is where you feel the fear and take action anyway. Fear exists but it’s not the reason to stop or give up.
It’s when you decide your big goals are more important than the fear you feel. Because fear will always exist. In fact, I’d argue fear is a must.
If you’re not feeling fear every day, then you’re not doing anything important. Fear is a precursor to growth. It’s where all the mental muscle is built.
Fear is a mind game, and like all games, the game can be won. Lean into the fear. Seek it out. And get good at living with it.
We procrastinate not out of laziness, but out of fear – Ankur Warikoo
When I first changed industries from banking to IT it was scary.
The first meeting where I had to sell in front of my boss was terrifying. Before the meeting I had diarrhoea.
I couldn’t even eat my lunch beforehand, so my stomach rumbled all the way through, making me more nervous. My palms were dripping with sweat when I went to shake hands.
The second meeting I had wasn’t much better. By the tenth meeting I started to get used to talking about IT and the cloud. The fear never went away altogether, but it became manageable.
I got used to the fear.
That’s a big takeaway: we get used to fear. Once we are used to it we can transcend it. We either let fear use and abuse us, or we can use fear to our advantage.
So that’s what I did. I noticed when I showed up to sales meetings and had more fear than normal it was a sign I didn’t do enough preparation. Or I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
Fear became a compass.
Most people are scared of this one thing when they shouldn’t be
We live in fear when we’re scared of failure.
It’s stupid. Instead of seeing failure as learning, we see it as an outcome to avoid. This is because we’re status-seeking creatures. We associate failure with weakness, poverty, and a lack of intelligence.
Instead, we should be petrified of ending up like everyone else who lives in fear.
Being average is the real nightmare. It’s where you stay comfortable, avoid change, live in the mythical place of “someday,” and lie to yourself in your head every day.
The even stupider thing is we fear being different. We secretly want to fit in when by default that signs us up for a life of misery and fear avoidance.
If you fear being average more than you fear the fear itself, then you will come alive in ways you could never imagine.
Fear is the enemy of creativity – Tim Ferriss
The simple antidote to fear that took me 10 years to find
There’s a strange man I came across named Felix Dennis.
He started a bunch of magazines you’ve probably heard of. But his book with the clickbait title “How To Get Rich” is one of the best things I’ve ever read.
This technique will change your perception of reality forever:
Try for just a single day, a whole day when you refuse to acknowledge fear of failure, fear of making yourself look like an idiot, fear of losing your lover, fear of anything and of any kind.
Fear will creep back, but laugh at it and tell it to take a hike. Go on. I dare you. If you can do it, this will transform your life.
You will instantly perceive (among many other things) just how much money there is in the world, and how pitifully easy it is to obtain it. Money that already has your name on it.
I challenge you to play this game. To see if you can look at fear in a new way. To gamify your fears and see what they’re trying to tell you.
Fear is an opportunity. Master fear and master everything hard about life. And it earns you the sort of rewards the rest of society can only dream of.
Stop letting fear control you. Start to control fear and exploit it to find opportunities.
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Hey Tim, Just wanted to tell you about my biggest fear now. I'm a scientist who now does science communication. One of my duties is to organize conferences and workshops. I had to organize such a conference two weeks ago for 200+ people. I couldn't sleep the night before. I stayed away from Medium and Substack.
I did my job anyway because if it challenges me, it means growth. By the way, the next workshop is taking place next week in another country. I'm not shaking yet but a bunch of last-minute cancellations are making me re-think some of the planning.
I appreciate everything about this post except the use of the term suicide to describe Jobs' death. For starters, the language around this is shifting. Death by suicide is more appropriate than "commit," for those to whom it applies.
More importantly, the way I see it, Jobs gambled. He wagered a bet that he could beat the odds, and the cards didn't land in his favor. That's not suicide. He is quoted as having said, "You’re born alone, you’re going to die alone. And does anything else really matter? I mean, what is it exactly is it that you have to lose, Steve? You know? There’s nothing.” We can speculate all we want about whether he might have lived longer than the 8 (?) years he had after diagnosis. But deciding to take an alternate treatment route is not the same as death by suicide.