Go toward the fear.

Dave Gray
4 min readJun 21, 2017

I grew up in a very competitive and male-dominated family, the oldest of three brothers. My dad appreciated winning and winners. My brothers and I played sports, but my heart was never in it. Which is not to say that I wasn’t competitive in other ways. My dad often lamented that I just didn’t have the killer instinct. The truth was that he was right. Winning in sports was never that important to me.

I didn’t avoid conflict though, especially where authority was concerned. I wasn’t afraid to stand up, speak truth to power, or to challenge the order of things. I challenged my teachers, questioned everything, and even walked out of school once when I felt I was treated unfairly. My dad was also a rebel at heart, and he respected my rebelliousness, even (or maybe especially) when I stood up to him. From the time I first made a finger painting of my pet turtle, I’ve known I wanted to be an artist. Without such a stubborn and anti-authoritarian nature, I’m not sure I would have stuck to that artist path. But I have.

My brother Rick was almost my exact opposite. He respected authority and craved the approval of his teachers and peers. So nothing bothered him more than when I broke a rule or challenged a norm and our father approved, which he often did. To this day, Rick calls himself the “white sheep of the family.”

Rick had a temper, and one of his favorite ploys when he was frustrated or jealous was to taunt or tempt me into hitting him, which would then justify a brawl where he could claim to be the good guy because “Dave started it.” Somehow this worked for both of us, because he got to feel wronged and I got to lash out physically. We played out this game over and over over many years of our childhood.

My dad was a university professor and we often went camping in the summertime. One year when I was about 15, we were camping somewhere in New Hampshire and the three boys went off alone in a canoe. We were goofing around and I threw my brother’s hat into the water. I knew the hat was precious to him — it was a painter’s cap, a concert promo giveaway by the Police, and not replaceable. I intended to retrieve it but as we maneuvered the canoe and I reached for it, it sank, beyond any hope of recovery.

My brother was livid. He picked up his oar and heaved it at me and it struck a glancing blow off of my head. I reached up to feel my head and there was a deep gash. My hair was sticky with blood. My youngest brother Dan, between us in the boat, looked apprehensively at both of us, wondering what would come next. Somehow I felt strangely calm. In an even voice I firmly told my brothers to pull over and let me out. I didn’t want to be in that boat any more. Ashen, they complied.

I found myself on the bank of a stream in the middle of nowhere. There were no roads in sight, and I just started walking. I came across some railroad tracks and decided to follow wherever they led. Walking down the tracks, I realized that I was free. I didn’t need to go back or return to my family. I could just keep walking. I was not concerned where my path would lead. As I contemplated my newfound freedom, a feeling of great exhilaration washed over me. I will never forget the sense of possibility in that moment.

My family, of course, was greatly concerned, and I was reunited with my family not much later, to find that my brothers had somehow agreed on the story that it was not an oar but an empty Coke can. I still had the gash on my head but somehow they convinced me that it had happened that way. Years later Rick revealed that it had, indeed, been an oar.

This was many years ago. My dad is now 82 years old, and is surprised and delighted at the successes I have had in life. Surprise, because he never expected my pursuit of art to result in anything but poverty. Delight, because I have followed my passion for art and lead a happy life.

In a reflective moment, over dinner, he said to me, “the thing about you Dave is that you had no fear. I don’t think most people realize how much fear holds them back.” I think that’s true. Fear stops most people from becoming the person they want to be, and leading the life they want to live.

Fear can be overcome though, by following one simple rule. There are many times in life when you are faced with an important decision and you are torn between two options. Should I marry this person? Should I quit my job? Change careers? Move to a different country? These kinds of things are scary. The choice is usually between a safe option and a scary one.

But when you think about it, the right answer is lurking in the middle of your dilemma.

If you make a pro and con list, you will notice that the safer option usually wins. But somehow that doesn’t feel right. That’s because we all tend to subconsciously stack the deck in favor of the answer we want. It’s human nature.

But the very fact that you are torn between the safe option and the scary one is the most important clue. If the safe answer were the right answer, you wouldn’t be so torn between the two options.

Deep down, you know that the right choice is the scary one. That’s why I always follow one simple rule:

When in doubt, go toward the fear.

Dave Gray is the founder of XPLANE and author of a new book on creativity and change, Liminal Thinking.

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Dave Gray

Founder, XPLANE. Author, The Connected Company and Gamestorming http://xplaner.com