The World of Fear

Darkness is a very scary thing. It can turn a sane person insane. When we can’t see, we get scared. We hear things. Our Systems goes south. The more illusionary tricks our mind plays, the scarier it gets. Then suddenly you reach out to flip a switch and the light comes on and everything’s fine again. You now believe that there’s no monster hiding in the closet or a serial killer creeping up the stairs to kill you. All illusions washes away and life goes on. But turning on the light to fear isn’t as in real life. We get drown into the pool of fear and there’s no ladder to get us out. Most of us live life in fear, we give up all our controls to fear. This is the reason we fail. It’s not because of external conditions, most of the time it’s internal problem. We have to change our mindset towards fear if we want to progress and achieve greatness for ourselves in life. Fear isn’t something you overcome, fear is something that you dance with. This concept was talked about by Seth Godin, he talks about learning to understand fear, and to know that it’ll always be there by your side. But you have a choice, you can either allow fear to take control of you, or you can take control of fear and allocate a location for it in your life. Fear is a part of our daily lives, it’s high time we face it.

Why Fear Exist?

Fear have stayed with Human Beings since the Paleolithic era. And fear exist for a good reason, after all our survival depends on it. When Fear manifest, we know to look for danger. Say a lion was strolling in the neighborhood, without fear we wouldn’t be alarmed and death would befall on us. Fear protects us from the dangers in our environment, fear is what kept us alive and multiplying all these years.

Fear comes when we experience threat that alarms our senses. We didn’t fear the lions since the beginning of time, it was only after a dozen Human Beings were killed by it that this fear had developed amongst the ones that witnessed the tragic event, those were the ones that passed on these fear from one generation to the other. That’s the reason we fear Lions but not Kittens even though they’re the same species. An experiment was conducted to prove the validity of this theory by John B. Watson, it was called the Little Albert experiment. The scientists wanted to know whether fear can be conditioned. In this experiment a new born of just 9 months (Albert) was taken into a laboratory and little Albert was presented with a white rat. The rat didn’t seem to scare Albert at all, he was actually playing with it. The the scientists brought in a steel bar to strike on, and the noise would bother Little Albert. He would cry when he hears the noise. This is because his human sense (his ear) is sensing abnormality in the environment. So now whenever Albert touches or plays with the white rat, the scientists would strike the steel bar and Albert would cry. This made Albert associate the white rat with fear and it wasn’t long before he fears the rat and stayed away from it completely. You might think that this is unethical. So do I. But this kind of experiments are conduct at massive scale, all around the world. The only difference being the people conducting it, instead of Scientists — it’s Parents, Teachers, Media, Governments and the Society that we all live in!

Fear of New

New things are scary. From trying out a new haircut to meeting new people, its all very scary. It’s scary because we don’t know about it’s drawbacks. When we try out new things we cannot estimate the consequences of going wrong. We don’t know what will work and what won’t. So instead of risking it we assume that everything will fall apart if we mess up at any one point. Is this true? Absolutely not. When you swim and miss a stroke, will you drawn? No you won’t, not even if you miss a breath. To assure that you won’t completely mess up everything, start small. Don’t listen to the people who says, ‘oh you should risk everything, higher risk equals higher reward’, this is a bullshit statement and it doesn’t apply to all situation. Yes there is a percentage of people who do succeed when they risk everything but that percentage is very small compared to those who failed. Going bald is not a hairstyle for everyone, for some people it looks good — others look bad. But if you followed the theory of ‘higher risk equals higher reward’ then you’re setting yourself up for failure or success, it’s 50/50. But if you want to test whether you look good by going bald, you can start small. Maybe start be cutting your hair very short and then slowly trim it to a lower number. By doing this, you give yourself a space to fail without having to completely start over. Doing anything new requires patience, nothing great will happen to you overnight it gradually comes. So to avoid being scared of trying out new things, don’t go all in. Test the water first. Have a plan and experiment with different things.

Fear of Death

Fear of Death is a very rational fear. No sane person would want to die. Not even the ones who wants to go to Heaven. There’s a reason death scares us, death scares us to keep us living. Now this statement may sound really obvious but we don’t remind ourselves of this nearly enough. We take Life for granted. We take it for full certainty that we will live for 70 to 80 years and that there’s plenty of time left for us. That’s not an effective thinking. That’s the kind of thinking that creates failure in the world. We human beings are not programmed to do well with abundance. We do a hell of a lot better when we live in scarcity. We strive for more when we have less. But when we have everything our progress starts to fall and we dive down towards failure. This is why big companies have lower rate of improvement. That’s why we see small businesses invent new things even-though they don’t have nearly as much money, people or connections as the big companies do.

We should be scared of death, we should think of it everyday. We should tell ourselves that we don’t have all the time in the world, it’s now or never!

Fear of Failure

We don’t want to fail. We don’t want to be humiliated. We crave for Social Proof. We crave for Social Acceptance. And failure does not look good, we look at failure the same way we look at humiliation. Even people who’ve succeeded after failing a hundredth time doesn’t want to fail again. But it happens. And it gets easier to cope with. Remember the first time you did public talking and you were stressed out? Did it got easier the second time? Well of course it did, it gets easier but it doesn’t go away. Ask public speakers if in some corner of their mind they still fear talking in front of people, if they’re not lying to you they will say “yes”.

Fear of failure will happen to you, me and everybody else who tries to do something new and off-track. It happens not because Life is being mean on you, it happens because Life is preparing you. It’s preparing you for The Battle. Failure are meant for you to become stronger and smarter, so don’t taken it personally. Look at it objectively, learn from your mistake and you will be a step closer to your success.

To Conclude

Fear is created by us. We invented it, so it’s only up to us to handle it. You cannot shove fear aside. It’ll always be there, it’s just up to you how much importance you give it. If you give fear a lot of importance in your life, you will go nowhere. Fear is not your enemy, you are you’re own worst enemy. So don’t let “You” stop you from going anywhere in life.

“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”

— Mark Zuckerberg