☕ saturday mornings - January 29, 2022
☕ saturday mornings - January 29, 2022
exploiting simplicities, asymmetric relationships & smashing fear
Happy Saturday all,
I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been pondering, learning, and exploring over the past few days.
Thanks for being here.
If you enjoy “saturday mornings”, I’d love if you could share it with a friend.
Total read time (bolded sections) = 2 minutes
Total read time (all) = 6 minutes
✍️ Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
— Andy Benoit
💡 Idea from me:
Some people show kindness when you do a million things they like, but instantly treat you like dirt the moment you do one thing that’s not in their best interest ― hence the relationship is asymmetric.
Don’t invest in asymmetric relationships.
🐲Challenge for the week ahead: Smashing Fear
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear ― not absence of fear.”
― Mark Twain
How do you overcome fear?
It’s an age-old question. One that I’ve read a lot about, but never found a guide that covers everything you need to know. So, being me, I decided to write my own.
I’ll explain how you can apply ancient wisdom, lessons from historical greats, and modern clinical psychology to smash fear and level up.
First, I’ll cover why you should confront your fear. Then, how you can take action to overcome fear.
Through this approach, I’ve overcome many of my most paralyzing fears and I hope you can too.
Fear is no fun.
Step 1: Going into Fear like a Knight
“The more you run from your fears, the bigger they get, but the more you go into them, the more they tend to vanish like a mirage.”
― Terry Crews
“All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory.”
— Dale Carnegie
There’s an old English legend about King Arthur and the knights of the round table.
Once upon a time, in a castle surrounded by a thick forest, King Arthur and his knights were in search of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is the most valuable object, the highest possible goal, the objective of all objectives.
But where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don’t know where it is?
The knights resolved to search the forest surrounding the castle. Each knight decided to enter the forest at the point that looked darkest to him.
That’s a significant point.
What you most need to find will be found where you least want to look.
To find your Holy Grail, you have to go where you don’t want to because that’s precisely where you put all the things that scare you or make you uncomfortable that you don’t want to deal with.
And this concept is echoed in the stories and dragons and gold.
The dragon is this terrible thing that lives in hiding in a dark cave. And it’s scary because it’s dangerous ― it’ll kill you in a second. It’s this physical embodiment of fear.
But, it hoards gold. To get the treasure, you have to be brave, confront fear and enter the dragon’s lair. You can’t get one thing without the other. You don’t get the gold without the dragon.
The thing of value you seek is usually directly past the thing you fear most.
And there’s substantial evidence from clinical psychology to support this idea. Controlled exposure to fear rewires our brain to reduce our fear response. Through confronting our fears we build confidence and become less fearful.
Key takeaway: To live a good life, and reach your highest potential, you have to confront your fear.
Now let’s cover exactly how to do that.
Step 2: Overcoming Fear like a Stoic
“There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
― Seneca
“The most important actions are never comfortable.”
— Tim Ferriss
Cato was a Roman senator from ~100 BC and is regarded as one of the founders of stoic philosophy.
As a young man, he was very conscious of others' opinions. He wanted to be liked and worried people said mean things about him.
Being a philosopher, Cato did something smart. He overhauled his wardrobe.
Cato intentionally wore brightly colored and mismatched clothing around town, which was seen as ridiculous for someone of his position. This way he didn't have to guess about whether people were teasing him — he knew they were.
Cato realized that in reality, his fear wasn’t that scary. People’s opinions mattered much less than he thought. Through this exercise, Cato overcame his fear of judgment, becoming much less self-conscious.
What’s the lesson we can distill?
The stoics believed in confronting your fears. They would intentionally expose themselves to their fear knowing that it wouldn’t stand the test of reality.
They knew that only through confronting fear you can overcome it and realize we suffer much more in our imagination.
From Stoicism, we can learn to design low-risk experiments to test and overcome our fears.
Fun Fact: Cato actually inspired my pair of bright pink shorts. I get some weird looks… but who cares?
My Operating Philosophy for Fear: Take Action
“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”
— Jerzy Gregorek
Action cures fear. Indecision, postponement, on the other hand, fertilize fear… What kind of action can I take to conquer my fear?
— The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz, PH.D.
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it.”
— Dale Carnegie
Psychologists and philosophers alike echo that the best possible action when dealing with fear is to confront it directly and immediately.
The “I’ll do it later approach” doesn’t really work out. Pushed to the side, fear only grows, becomes more controlling, and harder to confront. It doesn’t go away.
At the risk of oversharing, I’ll tell a short story.
I used to hate checking my grades in school. Each midterm or exam, I’d play out every worst-case scenario for hours and was paralyzed by fear the moment grades came out, to the point where I just wouldn’t check them. For weeks. I thought it was easier not knowing.
Except (surprise surprise) I was wrong. It may have been easier not to check in the short-term, but that fear and uncertainty I felt, when pushed to the side, didn’t go away but festered in the back of my head.
And then I started doing some research and came across the story of King Arthur and his knights.
And, as much as I hated to remind myself, I knew for my own growth and development I had to take action and turn into my fear. I even taped to my wall: “the best possible action when dealing with a fear is to confront it directly and immediately.”
Although checking my grades right away wasn’t easy, I knew it was a hard decision with a huge payoff.
Interestingly, what I found in turning into my fear wasn’t more pain. It was relief. The short-term decision was still scary but I was no longer in a constant state of fear and unease around grades.
Even in the worst-case scenario, the pain from fear was far greater than the pain from receiving a bad grade. Reality was never as bad as the potential outcomes I created in my head (even with advanced math courses). But that was only discovered by confronting my fear.
It’s a dangerous negative feedback loop. Every fear you turn away from you shrink. Soon, the number of things you fear grows, as you’ve never faced any of them. Your identity becomes someone that runs from fear. You become small and afraid.
Closing Thoughts
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
— Dune, Frank Herbert
Only through moving into our fears can we grow bigger and reach our highest potential. Every big thing you want to do lies on the other side of fear.
It really sucks to face fear. It’s scary. It’s entering the dragon’s lair and staring the beast in the eyes.
But once you do it, and make it through to the other side, the payoff is 100x. You reform your identity into someone that overcomes fear. It becomes habit. You take more control of your life. And it feels really good.
Our fears define our limits.
Define our fears and we become limitless.
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
As always, if you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email or shoot me a message on Twitter.
Have a lovely weekend. You deserve it.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas