saturday mornings #5
taking risks, facing fears, and saving money
Happy Saturday morning all,
I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend and enjoying the warm summer weather.
I’m sure the last few days have had their share of stresses, emergencies, and annoyances, but hopefully you can put those behind you, brush them off, and just enjoy the day.
Thanks for kicking off your weekend with me. Let’s dig in.
Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
I believe more and more that life is all about calculated risk taking. The moment one stops taking risks, shutting themselves in a room and closing the blinds, they stop living. Many risks are dumb to take and can be avoided with a bit of thoughtful consideration however, as far as I can tell, you need to take risks to thrive and accomplish big things. The safe path isn’t usually the best path, although it’s often the easiest.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes (somewhat dramatically):
“If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing that makes you grand, nothing.”
It takes much more strength to take risks, and potentially fail, than to remain in the same place you are. But for me, the fear of not actualizing my potential (doing everything I can with the opportunities life has provided) is much larger than my fear of failure.
In my mind, that’s what it comes down to. I’ve discovered that unfulfilled potential is truly what I fear most.
And through that continual reminder, I think one can largely work towards overcoming their fear of failure, as you can’t realize what your potential truly is without taking risks and possibly failing.
Book passage I loved:
“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 was 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
This mantra is something the protagonist in Dune repeats throughout the book to calm and centre himself in times of fear or panic. And in my own life, I’ve found this passage to be really helpful to remember and call on for courage in similar moments.
I think we’re caught in fear, especially over the past year, much more often than we may realize. However, and this is an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while, it’s so critical to be able to face your fear head-on, looking at it directly “in the eye”. And the ending message of overcoming those feelings of fear and being left standing once the fear leaves is empowering.
As easy as it is to push scary or uncomfortable things aside in avoidance, hoping it goes away (which is something I catch myself doing quite often) you’re just intensifying your fear and delaying the difficult thing you have to face. The hard choices: what we most fear doing, asking, or saying. These are very often what we most need to do. If you’re courageous and face the thing you fear directly, you realize your ability to conquer fear instead of letting it conquer you.
Fun fact: My Dad found a version of this quote scribed across on a steel beam in Split, Croatia a couple of years ago and snapped a pic.
Speech that resonated:
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something… almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement, 2005
Website I’ve found useful:
Despite its amusing name, CamelCamelCamel is a useful tool for people who shop frequently on Amazon. It’s a free Amazon price tracker, where users can paste in the URL of the Amazon product they’re looking at purchasing and CamelCamelCamel will show you the item’s price history, almost similar to a stock chart. Amazon employs dynamic pricing so items can experience +30% swings in price.
See Example:
I’ve found this site to be helpful in determining whether the current price is high or low in relation to historical averages and if it looks like the price could spike or drop in the future.
For those of you who love Amazon but are bargain hunters and don’t mind waiting to purchase something (which is slightly contradictory with using Amazon I suppose) it’s a great tool.
Song that’s been stuck in my head:
“Cigarette Daydreams” – Cage The Elephant
Definitely some high school vibes, but I’d recommend giving it a listen.
Check it out on YouTube or on Spotify
Question for reflection:
A good question to revisit whenever overwhelmed: Are you having a breakdown or a breakthrough?
Oftentimes when there feels like a million things going on, where you’re stretched thin and at a tipping point, you feel out of control. However, it’s often those moments of stress and discomfort where you’re able to grow and develop the most.
Seth Godin has a quote with a very similar idea:
“That feeling that everything is about to fall apart. That panic is precisely what growth feels like.”
The overarching message is that feeling overwhelmed is not always a negative thing (assuming one’s goal is growth and development). Although the feeling can be unpleasant, it’s often a sign you’re learning and expanding your capabilities (even your ability to handle being overwhelmed).
Think back to some of the most challenging times in your life, and odds are they are also the most transformative.
Challenge for the week ahead:
Fear Setting
Fear setting, popularized by Tim Ferriss, is a journaling and thought exercise with its roots in Stoic thinking.
Seneca (ancient Stoic philosopher) prescribes that people should look into their fears, explore them, question them, and then try to test them in real life.
“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all.”
Seneca
From a high level, it’s an exercise that prompts you to reflect on a couple of simple questions to help you better understand the things you’re afraid of (both consciously and unconsciously).
The thinking behind fear setting is that our fears become spun out of proportion in our minds, and can cause us a lot of pain and discomfort. But if you are to work through the exercise of writing your fears down and probing into them, you can sometimes realize your fears are unjustified, as they often don’t deserve the fear you may feel.
Fear setting is not a panacea. You’ll find that some of your fears are very well-founded, but you shouldn’t conclude that without first putting them under a microscope.
I encourage you to ask yourself where in your life, right now, might defining your fears might be more important than defining your goals.
Tim has a great TED Talk on fear setting with >3 million views, as well as a blog post walking through the practice.
“I can trace all of my biggest wins, and all of my biggest disasters averted back to doing fear setting at least once a quarter” – Tim Ferriss
I worked through fear setting back over the winter break, in trying to decide whether to launch into a new path I was concerned about, and found it helpful to identify and test my fears. It helped me to build the courage to embark on a new path, and I hope if you’re in a similar position it can do the same for you.
Update as of writing: That path I took completely failed. Simply put, I stepped up to bat and struck out. Five months later, I’m exactly where I was before, except $300 and 200 hours short. My initial paralyzing fear of failure came true.
However, I’m still alive and breathing today. I realized, when tested in my life, that fear was drastically overdramatized in my mind. Failing was disappointing, don’t get me wrong, but it really wasn’t all that bad.
The pain from my fear of failure was much greater than the pain from actually failing. I figured out a different path I’m equally excited about and life goes on. I’m grateful for that experience as through having the courage to face my fears I had a real-life experience to learn that “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality”.
That’s all for this edition of saturday mornings.
It unintentionally had a theme around fear but hopefully, I was able to provide some useful insights or tools to provide you more confidence if you happen to be grappling with fear.
I felt, after struggling with it a lot personally, offering some food for thought around handling fear may help and make an impact on people. If there’s anything you found helpful in particular, I’d love to hear about it.
If you’re still reading this, thank you for getting this far. Your support and attention mean so much.
Have a restful and relaxing weekend. You deserve it.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas