When deciding whether to jump off my old career path and onto my current one, my thinking was almost entirely set on my fears and not the opportunities. What if I fail? What if I regret this? What if I hate it? What if I’m bad at it?
My fears held me back… much longer than they should have.
Today showed me that I shouldn’t have let that be the case. My day was spent running an exam in my capacity as a lecturer, researching the impact of AI on employment and interviewing one of the most well known social ventures in Cape Town. I also received my brief for my consulting project on an impact evaluation of a government innovation project and I found out that I’d made the final round of a startup accelerator.
I would never have imagined having days like these…. And this is because I spent my time imagining everything that could go wrong.
Throw the Fear
“Importance of just keeping-going
Perseverance will be your greatest friend
Don’t die before you’re dead, keep watering the plants, love
In the end, the end is just the end”
-Throw the Fear by Tom Rosenthal
I discovered this song when I woke up this morning, and have played it 14 time since then. A little obsessive, but it captured my mood perfectly. Listen to it here.
It’s a popfolk song which Tom Rosenthal wrote to his newborn daughter. Tom is a person who clearly doesn’t fear much. He has one song about his love for Pasta, one dedicated exclusively to watermelons and one titled ” Toby Carr’s difficult relationship with Tuna”.
The interesting thing is throwing away his fear of people finding him weird is likely what ultimately led to his popularity. He is unique, precisely because he doesn’t fear doing things differently
Defining Fears
To round off today’s theme, I stumbled across a Ted talk titled “why you should define your fears instead of your goals“. It’s by Tim Ferriss, a serial entrepreneur and the guy who wrote “The 4 Hour Work Week”.
This shone a whole new light on how to handle fears. Conquering fears, in my mind, usually involves suppressing or ignoring them. Not for Tim.
Tim uses a stoic approach to dealing with fears. He created a worksheet to do this. The first page has the focal question: “What if I….?” followed by space to define your fears. Then, you list how you can prevent these from happening. Finally, you explain how you’d fix the issue if it happened.
In doing this, there are two key results. Firstly, you have a plan on how to deal with a number of negative outcomes. More importantly though, you’ve defined your fears and seen that ultimately, they can all be eliminated, reduced or handled if need be.
It’s always going to be difficult to overcome fears. We’re preprogrammed to experience them. But we can train ourselves to overcome them. In doing so, we open ourselves up to an abundant number of positive possibilities
“Throw the fear, throw the fear, let the day become the year
You’re alive, I’m alive, we’re a-la-la-la-la-la-live!
If you go, if you go, take all the heart with you
History, is all gone, make the new, make the new”
-Throw the Fear by Tom Rosenthal