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Fear. We’re all driven by it. It’s the primary motivating factor in our lives. We’re flooded with messages of fear everyday.
If you listen to how people talk, you’ll notice that a good percentage of the time, people are reacting to fear. Fear for their safety. Fear for their diet. Fear for their family. Fear for their job.
One of the major political strategies is fear. Fear that bad things will happen if the other side wins.
On a work level, fear affects who decides to be a worker and who decides to be an entrepreneur. It takes a leap of faith to be an entrepreneur. You have to face your fears about yourself and your ability to be a success. And you have to grapple with the fact that if you fail, YOU will have failed. The proof will be in the ashes of the ruined business.
That’s scary. But on the other hand, working at a job where you have to endure problems with no real solutions because your problems are institutional… personally, that idea scares me more.
The important thing is to realize “fear” as a specific thing that you have a relationship with. You have areas of comfort and areas of real unease. If you notice what media you’re consuming, you’re bound to find a few sources that provide healthy doses of fear to you, packaged in culturally appropriate ways. You’ll see it in the nightly news. You’ll see it in women’s magazines (and men’s magazines). You’ll see it in movie theaters. (This summer has not one but two movies coming out where the White House is taken over by a hostile country.) And you’ll see it in our diet. What’s the boogie man at the moment? Sugar? HFCS? Gluten?
These incoming sources of fear, contrary to how it feels, making you smarter. They’re making you more fearful, and probably skewing your ability to judge risk appropriately.
After all, you’re 3 times more likely to die in a car crash on the way to buy a lottery ticket as you are to win the lottery. But millions of people play the lottery anyway.
In today’s podcast, we talk about this and more.
Happy Friday everybody!
