If you want to live a life of fear, it’s pretty straightforward:
- Read the news
- Believe the worst about people
- Ignore any evidence to the contrary
- Read the fine print (every last word of it dangit!)
- Spend more time worrying about potential problems than solving them.
It’s a simple life, but the tradeoff is you spend it all worrying about things you can’t control, instead of focusing on things you can.
Sure there are dangers in life and things you should be scared of, but if you spend your whole time worrying about them, you’ll be paralyzed from fear and never do anything.
And that’s what some people do…
But, there’s another way that people live.
These people aren’t fearless, but they learn to accept the fact that even though they’re scared out of their mind, they’re still going to do something. These people are the ones that end up doing something worthwhile. They’re the ones that end up doing something impossible.
It’s time to stop living scared and start actually living.
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I love this post! Three years ago I took the bull by the horns and stopped living scared. I went back to school to pursue my dream of becoming a teacher. This month I walked in my graduation ceremony with my teaching certificate ready and waiting. Now I just need to find a full-time job for next year. I noticed the same fear creeping in. “Am I good enough?” “Will anyone want ME?” It’s time to remember that I’ve “done the impossible” so many times in my life it’s not funny. It’s time to live. I KNOW I will get hired when the time is right and “I” am ready. It’s funny how the universe knows these things.
Great post. Thank you!
Good luck on the job hunt. Let me know what happens!
great post! my parents and whole family are pretty much that way so its been a lifelong process of creating new histories and language for me.. i am made to do something great. i feel it 🙂
Yes you were. Now go make it happen 🙂
Punchy post, Joel! So true, you can talk yourself out of anything by worrying about every little thing that might go wrong.
One of my favourite advertising slogans is Nike’s “Just do it”.
Seriously. All the excuses in the world tend to disappear when you decide to “just do it.”
Great post. I’m sick of being scared. Enough said.
’nuff said 🙂
Currently my mantra is:
Do it afraid.
Kelly- I love your mantra! and I agree, we need to challenge ourselves to do the impossible even if we are shaking in the knees. Great post!
I think it’s a pretty good one too 🙂
I like it 🙂
Amen! About 3 weeks ago I gave up news: print, TV and internet. I do read the sports section in the morning because I work with kids and like to see how their teams did, but I purposefully reach for it without reading the headlines. It’s not some stick-my-head-in-the-sand attitude – I just got sick and tired of all the negativity and especially the stupidity in Washington, DC – I have important work to do – no time for all that bullshit!
It’s amazing how many less worries you have when you dont have the news constantly telling you what to be afraid of.
What’s up Joel. I think we can use our fear to fear better and have an awesome life. A personal ex.: when I first started doing spoken word poetry, I was spankin’ terrified. But I got up there and performed my poem while being scared. Fast forward 3 years and I was asked to perform a poem in front of hundreds of people over the course of 2 days.
We all get scared, but we can use that same fear and do that thing we are scared of and fear better.
Definitely. Fear isn’t a bad thing, but the paralysis that can happen when we let fear control us can be devastating.
I’ve been thinking about that a good bit lately b/c we’re getting our SCUBA certification. A lot of things can go wrong with diving (just the tank alone scares me-anything that can become a torpedo if dropped is frightening) but I just push it out of my mind and keep telling myself that as long as I do everything I’m supposed to, a tragic accident should be averted. I can’t let my fear ruin my fun!
Things can go wrong in almost anything, but it’s the everyday stuff that we justify as necessary risks (and tend to be pretty mundane). God forbid something terrible happen, but I’d much rather go having a great time, than living to be 200 and never having taken a risk.
good point!!! I think its great to remember you don’t have to be fearless to give things a go!!
you don’t, you just have to be wiling to face it.
I think the fact that some people are scared is because they don’t have control. In April 2008, I went heli-skiing because I knew at least that once I touch ground, I’m comfortable in my skiing ability. I’ve been wanting to go sky diving but the fact that I really don’t have control while plummeting from the plane for a bit and then relying on a parachute kinda freaks me out.
But my mantra is “Go Big or Go Home”, so I know I’ll be doing it sometime soon (just not with all of you guys in June!)
Sadly, we don’t have much time on this planet so make life worth it by doing crazy “impossible” things that not many other people would even think of trying.
Why aren’t you coming? You know you want to 🙂
Did you see this recent study showing that a fear-dominant political orientation correlates with the physical size of the amygdala? Of course, the amygdala is known to be one of the primary fear centers of the brain.
Interesting stuff. Probably a useful tendency if you’re surrounded by sabertooth tigers and sleeping under the stars with a pointy stick for defense, but for most of us…
I can always count on you for an amazingly interesting link :).
That actually makes sense – you’re more conservative when you’re cautious/scared. You tend to be more liberal when you’re feeling unafraid or uninhibited. I could see that worldview transferring over to politics fairly easily.
I’ve heard it said before that all you need to do to stimulate fear is to read the news. I don’t quite get that one.
Perhaps if I think of it as reading the news and believing it all as presented it may be more understandable since it would be easy to believe the world is a more dangerous place than it is if you ride the news cycle roller coaster without a discerning eye. Remember when every Prius was out to kill it’s owner last year?
It’s safe to say you aren’t recommending we ignore trends and changing events right Joel? Just use them as stepping stones rather than roadblocks perhaps…
A lot of the news deals with sensationalizing events to an extreme. When that’s your only filter, you tend to get a distorted view of reality. I think you have a healthy viewpoint and it’s definitely good to use a discerning eye, but what do you really get out of watching the news? Personally, I don’t miss out on a lot. The really big news in the world tends to find me and I find common sense & situational awareness tends to work wonders as you go through life.
Not only does TV news sensationalize they also repeat, repeat, repeat…lol.
Actually I don’t have a TV so I read my news and like you said, a lot of it does find you. Following select blogs and folks on Twitter will keep you quite informed. Seems to work for me anyway.
The repeated consumption fo the same information is amazing, isn’t it?
Reason number 1 that my wife and I do not watch the news. When the nightly news is 4 hours of murders, killing, corruption and if you are LUCKY, 20 minutes about some celebrity before going back to arson, police activity and war, paints a bad picture of what is “news”
does nothing good happen in this world? not according to mainstream media who is all about sensationalism and make money off fear.
It’s amazing how much good in the world goes unreported.
To all who have said that the news doesn’t report good things: WHO made it that way? “We,” the American people did, by voting with our viewing habits and with our dollars. Apparently good doesn’t sell. We are like-minded people here, but we are obviously in the minority.
That’s true. The news reports what people want to hear. It’s a cycle. Gotta put the foot down somewhere.