You are eight years old, your parents have left the house for a dinner party and you are home alone. Finally you get a chance to watch TV all night, even though they told you to get into bed early. After a couple of hours of channel surfing you land on a movie that drags your full attention. It is a woman she is breathing heavily in the dark, as if she is hiding from someone. Not knowing what it is about, you yourself begin to get a bit nervous. Your muscles tighten. When all of the sudden this man with a knife finds her and makes her loose her mind screaming. You get startled and start breathing faster, your heart races in suspense of the outcome. The woman manages to get away and is alone running in the street, defenseless. She turns around and there he is, the man running after her. He is faster and will very likely catch up. She doesn’t give up. You don't want her to die. Everything happens so fast. He is but a few meters away, when without thinking, you grab the remote and change. “This is just too much”, you think to yourself. At some point in our life we have all experienced some type of fear. Little did we know, that fear is truly all around us and can sometimes be the inhibitor of achieving all our dreams and aspirations. Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, in an interview said while referring to fearlessness, "I've studied in history, Napoleon Bonaparte, Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt, Catherine the Great, Cesare Borgia, all of the thousands of people I've studied, they all shared that quality and it's like a... It's a way of being in the world. When you're afraid and fearful it's like your mind close... the aperture of your mind closes up to this and you stop looking at the world around you. You want everything to be comfortable and familiar and the same. You stay in your house. You watch the same TV shows. Everything just... The circle closes up."
How many times have we not been in a position were we were demanded by a decision or action which was resolved by taking the easy way out. It's like standing in front of a pool of freezing cold water with weather that matches it, but you want to go for a swim for some reason. You touch the water with the tip of your foot, you walk around trying to convince yourself. A breeze reminds you that by the time you get out you will very likely be overwhelmed by the cold. You think too much. Now really is it going to be that bad? If you want to go for a swim you should go for it. Just jump in. The consequences are not that life threatening if you come to think of it. And things like this are just the little things. You need to start by this and move up the ladder, challenge yourself. Still, it is not healthy to go through life thinking nothing will ever happen to you by putting yourself on the line because sooner or later it will and you need to be ready. The real thing we need to address is that most of the time we are afraid of the consequences of things which on the long run really don't matter. The key lies in identifying most of the things we should act on and which we shouldn't (that I agree are not many).
