Hey, It's Harry

GM. This is Harry. Bringin’ you paragraphs chunkier than Kim Jong Un’s face this week.

I’m replacing lightheartedness with something heavier today - fear. Most of you reading this are starting or working on your own businesses (or thinking of starting). And this is to help you take action and make decisions that get you closer to your goal. Whatever that might be.

Let’s go 👇🏻

“Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back not aggressively violating them.” — David Deida

Every man is afraid. In fact, every person, child, pet, animal and living being is afraid. I’m afraid of writing this right now — that it might be read the wrong way or understood in a way I don’t intend. Or worse, you might not like it.

The fear is always there and will always be there irrespective of what live endeavours we choose to do. Either we’re held back, blaming the world for our misfortunes and remaining fearful of things out of our control, or we’re afraid of what awaits us at the next level as we rise up. Life isn’t incremental improvements as social media would have you believe — life jumps in stages. Like an elastic band that you have to stretch to its limit before it finally releases you with enough momentum to get to the next ledge. And when you get to that ledge, having passed the fear of the last level, you’re presented with new danger. Danger of the unfamiliar, the unknown and the potentially harmful. Like in a video game where you continue to level up as you get stronger — the challenges get harder and the monsters at the end of the level are the hardest. They’re scary strong, and it’s rare that you get past them without dying a few times first.

The fear is with you all the time. But, you can choose your accompanying emotion. And you have two choices — despair or excitement. Yes, the Netflix special might be enough to distract you for a few hours, from your lack of courage to create something that gives you financial freedom. But in the back of your mind you know what you’re doing isn’t taking you where you want to be. You’re bored. And as Tim Ferriss so clearly put it all those years ago, the opposite of happiness — is boredom. So in a counterintuitive sense, by enjoying the Netflix special before bed, you’re making yourself unhappy because you know that is more in you and you’re choosing to be entertained rather than create. You have the energy and the willpower to do more. You haven’t extracted that to it’s limit today. You’re rewarding yourself for the ‘hard work’ without working hard at all.

It’s a cycle of despair. Fuelled by distraction. TV shows, social media, doing things around the house to keep busy… it’s all a distraction to keep you from doing what you’re absolutely afraid of — seeing what might happen. That you might fail. That you might be judged by your friends and family for challenging the assumptions they hold about you. It feels like a lot to face. But it’s also a little exciting to think, what if? Maybe there’s a way out of this comfortable lounge and addictive TV show. Maybe there’s a way to leave this city and travel. Maybe there’s a way to buy a house for your parents and make sure they retire comfortably living next to the ocean…

Maybe.

That’s the word we’re most afraid of. Certainty isn’t guaranteed in life, at all. Right now, I’m sitting at my favourite café, like I do every day to write. I got the same coffee from the same barista at the same time of day. But that doesn’t mean I can be 100% sure the coffee will taste the same. Maybe there’s a chance the espresso tastes different. Maybe the milk is off. Maybe his hand is tired and he angled the jug the wrong way so the milk didn’t heat up properly… there are so many moving parts that I have no control over. And if I keep thinking of the possible ways it could turn out badly, I become more and more afraid. That’s the thing with this word maybe, you can easily inject it into anything you want. Maybe the air is too humid and impacts the pumps in the coffee machine, not letting enough steam through to get the milk just right…maybe there’s a banana peel on the floor in the kitchen and the waitress might step on it and fall and I might not get the coffee for another few minutes…

If you let it, your imagination can turn anything into a giant fire breathing dragon that you need to defeat with a blunt pencil. Even for the simplest of things. Our imagination is our greatest strength and our greatest hindrance.

But why then, am I not afraid of getting a bad coffee? There are so many ways it could go wrong, and only one way to get it right — the odds are against me. So why don’t I feel fear with this uncertainty?

It’s simple, I won’t die. It won’t ruin my day. I won’t even remember it a few minutes later. The impact a ‘bad’ coffee will have on my life is so minuscule that I simply don’t care to think about all the ways it could go wrong. And that’s the key.

Your imagination can be hard to control, but if you concentrate on the outcome (and what it’s going to do for your life), you can use logic. You know that it probably won’t be a big deal if something goes wrong. A ‘feedback’ conversation at work, a fight with your wife, or maybe a few hundred dollars lost. In the grand scheme of things, the excitement of trying to make it to the end of the level and dance with the fear outweighs the short-term consequences. The excitement of uncertainty IS life. But it doesn’t exist without fear. That’s why people bungie jump. Why else tie yourself to a giant elastic band and get pushed off a bridge?

What we can do then, is embrace the fear. Because it’s going to stay no matter what you want to do. Instead of leaving it locked in a closet, keep it close. Hold it dear and kiss it in the morning when you wake up. Kiss it in the afternoon to check if it’s having a good day, and kiss it goodnight when you’re finished for the day. Stop fighting it and LET IT be your companion as you level up your life.

Choose excitement, because it makes you afraid.

Harry

P.S. It’ll take you 18 seconds to forward this to a friend. And its scientifically proven to make you (and me) happier.