fear

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth” — Pema Chodron

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” — Marie Curie

“Life can be the scariest and most beautiful thing simultaneously.” — Maxime Lagace

“You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.” — Dale Carnegie

“There is no fear for one whose mind is not filled with desires.” — The Buddha

“FEAR has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.” — Zig Ziglar

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.” — Plato

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.” — Plato

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anaïs Nin

“The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.” — Mignon McLaughlin

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” — William Faulkner

“Do not fear failure but rather fear not trying.” — Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

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If you can’t beat the fear, do it scared.

If we’re controlled by fear, we’re in the mode of ignorance.

Reframe fear as an information gap. Gather information and conquer your fears.

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Solution

• TODO Fear-setting by Tim Ferriss (define your fears instead of your goals)
• Ali Abdaal
  1. Name the fear
  2. Overcome the fear
     • “Will it matter in ten minutes? In ten weeks? In ten years?”
  3. Reduce the fear
     • The Batman Effect: self-distancing, thinking yourself as a separate entity (someone other than yourself)
• Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity

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Naval Ravikant

• “90% of our thoughts are fear-based. 10% of our thoughts are desire-based.”
• “I think it’s not we fear death. It’s we fear not living the life that we want. And I think the easiest way to get out of that is to start living the life you want now, not putting/frittering it off.”
  • This will make you feel that life is long, and you will be less afraid of dying.

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“The problem with smart people is they can come up with a good reason for not doing anything. They are smart enough to find the cracks, to foresee the challenges, and to talk themselves out of the idea. They are experts at justifying their lack of courage or lack of action with an intelligent excuse. But there will always be reasons to not do something, and this is particularly true of anything worth doing. We value those moments in which we overcame challenge, not those in which we avoided it. Ultimately, action is a choice. The choice to emphasize the reasons for doing it despite the reasons you have for avoiding it.”

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Becoming the Ocean – A Poem by Khalil Gibram

It is said that before entering the sea,

a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has travelled,

from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

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See also:

• Overthinking