Why I Wrote Fear Is Fuel
In 2004, I nearly died on an operating table at Johns Hopkins. The docs told me if the operation wasn't successful I'd have two weeks left; so say your goodbyes and get your affairs in order.
I had a rare form of leukemia. But it wasn't just about me — my wife was six months pregnant and my beautiful daughter was just over a year old.
Everyone who has seen the end remembers some small and bizarre detail. But what I didn't expect: buried underneath the terror was regret mixed with relief.
I spent my whole life afraid. Flying was my biggest fear. Failing was a close second. Looking foolish or being rejected was up there. I'd built my adolescence making decisions around fears I never said out loud, but felt tremendously ashamed about inside. And in one sentence from a doctor, every one of those fears was revealed as what it always was — imaginary. The real one, this ultimate fear, had information in it that all the fake little ones running my life never did.
Death, or the fear of it, told me exactly what I loved, it showed me exactly what I'd been postponing, and highlighted how much of my life I'd spent negotiating with dangers that didn't really exist, while the actual clock on the real one ran nonstop.
So when I got my second chance, the first thing I did was go after the biggest imaginary fear on the list. The man who was terrified of flying signed up for flying lessons. Holy shit, that was a mind-blowing moment.
Three things happened. First, when we hit turbulence during lesson 2 in that little two-seater plane I shat myself — I mean just a tiny bit, more of a shart than anything, but you get the picture. Second, after lesson 9 or 10 I fell in love with my fear. Flying became one of the most fulfilling things I'd ever done — I fly aerobatics now, for fun. Third — overcoming that one fear cast a courage halo over everything else in my life. Courage, it turns out, compounds because you train a part of your brain called the sgACC. You fire these new neurons into beating one fear and it renegotiates your relationship with all of them by rewiring a faster pathway to that courage center. Neuroplasticity — neurons that fire together wire together.
Fifteen years later I wrote a best-selling book about what fear does to the brain (Fear Is Fuel). But the entire contents of six years of research and 35 of the top neuroscientists' work basically comes down to what I learned at Hopkins:
Fear is information and most fear is fake, just imaginary fear that is nothing more than noise. And most of us spend our lives obeying the noise. We make decisions one of two ways: out of fear or out of opportunity. Want the life of your dreams? Recognize when you are making a decision that's important and ask yourself, “Am I choosing this way because of fear, or is this the biggest opportunity?” Let your gut tell you the answer.
What's the fear you've been obeying that — if you're honest — has never once shown up in real life?