If you haven’t already, you should really check out the Back to Work podcast by Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin.

Episode 5 is another discussion about creative work, learning, and so on, but I found the last part of the podcast particularly important.

Merlin and Dan discuss feelings of entitlement and why you might not be getting the work, the projects or the respect that you believe you deserve.  Ready for the answer?  Simple:  sometimes you don’t actually have the expertise, the work ethic or you haven’t paid your dues.  Or you haven’t demonstrated these qualities as well as the people you work with…

We could write a whole post (or series of posts) on the topic of “paying your dues”…

Anyway, please check this podcast out.  The discussions are a bit erratic and long-winded at times, but there’s gold in there.

Today I’m going to write about fear. I’ve wanted to write an essay or article about fear for weeks. But, to be honest, I’ve been lazy so I haven’t written it.

Not true. I’ve actually been too scared to write about fear because I didn’t want to write a bad article. I wanted this post to be evergreen content, something that would last the tests of time as a testament against timorousness and how to terminate terror or at least try to do so without being troubled by it.

I finally sat down and wrote this blog post. This is a long read, possibly due to pent up anxiety. Or maybe it’s over 2000 words just from taking time to think about it. Yes, it was scary to write this post. But lessons emerged…

Keep reading. Hopefully we can both learn something from this.  Mastery of fear is a powerful skill for any aspiring thoughtwrestler.

Acute fear – the immediate motivator

Scientists and academics believe there are practical reasons for all of our emotions. There has got to be some kind of biological reason for an emotion like fear. Fear makes you want to run and hide. It makes you tremble, sweat and turns your thought processes into broken production machinery. Your heart races, your breathing resembles the machinations of an air pump and you’re primed for action. You literally go out of your mind in the deepest throes of panic.

I’ve just described a fear attack or what you might think of as an acute case of fear. Brief but powerful fear.

Acute fear can paralyze. It can also galvanize you into action.

Chronic fear – the long-term demotivator

There’s chronic fear, though: less intense, more long-lived. This is the kind of fear which is more deadly. Acute fear can actually be useful by helping to save your life (cue the standard film clip about using fear to escape from a deadly sabertooth tiger or a speeding locomotive…) Acute fear gets results, fast – faster than Alka Seltzer, even.

Chronic fear, much like depression, demotivates you and is a contributing factor to… nothing. Chronic fear leads to the eradication of self-esteem, creativity and joy.

On a personal level, chronic fear has:

• Kept me away from rewarding pursuits like writing and public speaking for years due to disappointments, gaffes and general insecurities
• Generally made me miserable for long periods of time
• Other stuff too personal to get into, but probably no different than many people

I hope it hasn’t done the same for you. If it ever has… well, I can both empathize and sympathize with you.

If this post is getting you down, stick it out a bit longer. You’ll see.

Doing nothing and something worse than nothing.

Eating Cheetos, drinking Coca-Cola (or the beverage of choice), lying on a couch, watching worthless video entertainment, feeling sorry for yourself… these are just some of the (un)appealing benefits of chronic fear.  These are symptoms of writer’s block and creative blockage, among other things.

Steven Pressfield and Seth Godin have both have written about fear in similar terms but from different perspectives.

Fear as resistance

In The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (an affiliate link, by the way), Steven writes about Resistance, a kind of mysterious force that seeks to sabotage anything new, interesting or potentially risky. The bigger and better the challenge, the more powerful and sneakily Resistance works, using our own minds and bodies to sabotage our creative work at virtually any cost.

It can be as bad as Freddy Krueger invading your dreams and incredibly similar. Or, it can be like renting out your brain and body to, say, Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan at their worst. On top of the damage they do, they stiff you on the rent and never did pay you a damage deposit.

Fear as the Lizard Brain at work

In Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (yes, this is an affiliate link), Seth writes about the Lizard Brain, part of our vestigial reptile brain that chooses from a limited set of responses when facing something that looks scary or challenging. Human beings have developed the biological hardware and software to do some incredibly sophisticated thinking, but parts of our brains represent the really antiquated mental machinery that reptiles never got the permission to upgrade, it seems.

Human beings sometimes do strange things when they encounter different or scary situations that this Lizard Brain only has limited options to process, much like the answers of a multiple choice exam. Our brain tries to choose none of the above, I guess, and it goes a bit mad trying to create a new answer. Therefore, we often wind up choosing the sofa of least resistance, so to speak.

Fear is everywhere, if we look hard enough.

People without fear = our heroes

It’s no wonder that we look up to people who seem fearless. Just think about Evel Knievel and his many death-defying motorcycle stunts. He seemed pretty cool when I was a kid (even though he probably broke more bones than Jackie Chan and probably wasn’t a real nice guy).

The comic books have fearless heroes a-plenty. Two immediately come to mind:

• Daredevil – The Man Without Fear – here’s a blind guy who does all manner of acrobatic stunts and fighting. Yes, yes… he does have superpowers, so it’s not like he’s that disadvantaged… but still… a blind man jumping off buildings and swinging around like Spider-Man? That still takes some stones.
• Green Lantern – many characters have served in the role of a Green Lantern (a kind of space cop who can do virtually anything he or she imagines with the help of a ring (imagine an iPhone that you wear around your finger that can also make you fly faster than the speed of light, prevent supernovas from destroying solar systems, and move mountains – just for starters)). The iconic, most famous Green Lantern is Hal Jordan, an Air Force pilot who personified “the right stuff” as also seen in famous figures like Chuck Yeager and anyone who’s been brave enough to let themselves be strapped down and blasted off into space. Hal Jordan was the typical “man without fear”.

Green vs. yellow – courage and will vs. fear

Let’s unpack the Green Lantern example a bit more because it contains a great little metaphor for dealing with fear. So please bear with me while I geek out a bit more.

I said that a Green Lantern can do virtually anything with their ring. There’s one catch, though: a Green Lantern’s ring normally has a weakness. The weakness is something that a Green Lantern’s ring is powerless against. Like Superman, a Green Lantern’s ring has its own form of Kryptonite which nullifies its power.

A Green Lantern’s ring is helpless against the color yellow. If you were to fire a yellow bullet at a Green Lantern, there’s no way he or she could protect himself. If you made a protective shield using a Green Lantern’s ring, the yellow bullet would plow right through it just like Kleenex. A Green Lantern becomes just another working stiff when he or she faces the color yellow.

Talk about symbolism. After all, yellow is the color that we often associate with fear. And fear can take down the very embodiment of willpower and courage.

But wait… there’s more.

Overcoming your fears to defeat them

A few years ago, a comic book writer named Geoff Johns came up with a clever little twist on the Green Lantern back story which I think is both brilliant and inspirational. It seems too simple, but it makes perfect sense.

He provided a way for Green Lanterns to overcome their weakness to yellow. Yellow would no longer affect them when they figured out the secret. It was simple.

All they had to do was master their fears.

The yellow weakness became a rookie problem, a test for the newbies to pass. When they finally figured out how to stop being afraid and just treat yellow like any other problem, its special power over them vanished. They had to demonstrate their ability to overcome the yellow weakness in order to prove they were ready to become full-fledged Green Lanterns (like graduating from police academy, I guess).

Yes, it’s just a comic book story and it is kind of hokey, but it very clearly illustrates my main message: the key to dealing with any fear is facing it and overcoming it.

Back to reality – tips for facing down your creative fears

So how do you stop being afraid?

It’s simple to stop being afraid. It’s never easy, though.

Over the years, there’s a simple formula that I’ve used to overcome fears. It goes something like this:

• Convince yourself that you need to do the thing that scares you. Or better yet, don’t think too much about it.
• Take some sensible precautions that should protect you from anything going wrong.
• Do the thing that scares you.
• If you’re still alive and reasonably unharmed afterward, look at the results. If things turned out well, congratulate yourself. Then do it again, if you can.
• If things did not turn out well afterward, look at the results. Figure out what went wrong. Make amends, as needed. Come up with new techniques to do the thing, if needed.
• Then try again. Either it will work this time, or it won’t. You’ll have to decide how many iterations of this routine that you will go through until you decide it’s not worthwhile. It might be a good idea to read Seth Godin’s book The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) (yes, an affiliate link) before you start this process, just in case.

Examples of facing fears

For example, let’s say you’re a guy who wants to go out with a girl (yes, this is so 20th century, but let’s just go with this example, OK?) You work up the courage and ask her out. Her responses can be either yes, no or something in between. Most times, if the girl says no, you should forget about it and move on to someone else.

If she says no to a specific day and time, you always have the option of trying a different day and time. (Hint: it’s a good sign if they suggest that they might be available at a different day and time or that they might like to do something else instead…) In this case, it might be better to not lock in on a specific person and instead focus on a specific result (getting a date), especially when you are starting out.

Or how about getting published? One of the few things harder than writing is to do the work to get your work published. Getting published is often the result of networking, relationship building, study, research, and practice. There are hurdles to overcome, barriers to pass and steps to perform the right way.

Eleanor Brown, author of The Weird Sisters, describes this process quite clearly in her post about how she got a literary agent. I bet it wasn’t easy for her to venture out and cold call until she got what she was looking for. I’m sure that she felt fear at different points in the process. Nonetheless, she learned, kept trying and persisted (another key point) until she got satisfactory results.

In my case, I finally got a magazine article published after wasting a lot of years not writing. I also developed a public speaking interest into some skill after a disastrous speech that I gave in my senior year in high school (tip: never speak about fun with all of the animation of a corpse) drove me away from speaking in front of crowds for many years.

I’ll bet you’ve faced some fears down, too. Maybe worse ones than I have.

A corny quote and then over to you

FDR said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. This seems like a dumb thing to say or, at best, redundant. How can you fear… fear? Why should we worry about it?

Here’s a different way of looking at FDR’s quote:

The only thing we have to fear is the impact of chronic fear on our lives.

Chronic fear prevents us from doing things that need to be done. Chronic fear prevents us from doing things that are good growth experiences. It prevents us from taking reasonable risks that could lead to great results.

I’d like to say that I’m fearless, but I’m not – far from it. I still take baby steps doing certain things when other people will proceed without a second thought. There are probably things that I do that would scare other people. Life just seems to work that way.

Maybe we need to look at fears as training exercises rather than barriers. Instead of thinking that a fear is something that must not be faced, or done, maybe we need to:

• Sing that song in front of a crowd
• Display your artwork at a public show
• Make your first post in the forum that you just joined, despite the fact that you feel ignorant compared to all of the other experts there
• Publish your short stories and poetry on your blog
• Give a speech in front of a room full of strangers
• Try to contact that famous writer, blogger or expert with a valuable proposition, even if we think it’s likely that we’ll be ignored
• Say hello to someone

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Coda

I finally finished this post about fear. It wasn’t easy. It took me a lot of time and thinking to get to the point of writing it. I think it’s probably too long and too full of esoteric references.

I’m publishing it anyway. It’s what I wanted to write. And it was a heck of a lot easier to do… once I finally started writing it.

What do you do to face your fears?

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Image by istolethetv and DC Comics.

In Western culture there’s a lot of momentum in the direction of consuming things rather than creating or making things.

Consumption makes the world go ’round, but somebody’s got to make the stuff we consume, right?

At Thoughtwrestling, we think that while consumption is an important part of life, creating things and adding to our cultural ecosystems is far more important.

We can stuff our faces, bodies, minds, and spirits with the latest and greatest food, drink, television, movies, novels, gossip rags, technology, or possessions.  That certainly does help the world go around and it’s fun, at least for awhile.  Or we can sweat, toil, thoughtwrestle, and use our cognitive surplus to create works of art that benefit people other than ourselves.

In that spirit, here are ten reasons why it’s better to create than consume:

1. Creation offers a chance for immortality; consumption highlights your mortality.
2. Some things are better said than left unsaid.
3. Do you really have anything better to do with your time?
4. Consumption is a zero-sum game; making things allows you to break that cycle.
5. Someone else might need to experience the things that you create.
6. Making things is the path to self-actualization – it provides a sense of accomplishment.
7. If all the world’s a stage, then it needs actors and actresses!
8. It’s a great way to differentiate yourself from Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin.
9. It’s a wonderful thing to make people smile; sometimes it’s a beautiful thing to make them cry.  Isn’t it better to do those things by making something than by consuming someone else’s stuff?
10. You just might find love, happiness, and satisfaction by making something; this is a more satisfying way of getting those things than stuffing your mouth full of Twinkies and beer.  You’re less likely to fart or burp, too.

So, what’s reason 11?  Or do you disagree with anything I’ve written above?

Subscribe to Thoughtwrestling so you can read more great ideas about creativity, problem solving, and getting things done.  Follow us on Twitter as @twrestleblog.

Images by sashafatcat, alicepopkorn