Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.
Jerzy Gregorek
2018 rolled around and I was moving out to San Francisco to begin my career in tech sales at a high profile Silicon Valley company. The job had fallen into my lap at a job fair, it was the only one I had applied to, and fortunately, my interviews went well and I got the position.
For those months that I was there, I was having the time of my life. I was making friends, my job was fun but challenging, and I was exploring a unique and exciting new city. However, during this time I was also depressed and was having swings between “I’m having the time of my life” and “something important in my life is missing.”
I became incredibly sick just over 6 months after I had begun there. After moving home, while laying in my bed in immense pain knowing there was a chance I might die, I began to re-evaluate my life. My previous fears of what will people think of me faded away. This isn’t to say they don’t often come back but with practice, I’ve gained more control over them.
I knew almost instantly that golf would be my future and that I would do everything in my power to become a professional golfer. Mind you, this is without having played competitive golf in 6 years and a future of illness with no timeline or end in sight.
My first plan was to return to San Francisco when healthy, start back at work to pay for all of this and practice golf for hours before and after the workday.
This is the definition of not committing to a dream. In the back of my mind, I told myself I would have this job as my fall back. Do you think this kind of mindset would ever lead me to the success I was looking for? Likely I would cop-out on my dream and settle for my comfy sales job. Even worse, I would now know exactly why and who was responsible for those feelings of “something is missing in my life.”
You may have this same mindset in your life whether you’re looking to become a lawyer, doctor, or even a painter. If you haven’t fully committed to doing what you want to do (and you’ll know in your heart if you have or not) then your chance of achievement in that pursuit shrivels up.
The trouble is the vulnerability of putting yourself out there. To tell the world I want to become a professional golfer or a lawyer or a doctor puts the weight of it on your shoulders. You’re no longer a passive victim in life but hold the keys to your ultimate success or failure.
For me, my fear of failure had held me back for years. SMU was the only school I applied to that I wasn’t being recruited to play golf at and that’s where I went. I chose a major I wasn’t passionate about and fell into a job I knew was not my calling. This was all because of my fears saying that I wouldn’t be enough, that if I failed doing what I gave my whole heart to, what was my worth?
That is a difficult truth to face and if we don’t face it head on, we spend our whole lives tiptoeing around what we truly want. Is that what life is meant to be? Or is life an expression of who and what we truly love? You know the answer.
Exercise: Fear-Setting
Today I’ll talk about an exercise one of my favorite people on the planet, Tim Ferriss uses to help in decision making and to overcome his fears. It not only helps you see what you can do to help mitigate your fears if they do come to fruition, but it also paints a picture of just how much you’ll miss out on if you let them control your life.
We will use powers of stoicism, an ideology that is based upon separating what you can control and what you cannot. The exercise we’ll do will help you practice the former.
Let’s say you’re a manager and you fly off the handle at a valuable employee. That can cost you the employee. Perhaps you’re considering a completely new profession that you know you love but you’re scared it pursue it (for example, myself with golf). That can cost you a life filled with purpose, love, and passion for what you do.
This is an exercise that is the exact opposite of goal-setting. Here we aren’t going to lay out what our goals are and how we’ll accomplish them (although that is helpful to do as well) but rather set a stage for what our lives will be like if we don’t fully commit to our dreams and passions. Here’s the process (slides for steps 2 and 4 will be below).
- Begin by picking a decision in your life. This could be anything from what profession to pursue, what hobby to begin, or what do do in a relationship.
- The next step requires making three columns. The first defines what fears you have associated with that decision (going broke, how others will see you, etc.). The second column list how you could prevent that from happening. The third column will be how will you handle those fears if they actually do come to fruition.
- Make a list of what an attempt or partial success might look like physically, emotionally, financially, etc. For me, this includes pushing past my previous boundaries of comfortability, learning new mental skills, enjoying what I do for a living, being fulfilled, and risking my self-image for doing what I love. Figure out what this might be for you!
- The final step is the most important. What will the cost of inaction be in 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years? You can change those times to longer or shorter periods if you’d like. Using myself as an example again, my cost would be that I never pushed past my fears and likely never would if I can’t do so with something I truly love. I’ll find a job that I hate and become more and more numb to my life. I’ll struggle to find passion in other areas of my life as my fears have already walled me off from what I’ve wanted to do.
So ask yourself in what decisions would fear-setting provide a better motivator and compass for your life than goal-setting? You may find that some goals you’ve had might not be the right ones for you but you’re far more likely to find which ones are.
You hold the map to your life as only you can see where your true passions and fears lie. Don’t succumb to these fears, instead use them as motivation. Give yourself the opportunity to live a vibrant, passion-filled life doing what you love with those most meaningful to you. You deserve it.