Hello Friends,
And happy Monday!
We already talked about Tim Ferriss’s “Fear-Setting” framework in a past issue.
This first essay explains why growth always comes with fear, and why fear should be embraced. I think we can all relate.
Terminator Mode 10min
The Hero’s Journey is a story structure that Carl Jung originally noted that was popularized by Joseph Campbell in the 1970s.
The start was always similar: a hero received a call to adventure, something in their world changes fundamentally.
Initially, the hero refuses the call - they fear the difficult journey ahead and back down.
Eventually, the hero chooses to undertake the journey, crossing the threshold into the unknown world.
Whether it’s growing up and leaving home, starting a job, quitting a job, finding a partner, changing jobs, starting a business, having kids or any other major life event, you can pretty much always map it to the hero’s journey.
Quitting a job to move to a new field, starting a business, making a big investment is almost always accompanied by a real sense of fear.
In his wonderful book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield gives a name to this particular type of fear: The Resistance.
The Resistance is that voice in the back of your head that tells you that you aren’t good enough, that you don’t have enough time, or that it will never work.
The bad news is that The Resistance is real and it's omnipresent. The good news is that it lets you know what direction to move in.
"Are you paralyzed with fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance."
Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it's the easiest to rationalize.
We don't tell ourselves, "I'm never going to write my book." or "I'm never going to change jobs."
Instead we say, "I am going to write my book; I'm just going to start tomorrow" or "I'm going to make a change next year."
To forever refuse the call, to give into the Resistance is a terrible state.
It is an admission to yourself that you are incapable of growth or transformation.
In retrospect, all the periods of my life where I was refusing the call tended to be accompanied by some level of self-loathing.
When the finish line is in sight, The Resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it's got.
The mind will play all sorts of tricks on you when you get to 80% complete with a task. It will try to seduce you into doing something unrelated or new. Never give in to that.
An "almost done" project is just like a project you haven’t started. The half-written books on my hard drive are doing me no good! The worst thing you can do is get a project to "almost done" and quit.
For those of you who have not read Dune, by Frank Herbert - if you haven’t, I don’t want to know! - one of the intro scenes perfectly illustrates our second essay.
Paul, the future Emperor of the known universe, is being tested by the religious/fanatical order that groomed him (FYI, all factions are fanatics in Dune).
He has to keep his hand in a “pure-pain” box under threat of immediate death.
The 1984 movie gives an accurate depiction of the very intense book scene:
This pain exercise is not isolated.
His resistance to physical pain has been tested innumerable times despite him still being a teenager.
His resistance to emotional pain will be tested at yet another scale in the book and its sequel.
Without wishing anyone his life challenges, his fictional accomplishments are possibles only because of his incredible resilience.
And resilience is not gifted. It is built.
How To Be Resilient: 4 Steps To Success When Life Gets Hard 11min (Most of the content and quotes coming from “The Comfort Crisis”, by Michael Easter)
"First world problems”: Playing discomfort Whac-A-Mole just moves the goalposts and makes you seem less threatening things as threatening. Deliberate discomfort keeps small problems small.
Boredom is a motivation state: Don’t feed it the junk food of phone time, let it propel you toward creative accomplishment.
"When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable. Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort. This leads to a new level of what’s considered comfortable."
Boredom is a motivational state. Boredom is your brain saying, “DO SOMETHING! ACHIEVE THOSE GOALS!”
Studies dating back to the 1950’s show boredom actually makes you more creative. Your brain is itching to solve problems and accomplish things.
Boredom leads to creativity and creativity leads to success in life. It even beats IQ.
Think about death: Imagining the Grim Reaper standing next to you, looking at his watch and humming “Time is on my side” — is not fun. But a little reminder that death will come tells you this life is not a dress rehearsal and makes you appreciate it all the more.
"Death is a psychologically threatening fact, but when people contemplate it, apparently the automatic system begins to search for happy thoughts.”
When people think about death they tend to recognize ‘what might not be’ and become more grateful for the life they now experience.
“Misogi”: There is nothing like the hot-buttered satisfaction of doing something you thought you couldn’t do. Deliberate challenges on “hard mode” put everyday life on “easy mode.”
It’s a Japanese word that, for our purposes, means “Doing hard stuff because it’s hard.”
"Preventing kids from exploring their edges is largely thought to be the cause of the abnormally high and growing rates of anxiety and depression in young people. A study found that anxiety and depression rates in college students rose roughly 80 percent in the generation just after helicopter parenting began."
"Compared to the people who’d been sheltered their entire lives, the people who’d faced some adversity reported better psychological well-being over the several years of the study. They had higher life satisfaction, and fewer psychological and physical symptoms. They were less likely to use prescription painkillers. They used healthcare services less. They were less likely to report their employment status as disabled. By facing some challenge but not an overwhelming amount, these people developed an internal capacity that left them more robust and resilient."
There are two fundamental rules to doing a Misogi:
It has to be really hard.
Don’t die.
Seriously, you want to pick a challenge where you have about a 50% chance of success.
A nice balance where you are definitely stretching yourself but you’re also not going to get frustrated and collapse in a puddle of Sisyphean failure.
And make your Misogi quirky.
You want it to be idiosyncratic. Personal. It’s your challenge.
This process is inward-facing. It’s not to show off and you don’t want it to be something where you’re comparing your performance to others.
It’s a test by you and for you.
One of my most recent and quirky “Misogi” is running a near half-marathon in San Francisco. 12h after landing in the US for the time in my life. At night. Barefoot.
I ended up slightly short of the customary 21k because it would have made me late for my early-morning business meeting. But that’s a story for another time.
What’s your most recent “Misogi”? Most importantly - what’s your next?
Ending up with Dune’s most famous quote, the “litany against fear”:
Thanks for reading, and have a fearless week ahead,
V