Why you should define your fears instead of your goals

The hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls "fear-setting." Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot.

So, this happy pic of me
was taken in 1999.

I was a senior in college,

and it was right after a dance practice.

I was really, really happy.

And I remember exactly where I was
about a week and a half later.

I was sitting in the back
of my used minivan

in a campus parking lot,

when I decided

I was going to commit suicide.

I went from deciding
to full-blown planning very quickly.

And I came this close
to the edge of the precipice.

It's the closest I've ever come.

And the only reason I took
my finger off the trigger

was thanks to a few lucky coincidences.

And after the fact,

that's what scared me the most:
the element of chance.

So I became very methodical
about testing different ways

that I could manage my ups and downs,

which has proven to be
a good investment. (Laughs)

Many normal people might have,
say, six to 10 major depressive episodes

in their lives.

I have bipolar depression.
It runs in my family.

I've had 50-plus at this point,

and I've learned a lot.

I've had a lot of at-bats,

many rounds in the ring with darkness,

taking good notes.

So I thought rather than get up
and give any type of recipe for success

or highlight reel,

I would share my recipe
for avoiding self-destruction,

and certainly self-paralysis.

And the tool I've found which has proven
to be the most reliable safety net

for emotional free fall

is actually the same tool

that has helped me to make
my best business decisions.

But that is secondary.

And it is ... stoicism.

That sounds boring.

(Laughter)

You might think of Spock,

or it might conjure and image like this --

(Laughter)

a cow standing in the rain.

It's not sad. It's not particularly happy.

It's just an impassive creature taking
whatever life sends its way.

You might not think of the ultimate
competitor, say, Bill Belichick,

head coach of the New England Patriots,

who has the all-time NFL record
for Super Bowl titles.

And stoicism has spread like wildfire
in the top of the NFL ranks

as a means of mental toughness
training in the last few years.

You might not think
of the Founding Fathers --

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,
George Washington

to name but three students of stoicism.

George Washington actually had
a play about a Stoic --

this was "Cato, a Tragedy" --

performed for his troops at Valley Forge
to keep them motivated.

So why would people of action
focus so much on an ancient philosophy?

This seems very academic.

I would encourage you to think
about stoicism a little bit differently,

as an operating system for thriving
in high-stress environments,

for making better decisions.

And it all started here,

kind of,

on a porch.

So around 300 BC in Athens,

someone named Zeno of Citium
taught many lectures

walking around a painted porch, a "stoa."

That later became "stoicism."

And in the Greco-Roman world,

people used stoicism
as a comprehensive system

for doing many, many things.

But for our purposes, chief among them
was training yourself

to separate what you can control
from what you cannot control,

and then doing exercises
to focus exclusively

on the former.

This decreases emotional reactivity,

which can be a superpower.

Conversely, let's say
you're a quarterback.

You miss a pass.
You get furious with yourself.

That could cost you a game.

If you're a CEO, and you fly
off the handle at a very valued employee

because of a minor infraction,

that could cost you the employee.

If you're a college student
who, say, is in a downward spiral,

and you feel helpless and hopeless,

unabated, that could cost you your life.

So the stakes are very, very high.

And there are many tools
in the toolkit to get you there.

I'm going to focus on one
that completely changed my life in 2004.

It found me then because of two things:

a very close friend, young guy, my age,
died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly,

and then my girlfriend, who I thought
I was going to marry, walked out.

She'd had enough, and she didn't
give me a Dear John letter,

but she did give me this,

a Dear John plaque.

(Laughter)

I'm not making this up. I've kept it.

"Business hours are over at five o'clock."

She gave this to me
to put on my desk for personal health,

because at the time, I was working
on my first real business.

I had no idea what I was doing.
I was working 14-plus hour days,

seven days a week.

I was using stimulants to get going.

I was using depressants
to wind down and go to sleep.

It was a disaster.

I felt completely trapped.

I bought a book on simplicity
to try to find answers.

And I did find a quote
that made a big difference in my life,

which was, "We suffer more often
in imagination than in reality,"

by Seneca the Younger,

who was a famous Stoic writer.

That took me to his letters,

which took me to the exercise,

"premeditatio malorum,"

which means the pre-meditation of evils.

In simple terms,

this is visualizing the worst-case
scenarios, in detail, that you fear,

preventing you from taking action,

so that you can take action
to overcome that paralysis.

My problem was monkey mind --
super loud, very incessant.

Just thinking my way
through problems doesn't work.

I needed to capture my thoughts on paper.

So I created a written exercise

that I called "fear-setting,"
like goal-setting,

for myself.

It consists of three pages.

Super simple.

The first page is right here.

"What if I ...?"

This is whatever you fear,

whatever is causing you anxiety,

whatever you're putting off.

It could be asking someone out,

ending a relationship,

asking for a promotion,
quitting a job, starting a company.

It could be anything.

For me, it was taking
my first vacation in four years

and stepping away from my business
for a month to go to London,

where I could stay
in a friend's room for free,

to either remove myself
as a bottleneck in the business

or shut it down.

In the first column, "Define,"

you're writing down all of the worst
things you can imagine happening

if you take that step.

You want 10 to 20.

I won't go through all of them,
but I'll give you two examples.

One was, I'll go to London,
it'll be rainy, I'll get depressed,

the whole thing will be
a huge waste of time.

Number two, I'll miss
a letter from the IRS,

and I'll get audited

or raided or shut down or some such.

And then you go to the "Prevent" column.

In that column, you write
down the answer to:

What could I do to prevent
each of these bullets from happening,

or, at the very least, decrease
the likelihood even a little bit?

So for getting depressed in London,

I could take a portable blue light with me

and use it for 15 minutes in the morning.

I knew that helped stave off
depressive episodes.

For the IRS bit, I could change
the mailing address on file with the IRS

so the paperwork would go to my accountant

instead of to my UPS address.

Easy-peasy.

Then we go to "Repair."

So if the worst-case scenarios happen,

what could you do to repair
the damage even a little bit,

or who could you ask for help?

So in the first case, London,

well, I could fork over some money,
fly to Spain, get some sun --

undo the damage, if I got into a funk.

In the case of missing
a letter from the IRS,

I could call a friend who is a lawyer

or ask, say, a professor of law

what they would recommend,

who I should talk to,
how had people handled this in the past.

So one question to keep in mind
as you're doing this first page is:

Has anyone else in the history of time

less intelligent or less driven

figured this out?

Chances are, the answer is "Yes."

(Laughter)

The second page is simple:

What might be the benefits
of an attempt or a partial success?

You can see we're playing up the fears

and really taking a conservative
look at the upside.

So if you attempted whatever
you're considering,

might you build confidence,
develop skills,

emotionally, financially, otherwise?

What might be the benefits
of, say, a base hit?

Spend 10 to 15 minutes on this.

Page three.

This might be the most important,
so don't skip it:

"The Cost of Inaction."

Humans are very good at considering
what might go wrong

if we try something new,
say, ask for a raise.

What we don't often consider
is the atrocious cost of the status quo --

not changing anything.

So you should ask yourself,

if I avoid this action or decision

and actions and decisions like it,

what might my life look like in,
say, six months, 12 months, three years?

Any further out, it starts
to seem intangible.

And really get detailed --
again, emotionally, financially,

physically, whatever.

And when I did this, it painted
a terrifying picture.

I was self-medicating,

my business was going to implode
at any moment at all times,

if I didn't step away.

My relationships were fraying or failing.

And I realized that inaction
was no longer an option for me.

Those are the three pages. That's it.
That's fear-setting.

And after this, I realized
that on a scale of one to 10,

one being minimal impact,
10 being maximal impact,

if I took the trip, I was risking

a one to three of temporary
and reversible pain

for an eight to 10 of positive,
life-changing impact

that could be a semi-permanent.

So I took the trip.

None of the disasters came to pass.

There were some hiccups, sure.

I was able to extricate myself
from the business.

I ended up extending that trip
for a year and a half around the world,

and that became the basis
for my first book,

that leads me here today.

And I can trace all of my biggest wins

and all of my biggest disasters averted

back to doing fear-setting

at least once a quarter.

It's not a panacea.

You'll find that some of your fears
are very well-founded.

(Laughter)

But you shouldn't conclude that

without first putting them
under a microscope.

And it doesn't make all the hard times,
the hard choices, easy,

but it can make a lot of them easier.

I'd like to close with a profile
of one of my favorite modern-day Stoics.

This is Jerzy Gregorek.

He is a four-time world champion
in Olympic weightlifting,

political refugee,

published poet,

62 years old.

He can still kick my ass and probably
most asses in this room.

He's an impressive guy.

I spent a lot of time
on his stoa, his porch,

asking life and training advice.

He was part of the Solidarity in Poland,

which was a nonviolent
movement for social change

that was violently suppressed
by the government.

He lost his career as a firefighter.

Then his mentor, a priest,
was kidnapped, tortured, killed

and thrown into a river.

He was then threatened.

He and his wife had to flee Poland,
bounce from country to country

until they landed in the US
with next to nothing,

sleeping on floors.

He now lives in Woodside, California,
in a very nice place,

and of the 10,000-plus people
I've met in my life,

I would put him in the top 10,

in terms of success and happiness.

And there's a punchline coming,
so pay attention.

I sent him a text a few weeks ago,

asking him: Had he ever read
any Stoic philosophy?

And he replied with two pages of text.

This is very unlike him.
He is a terse dude.

(Laughter)

And not only was he familiar
with stoicism,

but he pointed out, for all
of his most important decisions,

his inflection points,

when he stood up
for his principles and ethics,

how he had used stoicism
and something akin to fear-setting,

which blew my mind.

And he closed with two things.

Number one: he couldn't imagine
any life more beautiful

than that of a Stoic.

And the last was his mantra,
which he applies to everything,

and you can apply to everything:

"Easy choices, hard life.

Hard choices, easy life."

The hard choices --

what we most fear doing, asking, saying --

these are very often exactly
what we most need to do.

And the biggest challenges
and problems we face

will never be solved
with comfortable conversations,

whether it's in your own head
or with other people.

So I encourage you to ask yourselves:

Where in your lives right now

might defining your fears be more
important than defining your goals?

Keeping in mind all the while,
the words of Seneca:

"We suffer more often
in imagination than in reality."

Thank you very much.

(Applause)