Fear drives a significant portion of our choices and actions in life. We avoid, we compensate, we hurt others because we are scared. Scared to face our insecurities, scared to take risks, scared to push ourselves. I lived a significant portion of my life through a lens of fear. I never took risks, I avoided anything that made me uncomfortable, I was sheltered. Recently I have been thinking about how to turn fear into a tool to help us succeed.

I know Gary Vaynerchuk has mentioned the idea of regret being the biggest fear you should have. This idea really stuck with me when I heard it. Allowing my fear of taking risks, of failing, of pushing myself, of trying and having to face that I am not as good as I thought kept me from a significant number of life experiences as a child and adolescent. Looking back, I regret not taking the chances I was given. 

Embrace Your Fears

Over time I have done a significant amount of work on myself to grow and move away from these fears. However, I think there is something to be said for EMBRACING fear and using it to push you towards success. Fear is like a magnet that repels things away from it. Where the magnet is positioned, what you fear, determines what direction you move. AWAY from it. What would happen if we learned to use this to our advantage and shifted our perception of what is truly scary?

Consider this; what would happen in your life if you began telling yourself that the true fear you SHOULD have is a fear of regret? Put some time into imagining yourself on your deathbed. You are out of time in this world, you get no more experiences. Do you want to look back and regret that you didn’t get to do those things now that death is imminent? 

When we are young death seems like a far off inevitability. No one LIKES confronting their mortality, it’s uncomfortable to consider that everything we know will just … stop one day. So we ignore it, we tuck it way back into our subconscious and go about our lives in blissful ignorance. “La la la la la I can’t hear you I can’t hear you!” 

Ignoring Death

This distancing from death allows our priorities to shift. We get focused on the small and petty things happening in our lives. The day-to-day wraps us up and we forget what is really important. We get caught in the rat race. “Oh that death thing will never happen to me!” 

But suddenly, our time is gone. We have nothing left and we look back at the choices we have made. In the context of everything ending suddenly the fears that prevented us from really embracing life seem silly. 

“Death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”

For the last 10 years of my life I have lived by the mantra of “Effort over Everything.” It didn’t always have the fancy alliteration, but the idea sparked inside of me long ago. I wrote about it here. I realized that anything I wanted to succeed at I needed to put effort into, and lots of it. Seems simple and obvious, but to me it was life-changing. 

I try to attack life with everything I have. If I am doing something I do it to the best of my ability and with all the force I can muster. When I truly sit down to consider the idea of my death, the idea of having regrets and wishing I had done more terrifies me. 

Fear Gives Strength

But instead of shying away from this fear of regret I am choosing to embrace it. A significant portion of my reasoning for working out and building my body is because I see old men who are bent over and can barely walk, and that TERRIFIES me. Being trapped in a body that betrays you is awful in my mind. I use the fear of becoming like that to fuel my workouts. Yes the strength, looks, and confidence that come with lifting are nice, but my primary motivation for exercise and diet is to maintain my physical health and build myself up as much as possible so that when I am old I am not decrepit. 

When considering the idea of fear as fuel I have already employed it in at least one major area of my life. Why not do it here as well? By putting the fear of regret into the forefront of my mind I can use it to fuel my actions going forward. Any time I am deciding whether or not to do something I can pit the immediate fear of doing the thing against the fear of regret and death and let the greater of the two fears win. 

I create maxims or mantras that I say to myself to keep myself moving on the correct path. “Just do today.” “Effort over Everything.” “Journey before Destination.” I say these mantras to myself to keep my perspective in check. There is no reason I cannot add another to the list. “Will you regret avoiding this?” Or perhaps; “Risk or Regret.” That has a nice ring to it.

Lessons

The lesson is this: you as a conscious human being have the ability to shift your perspective. The perspective you take with you and see the world through is called your paradigm. I liken it to a colored pair of sunglasses. Everyone has a different color, and your color changes the way you see and interpret the world. 

You can shift your perspective by considering something different. Hopefully walking through my own perspective shift above helps demonstrate it. You need to contrast the perspective you have with the perspective you want to have and weigh out which is better for your goals. Then, over time, practice looking at the world through this new lens. The mantras are to help remind you of this perspective. Create a short phrase that embodies the idea you want to live by. 

Over time, with repeated practice, these mantras will beceome second nature. Your perspective will permanently shift, and you will be able to live a better life. 

I hope that by reading this article you too are instilled with a fear of regret and have learned how to harness that fear as a fuel source that will push you in whatever it is you want to do. We all have a limited amount of time on this earth. Fears of risk, failure, or embarrassment all seem silly when put into the context of deathbed regrets. It’s time to pick a new fear, one that is rational and reasonable. Fear not doing enough. Fear missing out. Fear regretting wasting your only shot at life. That’s a real fear.