Fear, Courage, and Willingness

Nerves almost killed Nike before it got off the ground.

At 26 Phil Knight was running a growing sneaker business importing Japanese-made running shoes to America. He’d found a sneaker in Japan called Tigers that were lighter and faster than anything on the U.S. market. He was partnered with Olympic coach Bill Bowerman, and he’d figured out a sales strategy that meant he was taking orders faster than he could fill them. “I was on a roll,” he said. 

Until the letter arrived, and his business imploded. 

The letter was from a man, just back from meetings in Japan, who claimed that he was now the exclusive distributor of Tiger sneakers in America. “Since he’d heard that I was selling Tigers, I was therefore poaching, and he ordered me—ordered me!—to stop.”

Phil didn’t take the news well. He was a self-described shy, pale, rail-thin kid who couldn’t handle rejection. “I went into a deep funk. Each night I’d sit with my family at dinner, moving my mother’s pot roast and vegetables around my plate. Then I’d sit with my father in the nook, staring glumly at the TV.” He considered going back to selling encyclopedias door to door. 

He wrote letters to Onitsuka, the Japanese company who manufactured Tigers asking them to change their mind, but got no response. After a few months of waiting, he’d basically given up on the idea of selling shoes at all. 

But then at the end of summer of that year, he had a change of heart: 

“[I had a] Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future…I [decided] that the world is made up with crazy ideas.”

He realized that he couldn’t give up. And he decided to fly back to Japan to force a meeting with Onitsuka. And that’s exactly what he did. He flew back, got a meeting with the manufacturer, and convinced them to grant him the rights to sell Tigers on the West Coast. 

Phil Knight was back in business—and Nike was about to take off. The rest, as they say, is history.

Stories like this are dramatic examples of how your ability to achieve your dreams is shaped largely by your willingness to face your fears. It might seem like these situations only arise in rare, crucial moments. But Phil Knight’s choice to face his fear is just a larger-than life version of a choice you make all the time. If I had to bet, though, you’re probably choosing to give up and sell encyclopedias more often than you realize. 

You might think you don't get afraid that often. You go through life and do the things you need to do, some of it unpleasant but important so you do it anyway. But true fear? That's for special occasions. 

If that sounds like you, I encourage you to ask yourself: do you not experience fear often because you are just that fearless, or is there another reason? Perhaps fear is kept away because you subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, avoid situations that would make you afraid? If you're like 99% of most human beings (spoiler: you probably are) then most of the time it's the latter.

How many Nikes didn’t even get far enough to get sued because the person who could’ve started it was too afraid to think it up in the first place? How many of your own potential projects, potential relationships, potential creations have suffered the same fate?

In short, whether you realize it or not, avoidance of fear is one of the biggest things holding all of us back in our lives. And so developing a quality of courage in the face of fear is a key path to creating the lives we want.

Fortunately, there are well-understood methods that can help you courageously face your fears as effectively as possible. Let's talk about what they are.

Becoming fearless

Let’s say you want to figure out how to become fearless. Where do you start?

You could look for a population of people who have no fear, and try to understand the structure of their brains. Maybe, for example, looking at the amygdala of Alex Honnold—who spends his days equanimously scaling sheer cliff faces without ropes—might help tell you about how fear works in the brain and what we might do to eliminate it.

I think a better place to look, though, is in populations of people who used to have a lot of fear, but now don’t. The key is finding people who have accomplished a transition from fear to no fear. If you’re looking for a population like that, I think people who have OCD are a great place to start.

OCD is interesting because people, like me, who suffer from it are constantly experiencing thoughts that are extremely scary to them—that’s the “obsessive” part of OCD. Recovery from OCD doesn’t involve eliminating the scary thoughts, it involves being able to have the thoughts without avoiding them. It's about learning to develop courage in the face of extreme fear. This kind of consistent courage works, over time, to significantly reduce fear—even when you’re in contact with the worst of what your mind can imagine.

This is done through a well-researched empirically-backed protocol called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), or simply exposure. The practice of exposure follows from what we already know about fear: the best way to get over fear is to face it. But it turns out that not all exposure is created equal—there are ways to effectively optimize your exposure so that you can maximize your chances for actually reducing your fear and making sure it doesn’t come back.

So how does this actually work? Well, you might think that reducing your sense of fear is about, for example, learning how to relax or meditate better so that things don’t feel as bad. Or that it’s mostly about habituation—basically, putting yourself into contact with something you fear for as long as it takes for it not to provoke a reaction anymore. But according to science these are probably both wrong.

The most current thinking around what facilitates long-term fear reduction is actually learning. Effective exposure is about maximizing the amount of learning you’re doing while contacting the thing you fear. 

This has some key implications for how exposure should be done, and what kind of results can be expected from it. For example, this model of exposure emphasizes the importance of surprise—or expectancy violation. The bigger the difference between what you expect to happen during an exposure, and what actually happens—the more likely you are to learn that the thing you’re afraid of is actually safe. 

Another interesting implication is that it’s important to do exposure in multiple contexts because fear learning is generalized, while safety learning is usually context specific. So the more sets and settings within which you can do an exposure the more likely you are to strengthen the safety learning. 

Becoming courageously facing your fears is part science and part art. In the rest of this piece I’ll go through what the science says about how exposure works to reduce fear, and how to do it effectively.

NOTE: If you’re suffering from actual clinical anxiety, trauma, or OCD you should really do this with a therapist first before doing it on your own. I’m not a therapist or a doctor, I’m just a guy on the internet with deep interest in these topics and who has been doing exposure myself for a long time. This article is for educational purposes only, and it’s possible that I’ve gotten things wrong. Proceed with caution and at your own risk! 

Word to the wise: exposure is done with stimuli that are scary but not overwhelming—if it’s done incorrectly you could accidentally make things worse. 

The modern science of exposure

You can see the principles behind exposure already at work in pre-scientific traditions going back thousands of years. 

For example, the 13th century Persian mystic Rumi sums up exposure quite nicely: “Don't turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That's where the light enters you.” 

Another great historical example are the Stoics, who emphasized the idea of voluntary discomfort in which they subjected themselves to temporary conditions of poverty or purposefully invited social rejection in order to harden themselves against fear. Here’s Seneca:

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’ It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence.”

It turns out there is a surprising amount of overlap between this Stoic practice and what modern science says is important about effectively facing your fears. Notice how the question, “Is this the condition that I feared?” is explicitly bringing to mind the difference between the expectation of what it might be like to live cheaply and the reality of that experience—which is precisely what is hypothesized to create the kind of learning that inhibits fear.

Over the last 75 years modern psychology and neuroscience has taken up the mantle of these traditional practices to try to understand what makes them work—so that they can be optimized as much as possible.