Scared? Good. Here's what you do next.

Host: She said, "I'm nervous." I said, "Me too." And then I got this look like, "You nervous?" And I said, "I'm scared. I have big goals for this year. I'm scared that I won't hit them. But you know what? That's good. Fear means I'm alive. Fear means I care. Fear means I'm standing on the edge of something important."

[Pauses for a moment, reflecting on the conversation.]

Host: And then I looked at her and I said, "What is it that you want out of life?"

[Transitioning to address the audience.]

Host: What is up, my friends, and welcome back to the show. So, guys, we are on the precipice of 2025. This episode is coming out on New Year's Eve 2024. And this is a time of both excitement, energy for sure, but it also comes with an incredible amount of anxiety, fear, nervousness, tension, because what is 2025 going to bring?

[Pauses for emphasis.]

Host: We all set these big goals, things we want to achieve, accomplishments we want to have, and that's natural and normal. And if we're really shooting for something that stretches who we are, it's impossible for there not to be fear, for us not to be scared about what's going to happen. Will I actually make good on the promises that I made? Will I be able to commit to the things I said I was going to commit to?

[Softly, with introspection.]

Host: And I wanted to take an episode, a few minutes, this conversation with you to normalize fear. You are not alone in being scared. You are not alone in being nervous and feeling anxiety and feeling fear, doubt. Those are normal. Frankly, if you are not feeling those emotions, if the actions you're taking are not causing you tension, fear, nervousness, then you're probably not pushing hard enough. You're probably set in a place of comfort in a kind of doldrums, monotonous type lifestyle and have succumbed to whatever it is that life now gives you because if you're pushing, you're scared.

[With conviction.]

Host: And I don't want you to feel like you're alone and feeling scared. I'm incredibly scared. I wake up scared and fearful every single day. I have enormous projects that I want to get off the ground in 2025 and deliver to this audience and to my insurance community. I have Linkora, which I'm the chief marketing officer of, goes live full market in January of 2025. I'm launching the Master of the Clothes program, the most dynamic, intensive, and effective inbound sales coaching program and course that has ever been created. I just got accepted to do a TED Talk in February, and I am publishing a book with one of my best friends, Chris Paradiso, which comes out end of Q1, early Q2.

[Pauses, reflecting on the weight of these commitments.]

Host: And we haven't even gotten to June yet, and I want to make sure all those things hit because I've been working on all of them for more than a year, and I'm nervous that they're not going to work. I'm nervous that I have too many things going on. I'm nervous that I'm not going to be able to make the time. I'm nervous that by having all these things coming to a head at the same time, which I didn't plan by the way, that I'm not going to be able to give 100% to any single one of them and make it as big as it could possibly be.

[With vulnerability.]

Host: I'm nervous that I'm going to put all this effort into a book and no one's going to read it. I'm nervous that I'm going to put all this work into a course and that people won't buy it. I'm nervous that I'm going to be part of this team that has trusted me to market their product, to deliver their message, to drive new opportunities, new business into that company, to bring AI to the insurance space, and I'm not going to be able to make it happen. I wake up every day with that fear.

[Softly, with determination.]

Host: But I also read a lot. And the best part about reading is you get to tap into the brain, to the mindset, to the thought process of some of the most dynamic, intelligent, deep-thinking individuals, successful individuals who've ever existed. And what I'm going to do is walk you through my argument for why you should be scared, but that it shouldn't stop you from doing what you want to do in 2025.

[Quoting Mark Twain.]

Host: There's this quote from Mark Twain: *Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.* And I want us to hold that idea in our brain. You will never not be fearful. You will never not be fearful. Whether you do or do not do, you will be fearful for one reason or another. And our goal in becoming the best versions of ourselves, in finding the peak us, is accepting that that fear comes with trying to do great things and mastering it, not letting it become our master.

[Referencing the Bible.]

Host: In the Bible, there's a verse: *For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.* That's Timothy 1:7. You can be a Christian, not be a Christian. You can believe in God, not believe in God. I don't care. The Bible is one of the best handbooks for becoming the best versions of ourselves and leading a productive, happy, and love-filled life, a satisfied and fulfilled life that has ever been written, which is why it is still the most widely read book more than 2,000 years after it was created.

[With a personal note.]

Host: So you don't have to believe. Personally, my belief is, whether you believe or you don't believe, the good part is God believes in you. But I'm not putting that on you. People buck at biblical verses sometimes when I share them on the show because they feel like I'm trying to push Christianity on. That's not the case. I believe in God. That's me. I don't care if you do or you don't. That's your thing.

[Reflecting on American values.]

Host: And being an American and believing in kind of the pure American values that were created back in '76, one of those core values, not explicitly said, but implied, was you get to live the life you want to live as long as you don't put your shit on someone else. Now, that hasn't always been the case. We haven't always practiced that. But it's one of the implicit core values of this country, and it's one of the things that I love about this country.

[Addressing the audience directly.]

Host: So I'm going to share biblical verses with you. If you don't like that or it offends you, you can stop listening or stop watching right now. That's fine. But to me, whether you believe or don't believe, it doesn't matter. The book itself is a guidebook. It is the ultimate book on personal development that has ever been written. *For God has not given us a spirit of fear* meaning we are not naturally fearful. We're filled with power and with love and with a sound mind. And while fear may exist and we may experience fear, it is not who we are. It is not intrinsic to us. It is an external force placed upon us, which gives us the choice to not give into it, to not listen to it, to not abide by it. And I think that's incredibly powerful.

[Referencing Stoic philosophy.]

Host: The Stoics also address fear. Fear arises when we focus on external events rather than our own mindset. And we go to the master Stoic, Marcus Aurelius: *You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find your strength.* Meaning no matter what happens out in the world, no matter what that item is, no matter what that action is, that event is, that thing that hangs out there that causes you fear, you have in your mind the ability to move past it, to accept it, to take it in, and to keep going. You have that ability in your mind.

[Exploring the roots of fear.]

Host: So what is it? What is it that holds us back? What is it that makes fear just become so debilitating to us? And really, there are three core roots of fear. If you dive into the research—and I'm not a professional psychologist, so those of you that are professional psychologists or professional armchair psychologists, I would love for you to jump in the comments on YouTube or hit me up on DMs, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever, and push back on me—but there are three core roots of fear: a fear of failure, fear of judgment, and a fear of success.

[Referencing a study.]

Host: When it comes to a fear of failure, 31% of people avoid big goals because they fear failing. That comes from a CareerBuilder study from 2019. 31% of people, basically one out of every three people, don't try for the thing because they're worried they may not hit the thing. So they do nothing. Think about that. They don't even set the goal because of the created fear, the anticipated fear of not actually hitting that goal.

[Quoting Jordan Peterson.]

Host: Jordan Peterson has a great quote on this: *You're going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don't do. You don't get to choose not to pay a price,* meaning those individuals who allow anticipated fear to keep them from taking on that big thing. They then have a different price placed upon them, which is they don't get to dictate their future. They don't get to decide the rules. The rules get pressed upon them. Because if we don't push forward and do great work that separates us and allows us to choose and direct our destiny, our destiny is put upon us by someone else. And I cannot think of something that I would wish even upon my enemy than to have their destiny dictated to them. That sense of being stuck, that sense of being enclosed and captured, tethered down, anchored. It's devastating. It's depressing. It's overwhelming. Yet, because we may not hit our big mark, we refuse to even try.

[Referencing a video of elephants in captivity.]

Host: I don't know if you guys have ever seen this. There's lots of videos that you can go check out, Instagram or YouTube, whatever. But there's videos of elephants that are in captivity. And I saw a video of an elephant in captivity in Thailand. And what they'll do is when the elephant is a baby, they'll tie the elephant to a stake with a chain. And the elephant creates a radius upon which it will walk and it knows how far the chain will go. And when they reach a certain age, they take the chain off and the elephant still will not leave that space because in its brain, it has been tethered so long to that point that it no longer even believes it's possible to move past that point.

[Drawing a parallel to human behavior.]

Host: And this is what we do to ourselves when we allow fear to anchor us to a single point. The second root of fear is judgment—what others think—paralyzes us. Eric Weinstein has a great quote on this: *The problem isn't taking risks; it's the fear of people pointing out when we fail.* And I'm going to make an argument in a second that kind of doubles into this one, and last, and this is one that people often don't think about or when they're thinking about the idea of fear, is a fear of success. Many of us have a subconscious resistance to the increased responsibilities that come with success.

[Referencing Stoic philosophy again.]

Host: From the Stoic perspective, fear is misplaced, focused on the uncontrollable outcomes. Guys, now I want to dive into the fear of judgment because my TED Talk is actually on this particular point. It's all around the fear of status and my belief that we get stuck because of all these different fears and we put labels on them—fear of failure, fear of success, whatever. But ultimately, it all comes back to status. We are fearful of the status change that accompanies a potential outcome. Because, and I've said this before on the show, I do not believe there's such a thing as a fear of failure. I don't think that that's a real thing. I think failure is a word that we put onto an item. It's a label. It's a construct, but it's not real. And here's why.

[Providing examples of failure being redefined as lessons.]

Host: How many founder stories, how many success stories, being an athlete, an artist, an entrepreneur, have you heard where it's like failure, failure, failure, failure, huge, enormous success, and then all of a sudden we go back in the record books and we don't call those failures anymore. What do we call them? We call them lessons. So they're all failures. Missed business opportunity, went bankrupt, bad business deal, horrible litigation, huge, enormous success. Everyone knows their name and they're worth millions, if not billions of dollars. Now, failure, failure, failure, failure, huge win. And if we go backwards, it's now lesson, lesson, lesson, lesson, lesson. They're no longer failures. They're lessons. If we can do that, if it's possible to go back and change those things from failures to lessons, then failure isn't a real thing. What we are really worried about is not being successful. It's not a fear of failure. It's not a fear of going bankrupt. It's not a fear of any of those things. We're scared of the status change that will happen associated with the action we are considering taking.

[Providing personal examples of status change.]

Host: If I quit my job and join this startup, what will my golf buddies think? My drinking buddies think? My mom, my dad think? My kids think? My spouse thinks? What will my colleagues think in the industry? They think I'm crazy. They think I've lost it. I couldn't handle the pressure of a corporate job. Or I couldn't hack it. Whatever. Having a midlife crisis. If you take on a new hobby or you get sober or you want to get fit and this is a big one with fitness—a big, big reason that people do not take on and keep with fitness and wellness journeys—is because the status change associated with them going from being, you know, dad bod to fit dad over 40 is because they don't want the status change. Now you have to tell all your drinking buddies that, hey, I'm not coming out on Friday, guys. Seven beers on a Friday night doesn't get me to where I want to be for my fitness goals. And now your status changes in that group. You know, out on the golf course, everyone else is having a couple beers or a Bloody Mary, and you've said, can't do it. I'll play with you, but I'm not going to drink. And now they stop inviting you, or at least you think they'll stop inviting you. That status change keeps us from doing it, right?

[Reflecting on personal fitness journey.]

Host: Frankly, if you're fit in general, but certainly fit over the age of 40, you are the exception, and people do look at you differently. A year ago, I was probably in the best shape of my life, and I kind of took a little break from that for a while, and I'm now back on that train. I've been on it for about a month, and things are starting to go well. I'm kind of getting my numbers back up and whatever. It's all good. But about a year ago, a little more than a year ago, I was probably in the best shape of my life. It's about 195 pounds. I could deadlift 465. I could bench press 275. I was ruck walking every day. I just done 75 hard like I was kind of lean and mean and in real good shape and people look at you differently. They do and not always in a positive way.

[With a note of indifference to others' opinions.]

Host: Now, granted, I just my brain is broken and I can literally give a rat's ass what people think about me in general, which has been a superpower. I didn't realize was a superpower because it hasn't always been a positive, but my point being, people don't always look at you and aren't always happy for you. It's not always a positive experience when you're the fit person and you're surrounded by five or six other people who are all 20, 30 pounds overweight. And people don't want that change. They don't want to have to explain to everyone what their fitness regimen is or what they're doing or how they get up at 5 a.m. to get their workout in or how they're counting calories and then people are, oh, that's stupid. And I can't do that. I don't want to take that time and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, there's all these stupid conversations that happen when you're getting fit. And it's all a status change. So we don't change. We fear the status change.

[With determination.]

Host: And my friends, if I can push you past this in the next year, this is so much of the work that I do on this podcast. And I hope you're going to be around for this journey. I hope you'll dial in. If you're not subscribed, please do. It's going to be about pushing this idea of breaking through these status barriers, of breaking down the idea that you need to care what other people think.

[With a personal note on past mistakes.]

Host: And I've explained this before on the show. If you listen to the show on a regular basis, you've heard me talk about this concept. It is not that I don't want you guys to like me. I do. I do want you to like me. But if you don't, it will not change how I feel about myself, how I feel about my relationship with the people in my inner circle, and how I go about my business. It will not change my mood. It won't change my emotions. Trust me, I've had plenty of people take full-on hater runs at me, and I just don't care. And those are legit hater runs, not like, you know, I have some receipts. I'm not going to share them because I'm not going to do that, but like, not like one of these things, oh, there's haters out there. No, I've had people take real runs at me before. And whatever, right? I am who I am. Now, I have plenty of other freaking issues, don't get me wrong. But this fear of status, with the people that I've consulted with over the last year, with people that I've mentored in my various businesses and throughout the course of my career, with people that have been on my team or in the companies that I've owned, this piece is so vitally important to getting unstuck and becoming the best versions of ourselves. We cannot care what other people think. We can want them to like us. We obviously create to add value to others, whether that's the work we do, creation, or actual creative projects, but we cannot allow their opinions to run our lives.

[Referencing a LinkedIn post.]

Host: I just shared a LinkedIn post with like a meme on it. It was a dollar bill and what had written on it is, "Your opinion don't cut me checks," or something like that, and like handwriting and black marker because that's the way that I feel. And in my career, the biggest mistakes that I've made are when I have considered the status associated with a move or an action and played for the status. Those are the biggest mistakes that I've ever made in my career. Were those moments where, well, geez, I can get a country club membership if I take this job because of how much money I'm making, and think of the job title. And those were the biggest mistakes that I have made in my life were those moments where well, geez, I can get a country club membership if I take this job because of how much money I'm making, and think of the job title. And those were the biggest mistakes that I have made in my life. 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