Fear might be the most important emotion from an evolutionary perspective. Pretending you can simply run towards your fears and things will get better is awful, awful advice. I am not saying you should let your fears consume you or that they can never be conquered, but maybe an alcoholic's fear of being in a bar is a healthy thing (there are plenty of other examples but that was the first I thought of after 5 seconds).
The point about running toward your fear isn't that things will get better, it's that you'll know which of your fears were valid and which were illusory. Oftentimes the thing you're most afraid of is simply not knowing what's going to happen next.
In the context that Ben is writing this post (founding a startup), basically the worst thing that can happen to you is that your company goes bankrupt and you have to look for a job. It feels a lot scarier than that because your ego gets wrapped up in the startup and all sorts of negative events can be existential threats to the startup, but there are basically no physical threats to your person other than yourself. If a tiger comes running at you or someone points a gun at you, by all means, be afraid and run away, but if you're signing a $30M lease, be afraid and then face that fear and rationally analyze the risks.
The hard part of juggling startup risks feels more of the reverse of what Ben's remembering.
It's not that you need to spot a ball is about to drop and catch it. Founders are up at 2am and every e-staff & advice meeting thinking about them & then acting on them. However, running at all of them will give you a heart attack, burn out your team, and derail your mission.
Instead, you have to accept that a ton of balls are dropping, and somehow get good at guiding which & how. Now that's a chapter I'd like to read :)
As someone who started a company and had it fail years ago, I still consider that a defining moment in ruining my life today. The knock-on effects are not so simple unless you have the benefit of tens of millions of dollars of exceedingly wealthy investors' money to play with. Relationships destroyed, people's finances ruined, people that had nothing to do with my company losing their jobs. I was often told my biggest mistake as a founder was that I cared about people rather than money.
This post reeks of the privilege of a VC who sells self-help books.
I've found a lot of success in that philosophy, but also some incredible damage. I ran towards my dear for a long time, and mostly it worked out. Even when it failed, it was a learning experience - I knew not to trust, but was no longer afraid of what I had previously feared. There's a huge difference between being afraid and being aware of falsehood/scam/danger.
Then I ran into something truly awful, and got drugged (and possibly raped, though I will never know). I've been afraid since then, and it's gonna take me a good long while to shake it off. It has immensely negatively affected my life, and it's made me question my judgement in a lot of situations - because I'm pretty sure the experience is only unique in that the stars aligned, not that the intent, will, and opportunity wasn't there in plenty of previous places, only didn't all line up before.
I don't have anything that I can take from it, except a certainty that Chestertons fence is real, and a lot of things that are looked down upon are looked down upon for good reason.
The trouble with these reactive emotions is that they’re twice removed from reality. You see a tiger in the distance, your body pumps itself with adrenaline and you get ready for fight or flight. But the brain and the body don’t work on absolutes - only patterns. You see or hear something, you’re pumped full of adrenaline, and now you have to fight or flee. There’s no way to rationally examine the thing that triggered you and un-secrete or quickly flush the adrenaline.
That’s what we need in a modern non-jungle world - understand your impulses, but be enough in control or yourself to rationally examine your environmental triggers, counteract your adrenaline and logically decide your future actions.
Save the evolutionary adaptions for your camping trip.
Maybe the metaphor is a bad one, but he doesn't mean physically approach the fear, he means confronting the actual problem mentally instead of sticking your head in the sand and just hoping it works out.
