📋🎬 Why you should define your fears instead of your goals

I do not, as a rule, take life advice from men with a morning routine. I had been told more than once to watch the middle five minutes and ignore the frame, so on Saturday 20 December, after climbing, I did.

The talk is thirteen minutes by an author and podcaster. The frame is his own story of a very dark year and how reading the Stoics got him through it, which he tells plainly and which I am not going to mark out of ten. Seneca's line that we suffer more in our heads than in fact is the hinge.

The part I kept is a written exercise on three pages:

1. The thing I am afraid to do, at the top. Then three columns. Define: every bad outcome I can think of. Prevent: what would make each less likely. Repair: if it happened anyway, what I would do and who I would ask.
2. What might an attempt, or even a partial success, be worth?
3. What does not doing it cost in six months, a year, three years. Not in money only.

The third page is the one nobody writes. Fear puts a price on acting and none on waiting.

I did it the same evening for ❓ Sabbatical next year or the year after: forty minutes, three sheets of Jonas's tracing paper. The method is written up in 🧭 Fear-setting. It is ⚓ Rehearse the loss with columns, and the columns help.

Skipped: the heroic examples, and the suggestion that hard choices are mostly a matter of nerve. Mine was mostly a matter of arithmetic, which I did the next day.

Kept: The exercise only