Why You Should Always Do What You’re Afraid To Do

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’ And this rule seems a reasonably good guide for self-improvement. Because it turns out that people are often afraid to do the things they are least familiar with. Whether is approaching a girl in a club, giving a speech to 50 people, or setting up a business: things make us feel anxious because we have little experience doing it. In such cases the anxiety often pushes you away from doing the thing, hence still leaving you clueless about what you will experience, or even further increasing your anxiety.

But there is something odd here: because the things that you are least familiar with provide you with the biggest opportunities to learn. After all: if you are not familiar with something, it means that you have little knowledge of it. It means that you are still at the start of the learning curve; that the ‘marginal utility per unit of experience’ is very high. Therefore, being afraid of something might be a damn good indicator that there is a lot of potential for you to learn about the thing. Hence it might be wise to always do what you are afraid to do.

This reasoning seems cogent, doesn’t it? But there is one problem with Emerson’s rule…it is not always true. There are cases in which fear should actually push you away from doing something – not pull you into doing something. Think about the fear of jumping of a building, or the fear of approaching a tiger. Given that you want to improve yourself, it seems unwise to jump of a building, or to be ripped to pieces by an angry tiger.

So the best we can do is to say that the rule is a heuristic: a guide in life, that points you – in most cases – to the areas in life where you can learn a lot. But how do you know in what cases you should act upon the rule, and in what cases you should realize that doing so might actually put you in danger? I think we have to distinguish between two kinds of fear here: socially conditioned fears and innate fears. The first are things such as being afraid to start a business or to make a move on a girl*: we have been told, or we have experienced at first hand, that such endeavours might cause emotional pain – even though they are not inherently dangerous. Innate fears, on the other hand, are things such as being afraid of tigers, which seems like a reasonable fear. Tigers are dangerous; despite your experiences with one. In other words: it seems that innate fears try to protect us from real threats, while socially conditioned fears don’t always do so.

Taking this into account, ‘Always do what you are afraid of’ is likely to make you learn a lot.

But what do you think?

*it might be true that socially conditioned fears are grounded in biology, hence being innate. If we take evolutionary psychology seriously, for example, it might be true that the fear to approach women is in fact innate. Hence there seems to be a continuum from innate to socially conditioned fears; not a categorical difference.

Rembrandt and the Use of only One Canvas

What’s the link between Rembrandt and your life? I’ll give you a hint: it has something to do with a technology called Macro X-ray fluorescence. By using this new technology scientists have been able to detect paintings that have been painted underneath other paintings. Apparently, ancient painters – even the big ones – made mistakes, or were in any other way dissatisfied with their end product. Therefore they decided to change this ‘end’ product, either by painting an entirely new painting on top of the old one, or by changing a few details. But that’s not really interesting, is it? Everyone makes mistakes, so painters make mistakes as well, right? That’s true, but what is interesting is the fact that the painters decided to reuse a used canvas on top of which they painted their new painting: they deliberately didn’t use a new canvas. Why is that? Were canvasses very expense in those days, or might there be a deeper meaning behind this seemingly innocent action? Let’s take a look at that.

When you think about painters re-painting a canvas, you might see similarities with the manner in which we – human beings – live our lives. We also have a canvas – call it our souls or bodies, or both – which we have to re-paint in order for a new and revised work of art to appear. Even more than the painter we are forced to use the same canvas over and over again. Not because new canvasses are expensive, but simply because we only have one canvas. Like the painters we can decide to make minor adjustments to our paintings, or decide to radically alter the shapes and colors of our work of art. Layer upon layer, color upon color, we build and redesign ourselves until we are reasonably satisfied with the ‘end’ result.

But then the painful question shows it face: will we ever be satisfied with the end product? Do we ever reach the point at which we are simply done adjusting the colors and shapes? Probably not, right? There is always a new color to implement, a new technique to use, and a shape more appropriate. We keep on changing our minds, and this change is reflected in our paintings. And the painting process will go on until we die, until we cannot adjust anything any more, and the painting of our lives will get sold.

You could take the analogy ever further by saying that – by using a certain ‘technology’ – we can, just like the paintings’, unravel the layers of our own existence. That’s after all what Freud intended with his psychoanalysis, right? Peeling down the layers of our mind until we reach those layers buried and forgotten, the lake of the unconscious mind. Just like the painters we try to correct the mistakes we’ve made in our lives. But no matter how good of a painter we are, and no matter how bright the colors that we use might be, we can never erase the layers beyond our consciousness: we can merely masquerade them with fancy flowers and rivers.

You can take the analogy to the extreme by applying the painting metaphor to society as a whole. After all, what do you think Marx meant with his structuralism? What about his notions of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’? Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

So, what’s the conclusion of this article? Well, you could say that we’re all painters: painters of our own lives. And although we only have one canvas, we (have to) keep on adjusting our paintings, trying to attain that seemingly unreachable goal of perfection. And if we make a big mistake, unable to be corrected by a few brushes? We’ll start all over again. How to do so? Well, ask Rembrandt.

But what do you think?