Why Fear-setting is More Important than Goal-setting
Tim Ferris’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week, has been enormously influential to me. I still remember the sensations I experienced when I was reading it. It was a very sunny day. I was lying down on a sandy beach in St Ives in Cornwall, England. Between swim and swim, Ferris’ words made me envision ahead a better life for myself. There are many gems in this inspiring book. However, fear-setting is the bit I have found of most practical value. I do this exercise when I am procrastinating on an important decision. I believe that you will also find it valuable for yourself.
The Limitations of Goal-setting
Goal-setting is easy. It’s just stating the goals we want for ourselves. Quitting smoking, generating passive income through an online business, being slimmer, learning to play the violin, or finding an amazing partner. You name it.
The difficult part is to take the actions needed to make any of these goals a reality. One of the main reasons we don’t take action to pursue our dreams is fear. We are anxious about the possibility of failing and its economic, social, and/or emotional consequences. Here is where fear-setting is useful.
Fear-setting is a great tool to escape paralysis and motivate the necessary action to attain your goals
Fear-setting: A 3-Step Practical Exercise
The fear-setting is a simple 3-step exercise to put your fears under the microscope. The aim is to carefully evaluate all the implications of an action you are pondering. Examples of decisions to evaluate using fear-setting are: starting a new business, breaking up with your current partner, or moving to another country.
First Step: Defining Your Nightmare
The first step in the fear-setting exercise entails defining your fears and thinking about potential solutions to the problems you are imagining.
What If I…
To help you to do this, grab a piece of paper. Now write on the top of the sheet the words “What if I”. Then, complete the sentence with the action you are considering. Let’s give an example. Some months ago, I was at the end of my job contract at the university. At the time, I was deeply unsatisfied with how many things worked in academia and I had recently developed an interest in entrepreneurship. So, I wrote:
“What if I … … stopped applying for academic positions and instead, I fully commit to entrepreneurship for, at least, a year with the goal of developing passive sources of income.”
After your “What If I…” statement, divide the rest of the sheet into three columns with the labels “DEFINE”, “PREVENT”, and “REPAIR” on top.
Define
- Stop receiving a fixed amount of income every month to fund my lifestyle
- Stop having money to invest in stocks and cryptocurrencies
- Be unable to add more money to my pension fund
My worst-case scenario was failing to make any income at all, spending all my savings, and ending up having to be rescued by welfare benefits, my parents, or someone else. I also depicted the possibility of living in the streets if I was too proud to decline this potential help.
I was also fearful about stopping the path I started in 2010 when I became extremely interested in psychology and evolutionary theory. I felt that all the time and energy I had invested in my studies and acquiring skills to become a competent researcher in these areas were going to waste. Furthermore, I believed taking the entrepreneur path was going to make it more difficult to return to academia. So, this also went to my DEFINE column.
Some of the fears I included in the DEFINE column when I was pondering whether to, abandon, at least temporarily, academia to pursue self-employment
Prevent
Once you have defined the nightmare, it is time to think about what actions you can take to prevent these things from happening. This is what you should write in the PREVENT column.
In my case, my fear of not having regular income was prevented by things such as
- Having an emergency fund
- Having savings specifically destined to fund my lifestyle for the next six months
- Doing freelancing to get money straight away
For my fear of making it harder to come back to academia, I wrote things that would improve my academic CV and would keep improving my academic-related skills. I wrote down things such as
- I will publish the studies I have already conducted
- I will write blog posts related to my research and psychology (some examples of this here and here)
- I will do freelancing for academics
- I will privately tutor students in statistics and research methods
Repair
Now, is the time to think about what you can do to get things under control if things go wrong and your fears end up becoming a reality. In the REPAIR column, write down everything that you could do to repair the damage. This includes identifying who you could ask for help. For me, to repair the damage of putting myself in a bad economic situation, I wrote things such as- Go to a job office and accept whatever temporary job they give to me
- Apply for research-related jobs
- Sell some of my belongings
- Write review papers to enhance my CV
- Create an online course to showcase my teaching skills
- Ask for advice from my contacts in academia
- Ask for advice from people who had successfully come back to academia after a break
Some of the solutions I include in the PREVENT and REPAIR column for my fear of not having a fixed income every month
Second Step: Defining the Benefits of an Attempt or Partial Success
The second step entails carefully thinking about the benefits of an attempt or partial success. As you see, this is quite conservative. We are not thinking about the best-case scenario, just the benefits we will attain by trying. The benefits of your attempt or partial success could be of many types. They can refer to skills that you could gain. For instance, if you are considering starting a business, you will likely acquire new skills although your business does not end up being a success. Other benefits of your attempts would be related to gaining experience, building confidence, attaining a better emotional situation for yourself, or escaping from a lifestyle that is not taking you anywhere. In my case of abandoning academia and trying to build my own business, many of the benefits I identified were related to gaining knowledge and skills. These included:- Entrepreneurship
- Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Website Design
- Writing for a general audience
- Product creation
- Knowledge about self-improvement (e.g., finance, health, time-management)
- Knowledge about how to apply evolutionary theory and social learning to self-improvement
- Gaining experience with entrepreneurship
- Making new contacts and friends with who I share interests
- Being more motivated
- Being more independent
- Having the experience of trying what I really want to do with my life
- Having only one plan
Third Step: The Cost of Inaction
The third step is, in Tim Ferris’ opinion, the most important one. His rationale is that humans are awesome at imagining what can go wrong if we try new things. However, we are quite bad at depicting in our heads the costs of leaving everything as it is. This is what the third step attempts to tackle. Now, grab another sheet and divide it into three columns again. Write on top of each “6 MONTHS, “1 YEAR”, and “3 YEARS”. In each column, you should detail how your life would be if you avert the action you are pondering. This should be done with the major number of details possible, taking into account all its emotional, financial, and physical costs. For example, you might be thinking about whether you should break up with your partner. If you are thinking about it, you probably have good reasons to do so. The exercise would make you think about how your life would be in 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years if you remain with your current partner. In my case, I thought that if I keep applying for academic positions instead of trying with all my soul to become an entrepreneur, I was going to be quite miserable. I saw myself without a job in 6 months after having applied for 30 to 50 jobs, with most of them being jobs that I didn’t find especially appealing. This negative image was based on my previous experience. Getting a job in academia tends to be a slow process, the competition is intense, and the jobs are extremely specialized. In one year, I saw myself being a researcher or a lecturer at a university. However, I was unmotivated and uninspired, and; consequently, I wasted a lot of time. I was also living in a city I didn’t want to live in. This is a consequence of the job market for academics, which makes it quite tough to decide first where to live and then get a job in your field there. My emotional situation didn’t change much in three years’ time. I was still unhappy, unmotivated, and stressed. Nevertheless, I saw that I would be in a good financial situation and I would have time for some of my hobbies.
How I imagine my future if I did not try self-employment
Resources for Fear-setting
The reader might find useful the following resources:
• Chapter 3 “Dodging Bullets. Fear-setting and Escaping Paralysis” in Tim Ferris’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week
• Tim Ferris’ TED talk: Why You Should Define your Fears Instead of Your Goals
• A PDF with a template for the fear-setting exercise
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