The Tim Ferriss Show - #422: Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” — SenecaI do an exercise called “fear-setting” at least once a quarter, often once a month. It is the most powerful exercise I do. Fear-setting has produced my biggest business and personal successes, as well as repeatedly helped me to avoid catastrophic mistakes.ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:My TED talk, which is what you are listening to, gives you an overview, and the text at tim.blog/ted provides more detail, step-by-step instructions, and real-world examples.You can watch the TED talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_why_you_should_define_your_fears_instead_of_your_goalsThe three exercise slides from the TED presentation: https://tim.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ted_ferriss_fear_setting_sample_slides.pdfThis talk was also shared on the podcast TED Talks Daily, where TED shares new ideas every weekday. You might also enjoy my conversation with Chris Anderson on The TED Interview podcast, in which we discuss philosophy, psychedelics, and much more.SUGGESTED READING:Tao of Seneca: Letters from a Stoic Master — Free PDFs of three volumes of Stoic writing and modern profiles.Some Practical Thoughts on SuicideThe Tao of Seneca — On Groundless Fears***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests.For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to a very short episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. It is going to be between, let's call it 14 and 15 minutes,

and it describes something that is incredibly important to me called fear setting. It is the most valuable exercise that I do at least every quarter, usually every month, and I've been using it a lot in these very uncertain times. It is responsible for my best decisions and biggest successes in business and personally. It's also helped me to avoid paralysis by analysis. It's helped me to avoid catastrophic mistakes and also self-destruction. So I want to share this now. I feel there is some urgency to sharing this. It was recorded, that is the audio you're going to hear, April 24th, 2017, almost exactly three years ago. It is the talk I am proudest of. And it was recorded at TED, who has very, very generously agreed to

allow me to use this audio. So courtesy of TED, thank you guys very much. It was in the opening session and streamed nationwide in movie theaters, which goes to show you how much has changed. It has around seven and a half million views at this point. You don't need to worry about the visuals because I described them throughout. The initial picture that I describe is a sepia colored or black and white, if you prefer, photograph of me smiling ear to ear. Could not look happier from college. That's all you need to know. Last, I would just say there's incredible power in listening. You will get a lot from this, I hope, even if you just listen, but there's much more power and results in the doing. So I would suggest listening to this.

And then if you can go to tim.blog forward slash Ted, that's tim.blog forward slash Ted, where you can find the video, but you can also find step-by-step instructions, real world examples for doing fear setting yourself. So without further ado, please enjoy and hopefully benefit from this very vulnerable talk. And I hope useful talk on the most valuable exercise I do, fear setting. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually

drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the

world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog

forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday.

If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. So this happy pic of me was taken in 1999. I was a senior in college, and it was right after dance practice. I was really, really happy.

And I remember exactly where I was about a week and a half later. I was sitting in the back of my used minivan in a campus parking lot when I decided that I was going to commit suicide. And I went from deciding to a full-blown planning very quickly. And I came this close to the edge of the precipice. It's the closest I've ever come. And the only reason I took my finger off the trigger was thanks to a few lucky coincidences.

And after the fact, that's what scared me the most, the element of chance. So I became very methodical about testing different ways that I could manage my ups and downs, which has proven to be a good investment. Many normal people might have, say, six to ten major depressive episodes in their lives. I have bipolar depression, runs in my family.

I've had 50-plus at this point, and I've learned a lot. I've had a lot of at-bats, many rounds in the ring with darkness, taking good notes. So I thought rather than get up and give any type of recipe for success or highlight reel, I would share my recipe for avoiding self-destruction and certainly self-paralysis.

And the tool I found, which has proven to be the most reliable safety net for emotional freefall, is actually the same tool that has helped me to make my best business decisions, but that is secondary. And it is stoicism. That sounds boring. You might think of Spock, or might conjure an image like this.

A cow standing in the rain. It's not sad. It's not particularly annoying. You might think of Spock, or might conjure an image like this. A cow standing in the rain. It's not sad. It's not particularly happy. It's just an impassive creature taking whatever life sends its way. You might not think of the ultimate competitor, say Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots. He has the all-time NFL record for Super Bowl titles. And stoicism has spread like wildfire in the top of the NFL ranks as a means of mental toughness training in the last few years.

You might not think of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, to name but three students of stoicism. George Washington actually had a play about a Stoic, this was Cato, a Tragedy, performed for his troops at Valley Forge to keep them motivated. So why would people of action focus so much on an ancient philosophy? This seems very academic.

And I would encourage you to think about Stoicism a little bit differently, as an operating system for thriving and high-stress environments, for making better decisions. And it all started here, kind of, on a porch. So around 300 BC, in Athens, someone named Zeno of Citium taught many lectures walking around a painted porch, a stoa, that later became stoicism. And in the Greco-Roman worlds, people use stoicism as a comprehensive system for doing many, many things.

But for our purposes, chief among them was training yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former. This decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower. Conversely, let's say you're a quarterback, you miss a pass, you get furious with yourself, that could cost you a game. If you're a CEO and you fly off the handle at a very valued employee because of a minor infraction, that could cost you the employee. If you're a college student who, say, is in a downward spiral and you feel helpless and hopeless, unabated, that could cost

you your life. So the stakes are very, very high. And there are many tools in the toolkit to get you there. I'm going to focus on one that completely changed my life in 2004. And it found me then because of two things. A very close friend, young guy my age, died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly. And then my girlfriend, who I thought I was going to marry, walked out. She'd had enough. And she didn't give me a Dear John letter, but she did give me this. A Dear John plaque. I'm not making this up. I've kept it. Business hours are over at five o'clock. She gave this to me to put on my desk for personal

health because at the time I was working on my first real business. I had no idea what I was doing. I was working 14 plus hour days, seven days a week. I was using stimulants to get going. I was using depressants to wind down and go to sleep. It was a disaster. I felt completely trapped, and I bought a book on simplicity to try to find answers. And I did find a quote that made a big difference in my life, which was,

we suffer more often in imagination than in reality, by Seneca the Younger, who's a famous Stoic writer. That took me to his letters, which took me to the exercise, premeditatio malorum, which means the premeditation of evils. And in simple terms,

this is visualizing the worst-case scenarios in detail that you fear, preventing you from taking action so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis. My problem was monkey mind, super loud, very incessant. Just thinking my way through problems doesn't work. I needed to capture my thoughts on paper, so I created a written exercise that I called fear setting, like goal setting for myself.

And it consists of three pages. Super simple. The first page is right here. What if I dot, dot, dot, question mark. This is whatever you fear, whatever is causing you anxiety, whatever you're putting off. Could be asking someone out,

ending a relationship, asking for a promotion, quitting a job, starting a company, could be anything. For me, it was taking my first vacation in four years and stepping away from my business for a month to go to London, where I could stay in a friend's room for free, to either remove myself as a bottleneck in the business or shut it down.

In the first column, define, you're writing down all of the worst things you can imagine happening if you take that step. And you want 10 to 20. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I'll give you two examples. So one was, I'll go to London, it'll be rainy, I'll get depressed, the whole thing will be a huge waste of time. Number two, I'll miss a letter from the IRS and I'll get audited or raided or shut down or some such. And then you go to the prevent column. In that column, you write down the answer to, what could I do to prevent each of these bullets from happening, or at the very least, decrease the likelihood, even a little bit. So for getting depressed in London, I could take a portable blue light with me and use

it for 15 minutes in the morning. I knew that helped to stave off depressive episodes. For the IRS bit, I could change the mailing address on file with the IRS so the paperwork would go to my accountant instead of to my UPS address. Easy peasy. Then we go to repair. So if the worst case scenario has happened, what could you do to repair the damage even a little bit? Or who could you ask for help? So in the first case, London, well, I could fork over some money, fly to Spain, get some sun, undo the damage,

if I got into a funk. In the case of missing letter from the IRS, I could call a friend who is a lawyer, or ask, say, a professor of law, what they would recommend, who I should talk to, how had people handled this in the past? So one question to keep in mind as you're doing this first page is, has anyone else in the history of time, less intelligent or less driven, figured this out? Chances are, the answer is yes.

The second page is simple. What might be the benefits of an attempt or a partial success? So you can see we're playing up the fears and really taking a conservative look at the upside. So if you attempted whatever you're considering, might you build confidence, develop skills, emotionally, financially, otherwise? What might be the benefits of, say, a base hit? Spend 10 to 15 minutes on this.

Page three. This might be the most important, so don't skip it. The cost of inaction. Humans are very good at considering what might go wrong if we try something new, say, ask for a raise. What we don't often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo, not changing anything.

So you should ask yourself, if I avoid this action or decision, and actions and decisions like it, what might my life look like in, say, six months, 12 months, three years? Any further out, it starts to seem intangible. And really get detailed. Again, emotionally, financially, physically, whatever. And when I did this, it painted a terrifying picture.

I was self-medicating. My business was going to implode at any moment, at all times, if I didn't step away. My relationships were fraying or failing. And I realized that inaction was no longer an option for me. Those are the three pages. That's it. That's fear-setting. And after this, I realized that on a scale of one to ten, one being minimal impact, ten being maximal impact,

if I took the trip, I was risking a one to three of temporary and reversible pain for an eight to ten of positive, life-changing impact that could be semi-permanent. So I took the trip. None of the disasters came to pass. There were some hiccups, sure. I was able to extricate myself from the trip. None of the disasters came to pass. There were some hiccups, sure. I was able to extricate myself from the business. I ended up extending that trip for a year and a half around the world,

and that became the basis for my first book that leads me here today. And I can trace all of my biggest wins and all of my biggest disasters averted back to doing fear-set setting at least once a quarter. It's not a panacea. You'll find that some of your fears are very well-founded. But you shouldn't conclude that without first putting them under a microscope.

And it doesn't make all the hard times, the hard choices easy, but it can make a lot of them easier. So I'd like to close with a profile of one of my favorite modern-day Stoics. This is Jerzy Gregorek. He is a four-time world champion in Olympic weightlifting, political refugee, published poet. Sixty-two years old.

He can still kick my ass and probably most asses in this room. He's an impressive guy. I spend a lot of time on his stoa, his porch, asking life and training advice. He was part of the Solidarity in Poland, which was a nonviolent movement for social change that was violently suppressed by the government. He lost his career as a firefighter.

Then his mentor, a priest, was kidnapped, tortured, killed, and thrown into a river. He was then threatened. He and his wife had to flee Poland, bounce from country to country until they landed in the U.S. with next to nothing, sleeping on floors. He now lives in Woodside, California, in a very nice place. And of the 10,000-plus people I've met in my life,

I would put him in the top 10 in terms of success and happiness. And there's a punchline coming, so pay attention. I sent him a text a few weeks ago asking him, had he ever read any Stoic philosophy? And he replied with two pages of text. This is very unlike him. He is a terse dude. And not only was he familiar with Stoicism, but he pointed out for all of his most important decisions, his inflection points, when he stood up for his principles and ethics, how he had used Stoicism in something akin to fear setting, which blew my mind.

And he closed with two things. Number one, he couldn't imagine any life more beautiful than that of a Stoic. And the last was his mantra, which he applies to everything and you can apply to everything. Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. The hard choices, what we most fear doing, asking, saying, these are very often exactly what we most need to do. And the biggest challenges and problems we face will never be solved with comfortable conversations, whether it's in your own head or with other people.

So I encourage you to ask yourselves, where in your lives right now might defining your fears be more important than defining your goals keeping in mind all the while the words of Seneca we suffer more often in imagination than in reality thank you very much thank you all for listening and once again there is power in listening but Thank you. Thank you all for listening. And once again, there is power in listening,

but there's much more power and results in the doing. So please take a look at the text, the step-by-step instructions, what you can print out, all that you would need to do fear setting yourself at tim.blog forward slash TED. That's tim.blog forward slash TED. That's Tim.blog forward slash Ted. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting

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It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email. You will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.