How The Best Overcome Fear

Welcome to another edition of The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour, where I share the habits and patterns of world-class performers revealed over nearly 300 interviews. In this episode, we'll explore fear. Specifically, how to manage, mitigate, and overcome fear, which is something I've battled for decades. This has been such a focal point of my life that my last TED Talk focused on an exercise called fear setting https://tim.blog/ted, which is something I practice at least once a month and have found to be a life raft. In addition to my own experiences, we'll hear how Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/ (@richardbranson https://twitter.com/richardbranson), Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/ (@mariasharapova https://twitter.com/MariaSharapova), Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, and Caroline Paul https://tim.blog/2017/03/12/conquering-fear-and-reducing-anxiety-caroline-paul/ (@carowriter https://twitter.com/carowriter) have battled their own fears. Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by WordPress https://wordpress.com/Tim, my go-to platform for 24/7-supported, zero downtime blogging, writing online, creating websites — everything! I love it to bits, and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. Whether for personal use or business, you're in good company with WordPress https://wordpress.com/Tim — used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, Beyoncé, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress https://wordpress.com/Tim offers "the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable," which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet. Go to WordPress.com/Tim https://wordpress.com/Tim to get 15% off your website today! This episode is also brought to you by LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/. I've used this service for many of my businesses, as have quite a few of the icons on this podcast — such as Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted for everything from setting up wills, proper trademark searches, forming LLCs, setting up non-profits, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is not a law firm, but it does have a network of independent attorneys available in most states who can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business with complete transparency and up-front pricing. Check out LegalZoom.com and enter promo code TIM at checkout today https://www.legalzoom.com/ to save 15% and see how the fine folks there can make life easier for you and your business.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Maria Sharapova?

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:04Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and hello, Clarice. You'll see why that's relevant in a minute. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. More specifically, welcome to another edition of The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour, where I share some of the habits and patterns of world-class performers that I've identified after nearly 300, 300 guests on this podcast. This episode, we will explore fear specifically, managing, mitigating, overcoming, which is something I've personally spent decades battling with, of course, sometimes being paralyzed by, and fortunately, in more recent years, more and more overcoming. And this has been such a focal point of my life for extended periods that my last TED

• 2:09Tim Ferriss?

  Talk focused on an exercise called fear setting, which is something that I have found to be a life raft and that I practice, I would say, at least once every month. And you can learn more about that at tim.blog/ted if you want to see it. It's all free and all specked out for you. But Aside from my personal experience, coming up, I'll discuss many different facets of fear, or listen to tips and tactics and so on, from folks such as Sir Richard Branson, founder and chairman of The Virgin Group. Sir Richard is, of course, a world famous entrepreneur, adventurer, activist, and business icon. His most recent book, Finding My Virginity, shares the candid details of a lifetime of triumphs and failures, and it provides

• 2:53Tim Ferriss?

  an intimate look at his quest to push boundaries. And that often includes breaking rules, seeking new frontiers, and certainly, fear.

• 3:01Richard Branson?

  I suppose the most notable business failure that we've ever had was taking on Coca-Cola with Virgin Cola. And for a while, it really looked like we were going to topple Coke and Pepsi. I mean, we were outselling them in the UK.

• 3:16Tim Ferriss?

  Then I talked to Maria Sharapova, who is the winner of five Grand Slam tennis titles.

• 3:21Maria Sharapova?

  And that sense of, wow, everyone, all of a sudden, wants something. Everyone wants something that you have. Everyone wants to be a part of your success.

• 3:30Tim Ferriss?

  I also discussed the relationship between courage and fear with movie star, director, and producer Vince Vaughn.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  I would get down. And I would take four or five days, and I would just not do anything. And I'd lose my energy.

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  Caroline Paul is our last guest. She is an author, who has worked as a journalist, and who also became one of the first female firefighters with the San Francisco Fire Department.

• 3:51Caroline Paul?

  And I look around, and there was just three of us instead of four. And I remember thinking, I have to go back into that hallway? And the fear was paralyzing.

• 4:02Tim Ferriss?

  So, without further ado, let's jump into it. And we can begin with a bit of personal context on my part. For most of my life, I would say, the driving values, if you will, have been security and lack of vulnerability. So it's been a very defensive posture for a very, very long portion of my life, not all of it. But optimizing was done to maximize security, decrease vulnerability. And as was told to me recently by Tony Robbins, who have had the privilege to get to know over the last Few year, there are some values that the more we obsess over them and fixate on them, the less we perceive we have them.

• 4:46Tim Ferriss?

  And those could be values or resources. For example, you have respect or you have security. The more you fixate on those things, the less you perceive you have because you put on a lens through which you see constantly the transgressions, the slights, the violations, and so on. And if you were trying to, in my case, say, control everything, for a very long time, the pro and con list, the analytics, the spreadsheets, all of that was to try to control as many variables as possible. And there is a place for control, but when you try to control everything, as I did for a very long time, and still sometimes do, you end up in a position where you can be

• 5:29Tim Ferriss?

  dominated by fear and/or you can feel helpless. And this has led me, over decades, to experience many extended depressive periods. That has led to having a very close brush with suicide in college, which then led to the fear setting exercise that I mentioned earlier. And all of that, for people interested, are spelled out both in text and video, all for free at tim.blog/ted. But I don't try to figure it all out on my own. That is a mistake that I've made repeatedly in the past, and I've tried to get better at asking for help and asking experts to explain how they handle the ups and downs,

• 6:10Tim Ferriss?

  the triumphs and the failures, the fear of the unknown, and so on. That allows me to assemble a toolkit of reminders and principles, beliefs, maybe phrases, that I can revisit on a regular basis. This is part of the reason why I ask so many of my guests about their failures and fears. So, let's jump to Sir Richard Branson. At Richard Branson on Twitter and mostly everywhere else is an English business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He founded The Virgin Group, which controls more than 400 companies. Boggles the mind, really, to even think about that.

• 6:50Tim Ferriss?

  I have a long history with Sir Richard's books, all the way back to Losing My Virginity, which I brought with me, I still own it to this day after college, and it helped to inspire one of my first businesses. And his most recent book, Finding My Virginity, which shares the details of, as I mentioned before, many of his triumphs and failures, both of which, on either end of the spectrum, have been spectacular. There have been some really, really incredibly noteworthy failures in Sir Richard's life. We discussed his quest to push the boundaries, stay high on life, and, in the process, conquer fear.

• 7:32Tim Ferriss?

  When you've felt overwhelmed, or unfocused, or if you feel like you've temporarily lost your focus, what do you do? Or what have you found to help? What questions do you ask yourself? In those cases, what have you done historically that has been helpful?

• 7:51Richard Branson?

  I personally believe that the majority of people who have down moments in their lives, they can actually trace it back, quite often, to alcohol. So perhaps the only days of my life that I feel lethargic is if, instead of having two glasses at nighttime, I had five or six. And if I find that's happened on more than one or two occasions, I then give up completely for a month or two, and feel absolutely fantastic, of course, and realize that I'm never going to drink another touch of alcohol again, until actually you do.

• 8:33Richard Branson?

  Fortunately, I'm so busy that I just can't afford to let myself down too often. But my guess is that for the vast majority of people, if you can be high on life, and fit and healthy, and if you do find that something like alcohol is just beginning to drift, go a bit too far, being high on life is just so wonderful.

• 9:05Tim Ferriss?

  A friend of mine, entrepreneur named Matt Mullenweg, he's been on this podcast as well. He's the CEO of a company called Automatic, which is behind WordPress, which powers around 37% of the internet right now. And he told me at one point that he had learned something long ago, which was alcohol is borrowing happiness from tomorrow. And certainly seems to be the case.

• 9:29Richard Branson?

  I think that those are beautiful words and they're very, very, very true words. You know, I mean, my, you know, my, my son's just had a year off alcohol and, and, you know, look, you can tell he's just so high on life. He's just enjoying, enjoying it like, like he's never enjoyed it before. And, and, you know, so like, you know, if you could do it in moderation, that's great. You know, I tell the story in the book. There was one, one night in, when we, when we won the Grand Prix in Melbourne. And anyway, I let my hair down to such an extent that it would have made the film Hangover look like a children's, children's film.

• 10:11Richard Branson?

  And, and, and the next day I woke up and anyway, I gave, I gave up for six months. And, and so it, you know, it doesn't happen to me too often, but, but I think, you know, generally it's, yeah, generally when that's the one area that I think a lot of, a lot of people who do, you know, run into problems in lives, it's just from slightly too much.

• 10:37Tim Ferriss?

  During those periods when you go off of alcohol, do you avoid circumstances where other people are drinking? Or is there something that you say to people if you are in those circumstances? How do you ensure that you don't have just that one drink that then triggers more drinks if you're trying to take time away from alcohol?

• 10:56Richard Branson?

  My trick is simply to have a cranberry and soda in a champagne glass. People don't know, you know, I don't, you know, I just take cranberry and soda in a champagne glass. And, but I think, look, I think for a lot of people, especially when people first give up anything like that, drugs, alcohol, they need to walk away. Completely for a while. Fortunately, you know, I haven't got in, you know, I've never let myself get to that, that state. But, you know, but I think that, you know, the best advice is to, you know, get, you know, get it, you know, just, you know, just say, I need to go to bed early tonight and, and walk, walk away. Otherwise, it's very difficult for people to stick with it. Are you, are you, are you somebody who drinks or not, or not?

• 11:41Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I don't drink a whole lot. I do enjoy wine. Fortunately, I, I don't feel like I've had any issues with alcohol, although genetically, my family seems to have that predisposition. I certainly have a fair amount of alcoholism in my extended family. So I do, I think about it quite a bit. I, I can, I can tell that I think I have the potential to abuse it, but I haven't up to this point.

• 12:05Richard Branson?

  I think that you and, you and I have such fascinating lives that, that, you know, that, that, that is the best way of keeping, you know, keeping these sorts of things in check. You know, we just, we want to, every day is so interesting that you're just not going to want to waste, waste a day by, you know, letting, letting something like that take over your life.

• 12:24Tim Ferriss?

  Right. No, definitely. And just, just two more questions for me. This is one really intended just to give people a window into how you cope with some of the harder times. Do you have a favorite failure of yours? And what I mean by that is, how has a failure or an apparent failure set you up for later success? Are there any particular examples that come to mind?

• 12:50Richard Branson?

  Yeah, I mean, I think on the, on the adventure side, you know, the first time we crossed the Atlantic and a boat, we were trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and getting the blue ribbon back. And, you know, and we sank. And then the next day, we built a new, another boat and we, we were successful. And the British people. Love people who are underdogs and it taught me that actually failing and then being successful most likely was better than just going out there and being successful the first time round. I mean, overcoming difficulties, the public almost preferred than someone who's just successful the first time round. Maybe not so much in America, but in Britain anyway.

• 13:35Richard Branson?

  I suppose the most notable business failure that we've ever had was taking on Coca-Cola with Virgin Cola. And for a while, it really looked like we were going to topple Coke and Pepsi. I mean, we were outselling them in the UK. The Virgin brand resonated. People loved the drink. And then, you know, we landed in Times Square with the Sherman tank and, you know, we took on Coke in their homeland in America. And Coke decided to bar back and they filled up DC10s full of money and hitmen and hitwomen and they landed in the territories that we'd launched and they suddenly Virgin Cola started disappearing from all these

• 14:19Richard Branson?

  shelves. And I think the lesson I learned from that was, you know, if I'm going to take on a Goliath, I've got to be, we've got to be different. We've got to be much better than they are. And, you know, with a cola, you're just another cola. You're not, you can't be fundamentally different. You can be cheaper, but you can't be fundamentally different. So, anything we've launched since then, we've only launched new businesses if we can make a fundamental difference.

• 14:45Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Yeah, that's so, so important to underscore, I think. This is the last rapid fire question. If you could have a giant billboard anywhere with anything on it, so, and this is metaphorically speaking, so getting a message out to millions or billions of people, what would it say and why? It could be a few words, it could be a paragraph, it could be a quote you live your life by, yours or someone else's. Does anything come to mind if you could get a message out to billions of people? What would you, what might you put on that billboard?

• 15:17Richard Branson?

  Trouble is, I think I'm gonna sound like a model on stage.

• 15:24Richard Branson?

  About the need to bring peace to the world. And therefore, I will instead go back to be a businessman, which is, you know, I think just something like nothing ventured, nothing gained. I think, I think that in life, if people, you know, if people, you know, try things and stick their neck out, they're gonna have a lot more fun than than if they sit at home watching other people do it. And so, yeah, so I think that old, that old quote, nothing ventured, nothing been gained is important. Having said that, you know, I, I, you know, I've been involved for ten years now in this wonderful group called The Elders and Nelson Mandela set it up and it's now run by Kofi Anan.

• 16:07Richard Branson?

  And I, and I really do believe that in my, in our lifetime, I've seen so many unnecessary wars. I've seen the Vietnamese war, I've seen the Iraq war, the Libyan war, and these were all incredibly unjust wars, which have, you know, gone on to spawn awful things like ISIS and so on, which would not have happened if it wasn't for actually the West taking it upon themselves to interfere in other countries' business and, and killing and maiming thousands of people. And, you know, we, we, we must make sure that we don't have any wars in the future. And I think it, it takes business people, it takes society, it takes all of us to really

• 16:51Richard Branson?

  make sure that our politicians never, never take us down that path again. I mean, one of the saddest things, I think, about the invasion of Iraq was, you know, yes, there were thousands of people on the streets. There should have been hundreds and hundreds of thousands, just like the Vietnamese war, to, to stop such a foolish excursion. You know, all, all conflict should be able to be resolved by negotiation and, you know, even if you don't get exactly what you want out of it, that is better than, better than the, than all the bloodshed that flows from, from conflict.

• 17:29Tim Ferriss?

  Maria Sharapova, @maria sharapova, is the winner of five Grand Slam titles and an Olympic silver medalist. She is one of 10 women, and the only Russian, to hold a career Grand Slam, which refers to winning all four major championships: Wimbledon, the Australian Open, the US Open, and the French Open. Forbes also has named Maria the highest-paid female athlete of all time, which she first earned in 2005. She's held that title for more than a decade.

• 18:01Tim Ferriss?

  Is it true that you've never used the word rejection, or that you don't believe in that word? Is that true?

• 18:10Maria Sharapova?

  Well, I don't, I mean, it's a very, it's a very tough word to believe in. It's a very tough word to accept. I think one of the reasons is because I saw in many different scenarios where my father would say no, because he would open up an opportunity to say yes. And...

• 18:32Tim Ferriss?

  Could you, okay, please explain.

• 18:36Maria Sharapova?

  So, there are many situations, whether it was a coaching opportunity, or whether it was receiving money from an agency, he had this ability to say no to the things that seemed that like they made sense, like the easy way out, because he believed that later he'd have a better opportunity to say yes to bigger and greater things.

• 19:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So he said no to the small, shiny objects in front of him?

• 19:03Maria Sharapova?

  Well, at the time, I'm sure they didn't seem so small.

• 19:06Tim Ferriss?

  Not small, not small. I don't mean at the time in perception, but the short-term shiny objects maybe.

• 19:12Maria Sharapova?

  Right. So rejection, it wasn't, there was never a...

• 19:19Maria Sharapova?

  Because I always had, I mean, I always was following and kind of next to my father and seeing the decisions that he would make. I was only a kid. And even when I, even when I won Wimbledon, I was only seventeen years old, you're still a kid and you're still following the guidance and, you know, I'd win a match following that and I'd call it, or I'd win a tournament and I would go shopping in a store and I would call my mom because I, there was something like quite pricey and I, I didn't know if I could buy it. So I was still asking permission, even though I had earned that money, if, if I could purchase a piece of jewelry or shoes or whatever it was at the time that I wanted.

• 19:58Maria Sharapova?

  So I was always, um, watching and observing and they never, rejection, I mean, you're, of course, when someone says no to you, it's easy to say, oh, yes, I was, I was rejected. But if you can open up a different opportunity from that point of view, then you're turning a no into something that's, that brought you to a better place.

• 20:22Tim Ferriss?

  It sounds like you did that with your interactions with some of the other players who were boarding at Nick's Tennis Academy, in a way.

• 20:32Maria Sharapova?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Tim Ferriss?

  Do you consider yourself an introvert, an extrovert, a blend? How do you think about that?

• 20:40Maria Sharapova?

  I think from a very young age, because of sort of the, the process that I, that I went through, um, and the success that I earned from a young age and, and winning a, a major and a grand slam at such a young age. And because it became so unexpected, I went from being someone that was, you know, that someone that people scouted to being someone that everyone had analyzed and knew about and wanted to know more of. And I created this, um, you know, I definitely put on these horse blinders because if I had not, my mind would have been everywhere. And I, I think it, it would have been so easy to

• 21:25Maria Sharapova?

  be distracted in, in those moments and situations and be pulled in different directions, which, uh, it's, it's a slippery slope. It's very dangerous and a, as a young girl, it, it could have been a disaster, to say the least. And so. I definitely remember, I remember the moment and it was just a few matches before I won Wimbledon, where I was sitting down with my coach and all of a sudden, I think it was before the semifinals of the tournament and all these tourists who had gotten credentials, they seemed like tourists. I didn't know who they were, maybe they would have, maybe they weren't, maybe they were important agents or sponsors, but at the time they just seemed like tourists that wanted a picture with me.

• 22:09Maria Sharapova?

  And, and it really came overnight and that sense of wow, everyone all of a sudden wants something. Everyone wants something that you have. Everyone wants to be a part of your success. I didn't like that feeling. You know, I, I love the feeling of being in a position of, of showcasing what I could do with my tennis racket, but that feeling of everyone wanting a piece of that and the feeling of your opponents all of a sudden, all of a sudden feeling like just by beating her, they're not just winning a quarterfinal or the final of a match, but they're winning so much more.

• 22:50Maria Sharapova?

  It made me, it made me feel like I, I needed to kind of put myself in a bubble to concentrate, to focus, that it was going to be that much harder, that much more difficult. And I did. And I don't know if I could have done it another way.

• 23:07Tim Ferriss?

  What were some of the, or what are some of the best practices or decisions that have helped you with that? Because for instance, my friend Josh, I was mentioning earlier, who became well-known effectively overnight, particularly with the movie about his life for chess. He could no longer compete effectively after that because he would go to a chess tournament and there would be, I'm, I'm making up the age, but he's something like 13 or 14 and all of a sudden there are 20 girls who want his attention and a bunch of reporters. And he removed himself completely from the competitive scene. He's one of the most private people I know at this point.

• 23:50Tim Ferriss?

  So what, what helped you? What kind of decisions or advice or practices?

• 23:54Maria Sharapova?

  I think it was surrounding myself.

• 23:58Maria Sharapova?

  With good minds and good people that had my best interest. And it's so easy to say those words, but I know how difficult it is to find those people. And even harder now nowadays than it was and I I saw it in so many different examples of other of other tennis players and of their success and um their paths after that and the people that you all of a sudden associate yourself with. I think as an individual, it's very easy to be affected by the voices that are next to you because we listen to that and we we process that information. And all of a sudden, we I wouldn't say we want to be like them, but we we we interpret

• 24:43Maria Sharapova?

  it in in our way. But like when I read, when I read a funny book, all of a sudden I feel like I'm a comedian. Or, you know, when I when I watch this, an incredible um acting by someone, it inspires me to um to be an actor, you know, it's like there's moments of this that that happens. As an athlete, you surround yourself with with people's opinions or choices or money and wealth. And it's very, it's such an easy distraction and and I surrounded myself with good people. And I, the friends that I have today were my friends when I was a young girl that my manager has managed me since I was 11 years old.

• 25:24Maria Sharapova?

  You know, my mom is still very much my best friend and another really good friend of mine I met when I was 11 years old as well. So I have um, I have this fondness of of developing those real connections with people. And I think it was so helpful for me as a young girl because I competed in front of thousands of people and I still do and. The walk to the tunnel and the walk to a press conference and the walk back in the hotel room, it's a very lonely journey. And that it's a difficult, you know, you're in your mind a lot and you're thinking a lot.

• 26:06Maria Sharapova?

  So when you have, when you have voices next to you that are the right voices, um, then it's so helpful, but I know how hard it is to find, but I do believe that that is a big part of my success.

• 26:18Tim Ferriss?

  I have some public exposure and have found, I've made a lot of mistakes and have found it really difficult to identify in some cases what ulterior motives are, or if people start doing me tons of favors, I now realize there might be something coming six months later. Uh, so I'm very hesitant to accept favors, but I can't even imagine the level, I mean, I'm playing T-ball and you're in the major leagues in the World Series when it comes to how many people want a piece of you. And how do you, for instance, assess someone if you say have coffee or lunch with them?

• 27:01Tim Ferriss?

  What do you look out for or look for? I mean, how do you decide whether it's someone you want to see a second time or talk to a second time? Uh, if, if anything comes to mind, and this is just because quite frankly, you've had a lot more practice.

• 27:16Maria Sharapova?

  You have a lot of requests.

• 27:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, no, you've, you've had a lot, you've had a lot more practice than I have.

• 27:20Maria Sharapova?

  I saw that email back you sent, I was like, whoa. That automatic reply, I was like, oh my goodness.

• 27:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 27:28Maria Sharapova?

  I don't know who's emailing you.

• 27:29Tim Ferriss?

  I'm afraid I have 4,091 unread email in my inbox currently.

• 27:34Maria Sharapova?

  Oh my goodness.

• 27:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was released into the wild.

• 27:36Maria Sharapova?

  Oh, I can't do that. I need to keep my inbox clean. Then I feel like I have a mess in my head.

• 27:40Tim Ferriss?

  All right, well, we'll talk about that next, but in the meantime.

• 27:46Maria Sharapova?

  So how do I choose? I think it's about, I, I love meeting people and I love having conversation and I love being inspired. And you can get so much out of a conversation or about from, by exposing yourself to being in an unfamiliar territory. So with people, and I'll give you the, a big, kind of, an example that was, I felt like it was important because I'm very much, I'm always around the same people. So I have my team, which is my coach and my fitness coach and my trainer. And, and we travel, I see them more than my family. We travel probably two hundred and sixty days out of the year together. Breakfast, lunch, dinners, practice, training.

• 28:32Maria Sharapova?

  We know so much of each other and then you have a manager and then you come home and then you have your friends. So I'm always surrounded by people that I know and that I trust and that I love, which is incredible. But I always think that as a, as a human being and from a, a perspective of the mind and growth and intellectually, when you're put in a situation where you're unfamiliar with people and you're unfamiliar with their stories or who they are and you have to ask questions and to get that out, it makes you a much more interesting person. And so last year I, I put myself in this position where I had all this time off

• 29:16Maria Sharapova?

  and it was during the summer and I signed up for these two business courses in Boston at Harvard Business School. And I was one out of the forty students, I believe, in each of these courses. And I stayed on campus and these were individuals who were CEOs and COOs of companies, of airlines, of Microsoft, of all these incredible brands and.

• 29:43Maria Sharapova?

  I was by far the youngest and and um probably the silliest and the less the least knowledgeable one in the room. But just by being with them, just by sitting with them, just by sitting with them at dinner, by asking them questions, by feeling a little bit uncomfortable. I felt like at the end of those three weeks, I grew and I grew and and it wasn't that, I mean, there were definitely things that I learned that I I'm applying and that I wanted to apply in my business. But the biggest thing I I got out of it was that I grew as a person. I I became familiar in a in a very unfamiliar territory. I still keep in touch with people in those in in in the classes.

• 30:28Maria Sharapova?

  Um, we have completely different lives. Um, they're CEOs of companies. They have, you know, three or four kids. Um, you know, they travel all over the place and here I am, a thirty year old athlete. But there's so much respect in that room because we're all trying to learn and to grow. And so when I, when you ask me like, who are the people that you want to meet with or speak to or have a coffee with? I always think of that. And the people that I choose to be with are the people that I want to learn from and that I want to have a conversation with and not just about what they bought at the flea market or, you know, what they're gonna, how they're, how they like their coffee. But it's about the world and it's about education.

• 31:10Maria Sharapova?

  It's about people and and it's not about right or wrong. I don't always have conversation because I want to know what makes someone perfect and not, I I like to hear opinions. And I got out of that experience in Boston and I, no, I felt like I grew. I felt like I stepped up and I got out of my comfort zone and and I followed up with them and um and we still keep in touch about business and um projects and things like that. So it was a very interesting experience personally for me.

• 31:45Tim Ferriss?

  Vince Vaughn, at Wild West on Twitter, is one of the most prolific actors, writers, and producers in the world. He's acted in more than 30 major motion pictures that have gone on to gross more than 1.7 billion at the box office. He's largely credited for redefining the R-rated comedy with his performance in the 2005 hit Wedding Crashers, which set the record for highest grossing R-rated comedy at the time. He is, and will continue to be, I expect, one of the most sought-after leading men in Hollywood. I met Vince because he listened to this podcast, and he reached out through his production company, Wild West, to see if we might do a TV show together. Specifically, he had

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  seen one of my first TED Talks. It was actually recorded at something called the EG, the Entertainment Gathering, where I talked about language learning, dance, and swimming, three fears that I overcame using different toolkits with the help of mentors. And we discussed many different options, and we settled on a show that ended up being called Fearless, with the less in parentheses. And it's in parentheses because the objective of the show, where I interviewed everyone from David Blaine, the illusionist and endurance artist, to Kyle Maynard, and Stuart Copeland of the Police, and so on, the objective was

• 33:05Tim Ferriss?

  and is to teach people to fear less. Two words, to fear less, which is trainable, not to be fearless, which is not the objective at all.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  You know, one great thing about failure is you realize it's not as bad as your mind makes it out to be. It's the fear is more crippling than the actual consequences. The consequences, a lot of times, feel almost relieving in a way, because now you've faced it, you've gone through it, and that kind of takes that away from you.

• 33:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, it's amazing how also over time, the more you... You don't address your fear. And meaning if you take some large fear and you break it down into the smallest possible steps, let's say for swimming, for me, it was even just putting my face underwater for a period of time, right? So forget about swimming, forget about learning how to breathe, just putting your face underwater. And then when you finally have the incentive, like this bet that I had with my friend, or rather this mutually assigned nears resolution.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  With a deadline.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  What was that?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  With a deadline, yeah.

• 34:09Tim Ferriss?

  With a deadline. When I actually sat down and found a method of swimming called total immersion, which I recommend to everybody, which was introduced to me by Chris Sacca, who also had difficulty swimming, and he said, "I have the answer to your prayers." It took me a week, about 10 days, to go from zero laps in a pool to like 40 laps a workout as meditation. It was incredibly, it was incredibly easy compared to the mental monster that I had created for myself.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  That's what's fascinating is how much of it is the woods that we've created versus the actual path to the destination.

• 34:43Tim Ferriss?

  You were, as I understand it, rejected for certain roles because of your height. Is that true? I mean, the leading, leading men at the time, or that the roles they were casting for, or maybe the people you'd be featured with would be shorter and there were issues there that that ended up being an issue in the early days?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  I think whatever you're getting rejected for, they find a reason to say it, you know? I think when I was going out for roles younger and I was so much taller than people, they would say that, and I'm sure it played a role into it. But I think it's important, whatever you're doing, that you don't give voice to things that you're not able to change. You would have to use it in a way to find ways to do stuff. It's all neutral ultimately, even if it doesn't feel that way on some level, at least for the purposes of approaching stuff. But, you know, look, at the end of the day, it's just a lot of rejection. It's the nature of it. So I had gotten turned out at probably a thousand to one for the times that I would audition or more. And it wasn't always consistent, the reasons why. But all you knew was that you weren't getting a chance to participate, and so you would

• 35:45Speaker 04

  have to go back to the lab and try to get to a place of being more and more undeniable.

• 35:51Tim Ferriss?

  And when you Are going through all these rejections. Of course, at a certain point, it just becomes second nature to not flinch as much when you get turned down for something. But if you were giving advice to, say, an up-and-coming actor who has some degree of talent but is getting rejected, and they're really just feeling like they're getting punched in the face by the world, what would you say to that person?

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Well, I think, I looked at it mathematically at a certain point, which was, I started just focusing my entire day on perfecting my craft. So I was either watching a movie, reading a book on stuff, doing monologues, taking classes.

• 36:34Tim Ferriss?

  Ordering products from infomercials.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Ordering products from infomercials came later. That was the dessert, that was the treat for having gotten a chance to work. But I would deny myself other things. I couldn't go do this, I couldn't travel, until I earned it. So I would deny myself certain things that I would want to do, and say, "I haven't earned that yet," which I find to be a good motivator. And then, what I did was, if I would screen test for a movie, that was a big opportunity, that would have been life-changing, it would have given me an opportunity.

• 37:03Tim Ferriss?

  What is screen testing? I'm just, as an idiot, I'll ask.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  Screen test would be, you're close, there's a couple people for a role, and now they're gonna film a scene from the movie with you and perhaps the already casted actor, or just a pair of people together. And in screen testing, they would just see who mixes and matches, or how do you do on camera, how do they feel you come off? And I had a couple of those, maybe four or five, for good opportunities. And when you don't get it, so you could go through seven or eight auditions to get to this point, it's between you and two or three other people. And when you don't get it, your day the next day doesn't change, meaning you still are gonna get asked to go in for five lines on a television show or something smaller. There is no advancement, as far as opportunity. You were just a person with

• 37:48Speaker 04

  the same credits you had. So, there was a lot of time spent to get to that, and energy to get to that moment, and if it didn't pan out, there was no change in how someone, you were no more castable as a known entity than what you were. So what would happen is, when you would get that close, and it wouldn't happen, at first, I would get down, and I would take four or five days, and I would just not do anything, and I'd say, "Oh, this is, I'd lose my energy." And then I started to realize that the week I took off was really two weeks. That it was a week of not getting better and it was a week of getting worse. And I said, now I've given myself two weeks less to improve at the things I'm in control of. And I started looking at it like a percentage game.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  The more I worked on things, my percentages would go up. And what I realized later was it gave you a confidence to feel like you belong there. It gave you permission to perform in situations that didn't feel comfortable. Because you had felt good about what you had brought to the table. And so I would suggest that you find a process where you're able to. I think it's important to allow yourself to feel disappointed. I think it's important that you don't turn off those feelings. But it is also important to, how do you do that as quickly as possible? That to then become productive again. And start doing the things that are going to give you a better opportunity for what you want. The same could be said for a relationship.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  It hurts your feelings, it's. But how much time is effective in mourning it and processing it? I really believe no time is not good. You need that moment to accept it. But the sooner you can get back to doing things for your own growth and the things you're in charge of. I think your chances of having the things you want in your life become greater.

• 39:38Tim Ferriss?

  I think also from what I've observed in you and other people who've done really well in their respective fields is that having an opportunity to be exposed to micro failures in some environment like wrestling, like auditions. Inoculates you in such a way that you develop a tolerance for rejection. And that allows you to capitalize on opportunities much more effectively later. Because you don't take the two weeks off, right?

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 40:04Tim Ferriss?

  And it allows you to improve.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  So. But then we have the problem on the other side, which I don't know if you've experienced. You see it with boxers a lot, but once you have a level of success. Can you maintain a motivation? Right. To have the approach that you once had. Right. When the immediate needs are not there as strong. Sure. Because I think on some level, we all are looking for those things in life. How to let go of stuff and how to enjoy things in a more productive way. Could you talk about your car accident in high school? Sure, yeah. It's not something that we've talked about. No, I haven't talked about it much, but we were, uh, it was after school. I had played sports and then I had stopped. I had started getting more into acting and it was during the day.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  And, um, I was a passenger and it was raining out. And the girl that was driving was swerving on the road being cute. I remember her saying, "Don't swerve, don't, don't, you know, stop it." But she kept doing it. Uh, we were going maybe thirty-five miles an hour and then we hydroplaned. And I woke up in a ditch, uh, my thumb ripped up, uh, real bad and I couldn't move. My legs couldn't move. I had paramedics over me and I had blood all around me. I was real concerned by a friend. I, I didn't have any idea how I looked. I wasn't tracking it. My friend was real bloody. I said, "Is Sean okay?" They said, "Yeah, he's all right." They got me the ambulance. And then they couldn't get ahold of my parents at first because they were work traveling.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  And so I just remember being in a lot of pain.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  There was a moment you didn't know what the ramifications were. I had a small compression which turned out to be nothing in my back, but, uh, and, uh, the aesthetic of, uh, my thumb being, uh, injured, I, at the time, I didn't, I mean, it's now just a very bad scar on the backside of it. And thankfully, I have the thumb and can move it, but there's a pad that was gone. So, uh, that was, um, that was challenging because it really made me evaluate the oldest cliche, you know, without your health, you have, you don't have anything. So I really got the experience of feeling like, well, what if I can't move around? Or people go outside and play and things I had taken for granted.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  And then this, the, anything physical that is different that you're used to in a certain way, I think at first it's, uh, natural to feel insecure about it. And here I was, and at that time, knowing I wanted to pursue being an actor and entertainer. So it was a gift in. You know, processing things and putting your focus on other things and you started to realize the power of your own inner dialogue as far as what you were creating or not. So there was a lot of gifts in it ultimately, but at the time, it was, I feel lucky for it in that it was without real consequences, it was a, it was a nice learning gift in a way.

• 43:00Tim Ferriss?

  So just to, we're going to talk a lot about that inner dialogue and self-talk, but I want to touch on a few things that are around that same time period. And as maybe a preface to that, I will say that Vince is one of the most consistently curious people I've ever met, which is saying a lot because my job is to interview curious people. And to give you an idea, we were just backstage getting mic'd up and he had questions about something called the Marcelotene. So Marcelotene is a choke that's used in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu by the Michael Jordan slash Wayne Gretzky of grappling, his name is Marcelo Garcia. So I was backstage choking Vince about 10 minutes ago and there were a lot of very

• 43:45Tim Ferriss?

  nervous looks.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Very effectively, I will.

• 43:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a good choke. Marcelo knows what he's doing. And grappling was one of the first things, wrestling specifically, that we bonded over. And could you talk about the role of sports and wrestling to the extent that it's, that it had a lasting impact?

• 44:09Speaker 04

  I think it's important, I think, you know, George Washington, I think credited ballroom dancing and horseback riding as two of the most important things he did because it gave him confidence physically and grace. And, you know, being a leader, I don't know that you can put grace in the body without, you know, whether it's, I took ballet, I took, played sports, I think it's important. Especially for me being tall, it allowed me to have, I think, more control and confidence in my, in my, in my height and, and so wrestling to me was really...

• 44:42Speaker 04

  A course in resiliency and discipline. I would have loved to have played other team sports, but it was, I was very good at wrestling for whatever reason, and I wasn't as accepted in some of the team sports. So wrestling is very much a loner sport. If you're on a team bus, you kind of joke around and laugh. On a wrestling bus, everyone is dead silent. Partially because they're all dehydrated from cutting weight. Cutting weight, and you're gonna get in a fight in front of your school, or people you don't know, it's like you shake hands and it's like you're gonna, you know, there's no one missed a block. You got, you got beat, right? And you are dehydrated, it's odd in that you're growing and yet you're trying to maintain a weight as, I mean, it's especially when you're doing it when you're younger, it's very challenging.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  But I really felt that I got, and there's, you know, you would come out of playing football feeling like you were in shape, and then you would go into wrestling and you would realize you're not in any kind of shape, because if you just wrestle, it's exhausting, and then the only other thing you can do is run. And in the winter in Illinois, that meant hallways and stairs. We had a coach that was, he got fired, he was not fit to be with kids, but I, I felt like I was, like I benefited from having that personality, but he was a real problem. But I remember- I feel like we need a little more elaboration so people's minds don't go crazy. Well, he was, he was, he was, uh, he had a real anger problem. He would hit you- Okay. I got hit- This isn't spotlight, I just wanna-

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, he punched me once in the chest after a match, he hit the wind out of me, he would, he encouraged kids hurting each other, but it seemed normal at the time, you know. He was like the Cobra Kai- Yeah, he was like Cobra Kai. It was crazy, he had his own emotional issues, so we would win a meet like 60 to 6 or whatever it was, and he would be angry over the few mistakes, and he would, it was, at some point you just heard the emotion being poured on you. Remember his sister was an assistant, he'd always say, "Get me a tab and an aspirin." Or an Advil, go give me a tab of Advil and then he'd keep screaming at us. But, uh, he would sometimes, like, there was a, you know, we would run these stairs and he would say in these hallways, it was like a spread, but if you didn't make it under a minute twenty, you would add another one, right?

• 46:53Speaker 04

  He was intentionally, you were gonna have the bar moved and he was trying to break your spirit. He wanted to simulate, "All is lost. What you thought was gonna get you there is not, and now will you stand?" Right? But inevitably, the second-string heavyweight was never gonna make that time. So the first time he would do it, he'd say, "Okay," he'd call the kid's name real loud, "was, uh, Illinois," what was his other, I think it was, I remember the name, I won't say it, but it might have been like Eastern European last name and he said, "He was late." So then, the first time we'd run after that, there'd be some encouragement, "Come on, you could do it." But the second or third time, kids would start yelling and screaming at him or kicking

• 47:33Speaker 04

  at him, and really physically forcing him, it was like a bad, like a bad, "A Few Good Men." Yeah. It was terrible. And I always had a problem with the authority anyway and I clashed with him a lot. I ended up just showing up at the meets and I was good enough that I could do that. I wouldn't go to practices all the time. I really had problems with him. He did punch me one time in the chest. But he turned out to be someone that created a past that was not truthful. He had told us that he made the Olympic team, but that it was when, the year that we boycotted it.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  And it turned out not to be true, you know? But anyway, I guess the long version of it is, I think that I gained more than I lost, even with him being, um, uh, challenging in a lot of ways, I wouldn't change that experience. And you can have a great coach, which there are in wrestling, and I think in general, one of the great attributes of wrestling is constitution and grit, the ability to survive painful moments and not take them on in the absolute sense, meaning to have perspective on pain.

• 48:45Tim Ferriss?

  Caroline Paul, @CaroWriter on Twitter, is an author of fiction and nonfiction. She worked in public radio as a journalist before joining the San Francisco Fire Department in 1988 as one of their first female firefighters. She worked most of her career on Rescue 2, where she and the crew were responsible for search and rescue and fires. Rescue 2 members were also trained and sent on scuba searches. She has some horrifying stories of pulling out decomposing bodies, rope and rappelling rescues, surf rescues, confined space searches, all hazardous material calls, and the most severe train and car wrecks. Her first book was the nonfiction memoir Fighting Fire, published in 1998.

• 49:26Tim Ferriss?

  She also wrote the New York Times bestseller and a book that I think is fantastic called The Gutsy Girl. She calls it Lean In for Girls, but I think it's actually much more than that. And it's not set in the boardroom, but rather in trees, on cliff edges, and in wild rivers. She is very, very good at recognizing how resilience and toughness, gutsiness, can be trained, can be taught. And in a controversial New York Times essay, the preceded publication of that book, she wrote that "risk teaches kids responsibility, problem solving, and confidence." You can certainly find it very easily by searching Caroline Paul, New York Times. Her perspective on fear and how she overcomes it in the most extreme circumstances, she's

• 50:09Tim Ferriss?

  done lugeeing, she's done all sorts of extreme sports, her approach was extremely helpful and inspiring and valuable to me personally, and I hope the same for you. When you think of the moments you've been most terrified, what are those moments that come to mind? They don't have to be physical danger, they could be, but what are the moments that first come to mind for you?

• 50:37Caroline Paul?

  Well, I think the time that I was probably the most physically scared, and it was a bit of an unusual feeling for me, and I'm not trying to say that I'm super brave, I just had this ability to really take fear and put it way, way back in line of all my other emotions when I was a firefighter. But I was in a, I talk about this in the book, actually, I was in a fire building and I was with my crew and I was, we're in teams of two, so the, the, the team who was ahead of me, Frank and Andy, and then I had my crewmate was behind me, Victor, he and I were together, but we were all crawling down the same hallway and we had a hose line, which was unusual, but they couldn't find the fire.

• 51:20Caroline Paul?

  So, the chief goes, "Hey, guys, you guys grab a hose line." So, we're psyched to do that, it's awesome to go find the heat, the seat of the fire, and it's super smoky, hot, and kind of quiet in this weird way, and then all of a sudden, a huge explosion, which pushed us all out of the hallway. And we're, what we realized later was that there had been a flashover, not in the hallway, which would have killed us, but somewhere close enough by to just blow us off.

• 51:51Tim Ferriss?

  What is a flashover?

• 51:52Caroline Paul?

  A flashover is when the room gets so hot that even the particles in the air simultaneously ignite.

• 52:02Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 52:03Caroline Paul?

  So, it's basically this just huge...

• 52:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a gas blast.

• 52:06Caroline Paul?

  Basically, yeah. I've been in those too, and those are not, those are, will knock your mask off and throw you backwards. And I remember being sort of discombobulated and in the garage, and my friend Frank goes, "Where's Victor?" Victor was my, my crewmate, and I look around and there was just three of us instead of four, and I remember thinking, "I have to go back into that hallway?" And the, the fear was... Paralyzing. This all took milliseconds and I see Frank, who's super brave, really great firefighter, just turn and start to just catapult himself towards that door to

• 52:48Caroline Paul?

  find Victor. And for me, it was only a millisecond, but I was scared and I recognized that fear and that fear scared me more than the fear itself. Because when you're paralyzed as a firefighter and your friend is missing, that's the worst. And so, of course, I was right on his heels, but I, that feeling of overwhelming fear was really sobering for me. And, but what I learned, of course, is that you can be scared. That's okay, but you still have to take action if it's necessary. And then my friend was fine. He had actually been blown out too, but he, he took shelter on the other side. We, we were, found ourselves in the garage. So it all ended up fine, but it was a moment I'll never forget.

• 53:33Tim Ferriss?

  So you've, you've mentioned, uh, in your writing, for instance, the, your ability to put fear behind your other emotions. And the story that comes to mind for me is the, uh, and we don't necessarily have to go into the details of this right now, but the climbing of the Golden Gate Bridge, which by the way, folks listening, illegal. I wouldn't recommend doing it.

• 53:58Caroline Paul?

  Especially now after 2001.

• 54:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Caroline Paul?

  They will shoot you.

• 54:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they will shoot you. So not advised.

• 54:03Caroline Paul?

  It was all a lark in the nineties, but not anymore.

• 54:07Tim Ferriss?

  760 some odd feet or something along those lines, 70, maybe, maybe 720. I don't know. You probably have a better memory of the elevation than I, but, uh, where did you develop that ability? Or how did you develop that ability? Like for someone listening who's like, God, you know, I'm so fearful. How can I develop that same ability to take, say, courage or desire or whatever it might be enthusiasm and try to put it in front of this dominant emotion that I have and default emotion, which is fear. What would you, what would you say to them? And I guess that's two questions. How did you develop it and what would you say to them? But you can tackle it any way you'd like.

• 54:47Caroline Paul?

  Well, I am not against fear. Let me just say right up front. I think fear is, is definitely important. It's there to keep us safe. But I do feel like some people give it too much priority. It's one of the many.

• 55:03Caroline Paul?

  Things that we use to assess a situation. Um, so I'm not against fear, but I am pro bravery. So that's my paradigm. So once I know that fear is just one of many things that are going on. So for instance, when we climbed the bridge, which was five of us deciding we wanted to walk up that cable in the middle of the night, please don't do that, but we did. And it was a really, I mean, talk about fear. I mean, you're working on a cable. We have to put one foot in front of the other and you get higher and higher until you're basically

• 55:45Caroline Paul?

  on as high as a 70 story building and with nothing below you and holding on to these two thin wires on either side. It's just a walk technically. Really nothing's going to happen unless some earthquake or sudden catastrophic gust of wind, which was really not going to happen, you're going to be fine as long as you keep your mental state intact. Don't panic. It's just a walk. And so what I do in those situations is I look and look at all the emotions I'm feeling, which is anticipation, exhilaration, focus, confidence, fun and fear.

• 56:28Caroline Paul?

  And then I take fear and say, well, how much priority am I going to give this? I really want to do this. And then I put it where it belongs.

• 56:38Caroline Paul?

  And it's, it's kind of like bricklaying. I don't know. You just look at all the bricks and you, or making a stone wall, you fit the pieces together.

• 56:46Tim Ferriss?

  So do you, or have you literally, I should use that word more carefully in my life in general, but visualized the bricks or like to someone who hasn't had this practice?

• 57:00Tim Ferriss?

  And you're going to give them sort of a meditation exercise, right? The next time you're feeling fear, do this. What would you advise them to do?

• 57:09Caroline Paul?

  Yeah, I actually want someone to partition each emotion as if it's a little separate block, and then put it in a line. Because once you not only look at your emotions, but also assess your own skill and the situation, often things change. I mean, we're scared supposedly. I hear people say, "I'm so scared of," fill in the blank, "picking up an insect." Really? What is really so scary about an insect? Seriously? Is it gonna eat you? No. So as long as you stop and really look, I think people's lives will change. Kind of radically, especially for women. Because women are very, very quick to say they're scared.

• 57:54Caroline Paul?

  And that's something I really want to change.

• 57:59Caroline Paul?

  This is Caroline Paul, and I'm really happy to be back with all of you and Tim on the Tim Ferriss Podcast for round two. And you sent me a bunch of questions, and I'm going to answer some of them. Thanks so much. Let's just dive right in. So NoName asked, "If you're trying to change your relationship with fear, where do you start? It's hard to face it when it's breathing down on you. Any tips?" Well, first of all, congratulations on changing your relationship to fear. I don't know if you're a woman, but if you are, this is an especially big step. Because as I've talked about, I feel really strongly that we as women have been so encouraged to be fearful that it's an underpinning of our life

• 58:44Caroline Paul?

  that we're often not even conscious of. So just taking this step is amazing. Here's my tip. It's really straightforward. Micro bravery. Because here's a concept that a great organization calls "girls' leadership," really articulated to me, which is that bravery is learned. And like anything learned, it just needs to be practiced. And the way we practice things is to start small. So, micro bravery. This is what they call it. I love that. Micro bravery is basically breaking down your fears into either smaller steps or just starting small with any fear.

• 59:28Caroline Paul?

  And the reason we want to do that is because, well, first of all, you become aware of what it feels like to be fearful. Because here's the truth, and I think I talked about this on the podcast before, but fear feels a lot like excitement, has the same physiological characteristics of high heart rate, the sweat, nervous tension. And so often, what we do, especially as women, because we're really not taught to discern the nuances of fear, because we aren't taught to value bravery like men are, so we aren't taught to really move through it, is that it feels so similar to excitement that we often mistake the fact

• 1:00:13Caroline Paul?

  that we're not actually completely subsumed with abject fear. We actually are feeling fear and other things. Excitement, exhilaration, anticipation, curiosity, things that really will open up our life and that actually is telling us, "Hey, this new experience is going to be kind of cool." But because, and again, often it's women, we haven't practiced bravery, so we don't really understand what we're feeling in times of stress or where we're pushing outside our comfort zones. So, when you practice bravery, and really what you're practicing is micro bravery, you get really comfortable and you start to understand

• 1:00:58Caroline Paul?

  What fear feels like, and you start to discern all the nuances of that emotion. So, the second thing you become knowledgeable about is what bravery is, because I think a lot of women don't really have a sense of what that feels like either. In fact, I like to, to turn around, maybe even this question and say, "Well, it's not really changing your relationship to fear, it's changing your relationship to bravery." And so, what we're doing, and I know I talked about this before, is that we are valuing a bravery paradigm instead of a fear paradigm, because I do think we give permission to

• 1:01:37Caroline Paul?

  women to talk about fear a lot, and to really emphasize it in ways that make it, that perpetuates it. The last thing you do is, when you're practicing micro-bravery, you really start to develop a process of moving from fear to bravery. And that process, when you use it in small instances, you can apply when you confront fear in bigger instances. And that can be an emotional fear, and that can be fear, you know, in, in, in your workplace, and that can also be fear in the outdoors.

• 1:02:20Caroline Paul?

  Now, when you practice micro-bravery, I really want kids to practice it in the outdoors, because it's really fun, the outdoors. And it's a really great way to understand that line between being scared, and then excitement, and then going to bravery, because it's just more obvious than if you're trying to practice it in a more emotional situation. But as adults, I know, you already know whether you like the outdoors or not. This is not about like, "Oh, you have to be in the outdoors to be brave." Not true. You guys, who are not so much outdoorsy, can practice in, at home, or in the workplace, small acts of micro-bravery.

• 1:03:02Caroline Paul?

  Again, really important, this is something you start small, so that you really get to Know yourself and bravery better. An analogy might be deciding you're going to run a 5K. You don't just go run a 5K on the day of the race. You practice and you practice in small increments. You start by walking. You start by, then you proceed to running a little bit. You get the picture. So it's you breaking it down and in that way you're training and you're training to understand your body like a runner and you're training to understand your own mind.

• 1:03:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there you have it, folks. I hope you enjoyed this episode on overcoming or managing or perhaps even using fear. It doesn't have to be a negative. It can be something that is useful. It can be a fuel. It can be a call to action. And now I'm going to pass the mic over to you guys. Please let me know what you liked or disliked about this episode. Let me know what you want to hear more about. What topics would you like me to explore? You can shoot me a note on Twitter @TFerriss or leave a comment on the blog at tim.blog/podcast and you can find the show notes for this episode. Until next time, thank you all so much for listening.

• 1:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  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? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. 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.

• 1:05:09Tim Ferriss?

  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 fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:05:30Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. I have used LegalZoom myself for many of my businesses. And many of the icons on this podcast have actually used LegalZoom. For instance, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, CEO of Automattic, which is now worth more than $1 billion, first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted to help with their businesses. Whether that's setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a nonprofit, or finding simple cease and desist letter templates. Man, do I use a lot of those. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews,

• 1:06:14Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:06:55Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:07:38Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:08:23Tim Ferriss?

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