Fear That We Will Succeed.
That we can access the powers we secretly know
we possess.
That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we
truly are.
This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can
face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the
tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty
million years.
We fear discovering that we are more than we think we
are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are.
We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small
voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the persever-
ance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship,
plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this
because, if it's true, then we become estranged from all we
know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters
and monstrous.
We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove
worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will
become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will
no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold
void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.
Of course this is exactly what happens. But here's the
trick. We wind up in space, but not alone. Instead we are
tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible
STEVEN PRESSFIELD 143