62 11111 00 W00 W00 W00 W00 Ways tays tays tays tays to Motivo Motivo Motivo Motivo Motivate Yate Yate Yate Yate Yourourourourourselfselfselfselfself26. Run toward your fear
The world’s best-kept secret is that on the other side
of your fear there is something safe and beneficial wait-
ing for you. If you pass through even a thin curtain of
fear you will increase the confidence you have in your
ability to create your life.
General George Patton said, “Fear kills more people
than death.” Death kills us but once, and we usually
don’t even know it. But fear kills us over and over again,
subtly at times and brutally at others. But if we keep
trying to avoid our fears, they will chase us down like
persistent dogs. The worst thing we can do is close our
eyes and pretend they don’t exist.
“Fear and pain,” says psychologist Nathaniel
Branden, “should be treated as signals not to close our
eyes but to open them wider.” By closing our eyes we
end up in the darkest of comfort zones—buried alive.
Janis Joplin’s biography, which chronicled her death
from alcohol and drug abuse, was aptly titled Buried
Alive.To Janis, as to so many similarly troubled people,
alcohol provided an artificial and tragically temporary
antidote to fear. It is no accident that in the old frontier
days the nickname for whiskey was “false courage.”
There was a time in my life, not too many years ago,
when my greatest fear of all was public speaking. It
didn’t even help that fear of speaking in front of people
was people’s number one fear, even greater than the
fear of death. This fact once caused comedian Jerry
Seinfeld to point out that most people would rather be
in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.
For me, it ran even deeper than that. As a child I
could not give oral book reports. I’d plead with my teach-
ers to let me off the hook. I would offer to do two, even