Fear is the greatest enemy in life

Whatever you're trying to achieve in life, fear will probably be your single greatest enemy or obstacle.

As I explained to a Linkedin user below, fear should be seen as "an army of mini-fears." The key is to select the easiest fears to defeat, so as to build self-confidence and momentum, eventually allowing you to overcome bigger fears.

Fear is not necessarily bad (unless you find yourself in front of a tiger that just came out of a bush and hasn't eaten in three days!).

Fear is simply an indication that you are on the edge of your comfort zone, and therefore have the unique opportunity to grow (if you decide to fight your ground) or shrink (if you choose to avoid battle and retreat).

So fear is rarely the problem. It's how you react to fear. Will you choose "fight" or "flight"?

This is why preparation and training are so critical to success. If you are well trained and have practiced a great deal, then you won't fear much. Knowledge is like a weapon. You use it to fight against fear. But if you don't have knowledge in your head (because you haven't read many books or haven't gone to seminars and workshops), then you can't use knowledge as a weapon to defend yourself against fears. Flight, then, would be the only option.

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Question: Is fear popular?

Great question! Fear is the mind-killer, as Muad Ib says in the novel Dune.

To me, fear is just the absence of thought or knowledge. Marie Curie said it best: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Einstein also said something similar: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." I teach and coach entrepreneurs, and one thing I often notice is their fear. They take it to be an emotional obstacle when in fact, it is simply an intellectual challenge. The presence of fear is simply the absence of knowledge.

Fear is like a huge dragon. It will not bother to attack any person directly, instead it will send little mini-fears. So the trick, I think, is for humans to face the little fears and overcome them, one by one, and then move on to bigger fears. An army of fears CAN be defeated, but it would be suicidal to go against one's biggest fear.

Rather, a strategic sequence of carefully selecting which fears to face and overcome first, will lead to increasing self-confidence, therefore increasing self-empowerment, so that one can eventually face bigger fears.