Fear Is the Compass

In 2017 I was standing on the cliff at Rick's Café in Negril, Jamaica, looking down at blue water 10 meters below, counting backwards in my head. Three, two, one, go. I jumped, swam back, climbed up, jumped again.

I'm afraid of heights. That's why I went looking for the cliff in the first place.

I did the same thing all over Thailand a few months earlier. Every time I saw a drop with water at the bottom, I walked to the edge and gave myself three seconds. Not because I'd stopped being scared. The second jump was as scary as the first. I stopped waiting for the fear to shrink and started using it as a signal that I was in the right place.

That was the start of a reframe that's been running in the background of my life ever since. Fear isn't the obstacle. It's the compass.

Most advice on this topic treats fear as a wall you punch through. Face it, push through it, do it anyway. That's fine. I've written my own version of it. But it leaves the better move on the table, which is that fear can tell you things before you act, not just during.

Here is how I use it now.

When I look at my list of things I could work on in a given week, some of them are fine, some are boring, and one or two of them make my stomach drop a little when I think about actually shipping them. That last batch is the one I should be working on. The boring items are safe because they don't matter. The ones that scare me are scary because they do.

I started testing this on everything. Posts I was nervous to publish got published first. Clients I was nervous to fire got fired first. Prices I was nervous to raise got raised that week. The pattern was embarrassingly obvious once I saw it. My fear had been pre-scoring the work for me the whole time, and I was throwing out the highest-signal items because they were uncomfortable to touch.

The thing people get wrong about this is assuming all fear is the same input. It isn't. There are two kinds and they feel nearly identical from the inside.

One kind is the fear of being seen, being wrong, being rejected, being judged, being small, being ignored. That one is almost always pointing at something worth doing. It's what shows up around a post you want to write, a project you want to start, a conversation you've been sitting on, a price you know you should charge.

The other kind is trying to keep you alive. Or keep you solvent. Or stop you from burning a bridge you actually need. Stepping off a real ledge. Signing something that would ruin you for a year. That fear is logic wearing a costume, and you listen to it without argument. I'm not talking about that one.

The test I use is short. What happens if this goes wrong? If the worst case is "I look stupid on the internet, the launch is quiet, someone in my replies is mean, the client is annoyed for a week," it's the useful kind and I treat it as a green light. If the worst case is a hospital or a year of no income with no path back, it's the other kind and I stop and make an actual plan.

Almost everything in independent work sits in the first bucket. Almost nothing sits in the second. Most of a career gets spent treating bucket one like bucket two, which is how you end up with a folder of drafts you never published and a list of ideas you never shipped, all of them pre-labeled "risky" by a part of your brain that doesn't know the difference between a cliff and a tweet.

There's a second trap I fell into for years before I caught it. Fear goes quiet around the wrong things. A project I should have been excited about would feel flat. A project I should have abandoned would feel cozy. I kept reading the flatness as a verdict on the idea. It wasn't. It was a verdict on how much I was letting myself care. The ideas I was scared of were the ones I actually believed in. The ideas I felt calm about were the ones I'd already half-given-up on.

That reading flipped the filter. I stopped trying to rank things by some deck-level reasoning about market size or upside. I started asking a much shorter question. Which of these makes me a little sick to look at? That one. Do that one.

It's also why I trust the idea I'm scared to tell anyone about more than the idea my group chat is congratulating me on. Praise is a lagging indicator. Fear is a leading one.

None of this retires the voice. It still shows up. It showed up while I was writing this post, which is probably why the post exists. I'm not trying to silence it. I'm trying to read it.

So the next time you look at your list and feel that pull in your chest around one of the items, don't push it to the bottom.

What is it pointing at?