“Feel the fear and do it anyway”
Flicking through old emails, found something I emailed a year exactly to the day. Spooky. Sent to a younger person* in response to something I can’t find, or remember. The context behind this is something for another day.
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Some words of advice from a 40 year old who has done more than most in their lifetimes. Not all of it good, but it’s all experience 
1. See the world. Just because you go somewhere, whether it is for a day, week, month, or year, doesn’t mean you can’t go anywhere else or return to your (current) home. The world is quite a small place in terms of travel – you can fly to the other side in less than a day. So, if you need to get back to your current home for any reason, you always can.
The phrase “travel broadens the mind” is really, really true. You’re intelligent; aren’t you bored of seeing the same – small – set of people where you live every bloody day? Bring up any topic of conversation and I bet you can predict what they will say. Are you going to do that every day, until you die? Okay, you can keep these as friends, but go and meet other people from different cultures in other places. You’ll be exotic and ‘different’ to them too, so they’ll find you equally as interesting.
Chat with them. Learn their point of view. They’ll say things you can’t predict, so it’ll work different parts of your brain to when you are speaking to your local, nice but predictable friends.
2. Ignore people who tell you that what you are doing, or planning to do:
- will fail…
- won’t work…
- is pointless…
… because they are *ALWAYS* saying this for the wrong reasons. There’s plenty of people like this. Everywhere. The reasons being:
- They are afraid that you are doing something more fun than they are or ever have, and are trying to belittle what you want to do so it doesn’t make their life feel so dull.
- Negative Britishness. It’s a nasty trait, and I don’t see it in so many Americans. In America generally (not totally) people aspire to be a success, get ahead, do stuff that their parents didn’t or couldn’t. The next generation should be more prosperous than their parents. If you do that in class-ridden Britain, you will be thought of as being “above your station” or “getting above yourself”. Ignore these people. They are the little people who add nothing to your life.
- They are dysfunctional and have little control over their lives, so they like to exert control over other people. And the best way they can do this is to influence what they do, or don’t do. Some people also just like doing it, as a little power thing.
Identify these people. Ignore them. They’ll hold you back in life. LEAVE THEM BEHIND (in every sense of the word).
3. The flipside of the last one: learn to identify the good people. Keep hold of them. You’ve probably exhausted all the possible people where you live. Time to think about travelling a bit to meet new people? Use the Internet to find other ways and opportunities.
4. Don’t stop doing things because you fear them, or come up with weak excuses. Fear stops you from having an enjoyable life. Everytime you fear doing something, be honest to yourself about what you are fearing. I’ve got an amazing friend in New Jersey who says “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” She’s very right. Analyse and confront your fears, and you’ll find they are usually irrational.
I see this back in my birth area a lot. People who have rarely travelled apart from a few trips to the city. Despite the fact that they are very well off, and travel is easy, they’ll come up with any excuse e.g. “No one to look after the dogs”, “Hard to get a passport”. It’s fear of the unknown at heart.
Example. November 2008 I went to see Barack Obama be elected. That’s not the interesting fact; what’s interesting is why so many people didn’t. Chicago is an 8 hour flight from the UK and you can get a ticket for under 400 pounds. So when lots of people were saying “I wish I’d been there…” I just thought – well, if it was that important to you, why didn’t you, then? Most people I spoke to easily had the resources (time, money) to go, but I was the only one who did. Why?
5. Ignore the mass media, who will tell you that everything is dangerous in some way or other. That’s how they sell newspapers, especially to easily frightened people. Or people they’ve made susceptible to certain types of ‘fear’. They’re good at it; it’s what they do.
And if *you* don’t do stuff, then, like many old people, you’ll spend your later years saying “I wish I’d tried that when I could.” And that’s the worst thing to feel, as it’s too late then to do it.
6. Record everything. Flickr et al helps. You’ll build up an archive of stuff.
7. Money is useful, but isn’t everything. Don’t get trapped into thinking you need to earn thousands of pounds in order to travel. That’s giving in to social pressure and fear again.
Okay; to summarise:
- Set your own agenda. Revise it when you want. Don’t let anyone put you off, or tell you what to do.
- Life is short. Ignore boring people. Collect only interesting friends.
- Travel.
- Confront your fears, and you’ll find most of them are irrational.
Yeah, that’s about it for a good life, basically. Have fun
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*= when you get to be middle age, nearly all people you meet are ‘younger people’
The book by Susan Jeffers, “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” helped me tremendously to get over my travel fears. After working through the exercises in the book, I was eventually able to fly. I still don’t like to fly, but now I know that I can!