Jan/101
On the Slaying of Dragons
A great Wyrm lurks inside you: patient, powerful, and cunning. It suffers no disobedience and works to maintain the world it dominates. Your world. For countless millennia this tyrant has lorded over its domain and it will not allow threats to its position, its safety, or its comfort. The beast sees your plans and dreams as nothing but an inconvenience at best and a challenge for supremacy at worst.
What chance do you or I have against this foe?
The Body of the Beast
Obviously, there’s not really an ancient dragon living inside your skull. Still, it’s an apt metaphor for that part of your brain which evolved to keep you alive long enough to reproduce. In Linchpin, Seth Godin talks about this concept at length as your “lizard brain” or “the resistance”. No matter what you choose to call it, this pre-human force plays a big part in your life, whether you like it or not.
The idea that someone could have a fear of success always confused me. Why would you be afraid of realizing your dreams? At the root, it’s not really a fear of success, it’s a fear of change. In the time before modern civilization, change was a very dangerous thing. New approaches could get you killed, exiled, or beaten. In order to fulfill the prime biological directive (make babies), the safe play was the smart play.
In the modern world, failure doesn’t usually get you killed or injured (unless you’re into flying wingsuits). Still, hitting on that girl, starting that business, and delivering that speech all can draw the wrath of the dragon. People aren’t afraid of success, people are afraid of risk. This is not some pathology of the modern age, it’s a primal reaction.
Becoming a Dragonslayer
Like the knights of legend, you have no chance of besting the beast in single combat, not in the long term anyway. Willpower is not enough. You need some powerful magic to win this fight. Assuming that you don’t have any particularly powerful wizards in your LinkedIn network, your going to need some better weapons.
Face Your Fears
When you get that knot in the pit of your stomach that holds you back, the Wyrm thinks you’re going to do something stupid that might get you killed. Thinking about quitting your job to travel the world and write? There’s obviously risk of failure and ruin there, it seems sensible to be afraid. So, pick something you want to do that frightens you. Got it?
Without getting into the absurd, imagine your absolute worst case scenario. Write it down, in detail. Now go watch a movie or something and come back when you’re done. I’ll wait…
Read what you wrote. Not that bad right? Even if your worst case scenario would make your life shitty for a little while, would it really impact your life in the long run? Is it as bad as being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of your life? A year afterwards, paraplegics have the same general degree of happiness as lottery winners. If your worst case is not at least as bad as that, then you don’t have a leg to stand on (sorry, I had to).
Once you’ve accepted the possible consequences of failure, trying won’t seem so scary. Prove that your plan really isn’t that dangerous.
Improve Your Systems
When willpower fails, you fall back on habits and instincts. If it’s all that you’ve got going for you when you try to accomplish something big, your willpower will fail and the dragon will drag you back to your old, safe habits. To achieve major personal goals, you need to get ahead of the game. Steve Pavlina as a really great article that goes into more depth, but basically you can tackle this on two fronts: your environment and your habits.
Change your environment to make it more conducive to your goals. If you’re trying to lose weight, take a day and get rid of all the bad foods in your house, replacing them with healthier alternatives. If you’re trying to become more productive, turn off your phone and disable email notifications on your computer while you’re working. You get the idea.
Changing your habits can be tougher, but committing to a 30 day trial is a great way to test out a change and see how it could work in your life. Common wisdom holds that it generally takes between 20 and 30 days to change a particular habit and your willpower probably won’t hold out for that long, so it can be important to make environmental changes in support of changing a habit.
By making your environment more supportive of your goals, you reduce the amount of willpower you need to keep making progress. By changing your habits, you create a safety net that keeps you from undoing your work when things get tough.
Take Heart
Overcoming a part of yourself that seems to hold you back is a tremendous challenge, one that will probably last as long as you live. If you want a life of your own choosing instead of taking the easy path, it’s a battle you must fight. I am not yet a dragonslayer, but I will work tirelessly towards that end.
If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or war stories, leave a comment. I’d love to hear them.
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