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Have you ever been in a situation where you come to a discussion full of confidence in your knowledge and suddenly by just some tiny conversation with strangers, via some open questions your confidence just disappears?
Or have you ever been in a panic situation where you are invited to a meeting or conversation and the titles of all the attendees there scare you? Once you’re there surrounded by all those members, you just feel lost and cannot even understand the topics that may be familiar to you in the normal state.
I was in both cases and if you were in either case, I hope that this article can help you to overcome it. And before jumping into solving the problem, let’s try to call out the reason why they happened. In my opinion, it all starts with fear.
Where are fears coming from?
In the very academic way of explanation, just to make it clear that I get this definition from researching and it’s not my definition, “Fear is the word we use to describe our emotional reaction to something that seems dangerous. People fear things or situations that make them feel unsafe or unsure”. Sounds interesting? Or familiar? Or hard to understand?
Let’s go through basic examples so we can explore the word “fear” together.
Most of us had the fear of the darkness at least when we were children, right? Why do we fear the darkness? Ghosts, dangerous creators, or something we don’t even know? Is it because our visual sense does not work in the darkness which causes us cannot detect who or what is around us? And to protect ourselves from possible harm, we need to trust our visual system.
Or we can say that we fear what we cannot see.
Do you remember the feeling of us trying to run as fast as possible to get away from the dark areas to the light with the belief that we will be safe once there is light around? But how do we get that feeling? Did our parents teach us? So who shared with our parents about that theory? I think it’s more like a natural mechanism that humans developed to protect ourselves. Fear makes us more vigilant for possible danger and being scared of the dark is one of our prepared fears.
But darkness is just a metaphor for how our brains work. Something similar will happen when we talk about knowledge and experience. In another work, the part of the things called “we don’t know what we don’t know” can be considered as the dark area. The home of knowledge where we experience the best, or can be called “what we know”, is a place full of light and safe. So where is the place for “what you know you don’t know”?
Why should we jump into the darkness?
Now we are a bit clearer about the fear that we have with the darkness and how to link them with our main topic today. Let’s come to the point of clarifying why should we go into the darkness. If you already have everything you need in the light, surely this whole article is just useless, right? You have to have something you cannot find right now in your most comfortable zone which motivates you to wish of discovering to see if can you find it in the dark.
In the past, it can be food, or a comfortable place to sleep. But I’m sure it’s not the critical things we are talking about now anymore, right? Or it can be the same, but what we’re aiming for is better food, better places for sleeping, better living condition, better titles, or achieving our dreams.
Yeah, you’re right, that’s what I tend to say as we all know that “If you keep doing the same thing you will get the same result”
Now it’s time for you to find your own “why” before we jump into the dark. Just in case your willingness is bigger than your fear, we can move on. Otherwise, it’s better to come back to enjoy what we’re having. Ready?
How?
Welcome to the main part of the journey to success, and the main part of that main part is conquering our fear. As I heard someone say that “fear kills more dreams than failure ever does”.
I don’t want to make it complicated, so let’s turn the time back to when we were children. We were home and all the toys are in the dark room and we know that we cannot ask anyone else to help. We don’t really remember what toys you put in that room but the strong desire to get them for playing. I bet that what we did is just go with it and pick the nearest one that we can see. But right at the moment we pick the toy, we suddenly saw another interesting one nearby and we just want to come back again and have another one and that process just keep going on until some part we don’t remember our fear anymore but just the joy of having toys that we want.
Now it’s time to come back to our boring mature life. Let’s try to make it as colorful as we had in the past. You see the picture above with 4 different parts A, B, C, and D. We’re in the D zone. Let’s play a game.
We know that our most desired thing is in each of the 3 remaining parts, and the game rule is that we need to start with B and then C after that is B and end with coming back to our D zone.
Let’s link it with the world of knowledge and experience. We all have dreams and goals in our life. And there is a long to-do list so that we can achieve them. That to-do list is something in the C or B part, right? But where did you get that to-do list? By reading books or articles about some topics that you have never known? By talking to someone else who had much more experience than you to get advice and recommendations from them? To join into groups or share activities where people discuss that same topic?...
How can you get what you want from those activities? Pretend to be an expert in that new field and advice others. Or admit that we don’t know and we’re open to receiving as much information as we can to explore the part of “I don’t know what I don’t know”. And because you don’t know, so please try not to filter anything, absorb them all. Then you can do the part of filtering, researching, learning, and structuring more in C - “I know what I don’t know” and B “I don’t know what I know”. Until the day we can master that new piece of knowledge and add them into our experience or the part of D - “I know what I know”.
So the formula will be A -> C -> B -> D
Conclusion
I love these 2 definitions about F.E.A.R very much as it shows a big difference on the same thing but with different views. I hope that you can find your strong will and motivation to achieve goals and dreams in your life and let it be strong enough to become joy while discovering the part of “I don’t know what I don’t know” until finding what you want.
It’s the process of keeping expanding our comfort zone in a proactively way as well instead of being in the situation of being thrown into a locked dark room with no way out.
At least start with the joy of moving as many things from the side of “I don’t know what I don’t know” to the side of “I know what I don’t know” so we can put them into our backlog. Depending on your product plan, you can decide when and why to move those backlog items into your action plan later. But at least you know they are there. Keeping enriching your backlog and keeping yourself busy with learning is the best way to get you closer to what you want.
Wish you all the best and success in your life and hope that this article can bring you some useful information.
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