Familiarity starves fear

Asked how anybody makes themselves do a thing that frightens them, one person answered with a question instead: at some point you’ve already faced something that scared you — maybe several times over. Did it get less frightening as you repeated it?

It often does. And that, they said, is the entire process. Fear comes from what’s unknown and unfamiliar, and it tends to thin out as things become known and familiar. There isn’t a further trick underneath.

Fear runs on unfamiliarity, so the cure is repetition rather than courage.

Why this changes what you’re allowed to expect of yourself

Because it moves confidence out of the category of character. The moment it landed for one person is worth having: they had sort of seen confidence as something a person either had or didn’t, and found it helpful to see it as something exposure can improve. On that view, they weren’t short of a quality. They were short of repetitions.

That’s a much better position to be in. Qualities are hard to acquire. Repetitions can be bought with time, at whatever size you can afford.

It also explains the peculiar arithmetic of hard things: the first time is expensive, and it buys you the second time cheaper. Which is why the step worth taking isn’t the brave one — it’s booking the second one before the first has happened, so that the courage you spend today buys the discount rather than a one-off.

There are two things that can be waiting on the other side, and neither is fearlessness. One is pride — one person called it a strong driving force — which is more useful than it sounds. The other is that the thing is now known, so the next approach starts from somewhere warmer than the last one did.