Distracted Fortune

Tag: fear

  • And The Least Worst Accounting Software Is…

    And The Least Worst Accounting Software Is…

    All electronic systems of accounting suck, unless you make more than enough money to cover the bills.

    My first major attempt at keeping the books was with a vast spreadsheet system. You know, like Mister Money Mustache.

    I broke a wide sheet into 52 chunks to represent fiscal weeks – they start when I get paid. Each chunk had a balance rolled over from the previous week, and sections for upcoming income, regular bills, expected costs (like upcoming car repairs), and some other categories.

    Each week, I would download all the line items from my bank website, and distribute them among all these categories. Then, I’d work it until the balance on my spreadsheet was equal to the actual bank balance.

    Rarely did it add up. And rarely did the process take less than 2 hours. And rarely did the result line up with my predictions.

    I tried to speed the process up a few times with functions to automatically categorize things, but still, it was a tedious mess that only kind of worked, and absolutely stressed me out.

    Wishing there were an easier system, I remembered an earlier experiment with Mint back in the day, which did everything I wanted. Mint went bust, so I found the next best thing – Simplifi.

    The Gap

    Back when I was an elite member of the prestigious Lyndon LaRouche gang, I studied a lot of math. We all did. Half of every paper LaRouche wrote was about math. Really, about how math is an inherently flawed model of the world, and dependence on (or “worship of”) math had led to major economic problems. And war. And sexual impotence. And a bunch of other bad stuff.

    I think, in essence, he’s not wrong.

    Here’s how it works. In math, you have a bunch of statements of bulletproof truths. Those truths are derived logically according to the Rules of Math, from other more fundamental truths. Those more fundamental truths are likewise derived from yet more fundamental truths, and so on, all the way down to a set of truths that can’t be derived from anything else – the axioms, postulates, and definitions.

    But whence this Triumvirate of Truth?

    Well, that’s debatable. We hope the come straight from The Book. That they’re the rules God used when He separated the Light from the Darkness. That they’re the true building blocks of nature.

    However, they are NOT handed down from the Creator. They’re invented by people, usually in order to make the later derived proofs work out. And, in the history of math, we’ve identified a few that are just wrong. For example, Euclid’s parallel postulate.

    So what do you get with a set of theorems proved true, according to an invented set of axioms, postulates, and definitions? You get Star Wars. Or Star Trek.

    You get an approximation to a real world, but not the real world itself.

    There’s a gap. It’s our job not to keep doing proofs on a system that’s inherently an approximation, but rather to find the places where the Real World gives a result that contradicts one of those proved “truths”.

    It’s at that spot, where a new discovery lies in wait. Like Einstein’s theories of Relativity, which incidentally came directly out of the recognition that Euclid was wrong on parallel lines.

    So this brings us back to Simplifi.

    Simplifi, or whatever, is the least worst

    None of these big accounting apps can map the real world exactly. They MUST go off the rails at some point, and require human intervention.

    The least worst accounting software is whatever sounds good to you in about 15 minutes of searching on the web. I like Simplifi, so you can start there if you want.

    You have to be ready to think it sucks after a few weeks of using it, learn how to spot what’s not working, and then figure out how to hack it into something that works better for you. In the end, it’s going to be something of a kludge built off of whatever you first downloaded and installed. But, it will be your kludge.

    The software will not bridge the Gap for you – you will have to build that bridge yourself.

    Here are some hacks I’ve learned with Simplifi, to make it more my own:

    1. Rules, Rules, Rules

    In order for the Reports to work the way you need, you need to set up rules. In the beginning, for every transaction that isn’t some one-off ATM stop, create a rule.

    To do so, click on a transaction, then click on “Create Rule”.

    Your list of transactions
    Your list of transactions

    Information about a single transaction
    Information about a single transaction

    Here, you generalize the keywords Simplifi uses to identify the transaction in the future, give it a nice name you like, and configure all the things you want Simplifi to do when it sees one. For example, maybe you guys get pizza every Friday, and you want that categorized as “Entertainment”.

    Creating a new rule. Get rid of a bunch of the suggested keywords, or it will be too specific to be useful
    Creating a new rule. Get rid of a bunch of the suggested keywords, or it will be too specific to be useful

    After you hit “Continue to Review”, you have the option of running the rule on all past transactions that fit the pattern. Do it!

    Review the rule, and make sure to run rule on all previous transactions
    Review the rule, and make sure to run rule on all previous transactions

    In this way, you are training Simplifi how to read your transactions properly.

    1. Set Recurring Bills and Income

    If a transaction happens more than once, consider it a bill. Click on the transaction (see the pattern?), and hit “Mark as Recurring”.

    Another transaction - Mark as Recurring is in upper right corner
    Another transaction – Mark as Recurring is in upper right corner

    Tell Simplifi how often this one happens, and when it usually happens, and how much it usually is.

    Settings for a recurring bill, or income
    Settings for a recurring bill, or income

    When you mark regular bills (like your weekly pizza night), you can see how these hit your future cash flow. To see your projected cash flow, either click on one of your accounts in the Dashboard, or click on Bills & Income, and then Cash Flow. Pretty neat huh?

    Oh, make sure to also mark any paychecks as Recurring.

    1. Use Categories and Tags for Reporting

    Each transaction can have one Category, but multiple Tags. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been going in and manually marking each transaction with one of two tags: Want and Need.

    When you go to Reports, now you can see the breakdown of what you spent last month based on category, or tags. For example, last month, I found out we spend a quarter of our income on Wants!

    Reports are awesome. This one looks at my custom tags.
    Reports are awesome. This one looks at my custom tags.

    The point is, you need to think about these apps like they are pets. Computer programs are inherently not models of the real world. But, by training them, you can make them a little more useful for you.

    If you liked this article, please leave a comment below, share it with someone you know, and get on my email list!

  • Burn the Ships: How to Force Yourself to Risk Success

    Burn the Ships: How to Force Yourself to Risk Success

    In 1519, Hernán Cortés faced a crisis. His men, fresh off the boat in Iberoamerica, were terrified of the powerful Aztec death cult and plotting to retreat. His answer? He burned the ships.

    Cortez ensured there was no illusion of retreat. And while few of us are launching expeditions to conquer empires, we face equally paralyzing fears every day. We aren’t afraid of human sacrifice, but we are terrified of rejection, failure, and embarrassment.

    For example, success in business is dependent on building a network of people that will help you grow your enterprise. If you don’t ask someone to buy your thing, then nobody will buy your thing. But what if you suffer from social anxiety, and dying sounds like more fun than networking events?

    This article is about how to remove retreat as an option, and force yourself to risk success.

    Case Study: Phone Calls

    I have a habit of not making phone calls to anybody. Especially my family. I’ve gone years not talking to my parents, siblings, and other relatives, simply because I hate talking on the telephone.

    The phone calls are risky. What if I agree to do something I don’t want to do? What if I say something offensive? My family is pretty liberal, but I’ve turned, and now support Trump. What if they find out, and no longer love me? What if the call eats up my whole day?

    All of those are really empty fears, but they’re fear enough to make me put off a phone call until some future date, every time.

    A few months ago, I noticed that I rarely miss scheduled meetings at work, and it’s easy for me to send out a calendar appointment. I still get hit by anxiety before the actual meeting happens, but I almost always push through and do the meeting. And it usually goes much better than I anticipated.

    Then it hit me – an accepted meeting invite is more powerful than a thousand reminders.

    So, I started doing that with my family. If I wanted to call my Mom, I’d send her a text that says “Mom, I’m going to call you on X day at Y time. OK?” Then, even if I was nervous about making the call, I did it anyhow.

    Sending out that invitation burns the ships. No retreat.

    How it works

    Calling family is not really high stakes. How about making one sales pitch for your new product? Higher risk of failure, so higher risk of not making that pitch.

    In a previous article, I talked about removing friction to get things done. If you have to take two steps instead of one to perform an important action, you’re twice as likely to avoid that action. Removing all intermediate steps, though, makes it far easier to get it done.

    When you burn the ships, though, you’re adding friction. Friction becomes your friend. You’re adding friction in front of the action of avoidance. And, yes, avoidance is an action, sometimes more difficult to carry out than whatever it is you’re avoiding!

    An invitation that gets accepted introduces the friction of tarnished reputation. “If I ditch Ben today, I’ll look like a jerk.” Scheduling a presentation before an audience does the same. Anything that includes an acknowledgment by somebody that you will do something at a given time or place adds enough friction to make it hard to avoid.

    Burn a Ship Today!

    Here are three opportunities you could use today, to get yourself off the couch and into a potentially risky but profitable situation.

    1. Schedule a phone call

    That person you’ve wanted to call every weekend for the past forty weekends? Send him a text and ask if he’s available this Saturday at noon for a 30 minute phone call. Then call him.

    1. Pre-Sell the Ghost Product.

    Stop letting your idea gather dust. Email your 10 best contacts today with a non-refundable, steeply discounted pre-order price and a firm, 30-day delivery date. You don’t have a product yet, but now you have ten paying customers and a cash-backed deadline that makes retreat more expensive than work.

    1. Interview someone

    Email some idol of yours, and ask to set up an interview (phone, in person, whatever). Then, send them a Google calendar invite.

    There are all kinds of ways to leverage this tactic to make ourselves do the things we fear. What ship are you burning this week? Let me know in the comments below.

    If this article got you off the couch, please leave a comment, share it, and get on my email list!

  • Why Planning Less May Be a Better Plan

    Why Planning Less May Be a Better Plan

    Disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links. If you click on them and buy the products, I’ll get a cut of the profit. I promise they’re good products!

    Story time!

    I embarked on my productivity porn addiction back around 2013, when I discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). After skimming a bootleg version of his book on my tiny iPhone, I reckoned I had found the secret to life!

    In short, the goal of GTD is to offload all chores, plans, and to-do lists to a filing cabinet, to free your mind from the burden of remembering everything. Instead of never getting to large projects, you break all projects down into a series of smaller actions, listed on a piece of paper for you. Each day, you get a bunch of those next-actions in front of you and complete them.

    Instead of using your mind as your to-do list, you can now use your mind to be creative while still getting everything done.

    That’s it. Mind like water.

    (Before you true believers out there pillory me, yes there’s more to it. Like, the machine that prints out labels for all the file folders.)

    I got obsessed, bought two beat up filing cabinets, and filled them with file folders for everything in my life.

    And I just couldn’t keep up.

    I’ve since tried a few ways to approximate Allen’s write-out-all-steps approach, and sometimes have made a bit of progress. But I could never quite make it take off.

    The part that filled me with guilt and failure, was that I just couldn’t bring myself to take every project and break it up into action chunks. While dealing with this guilt, and getting some things done half-assed, I kept wondering if maybe there was another way.

    Then, a few days ago, it hit me. There is another way!

    In this article, I’ll describe this other way, which is more like mathematical induction than exhaustive introspection. And, I think both you and I will become happier and more productive in the end.

    Enjoy Failure

    I’m reading a book called Fail Fast, Fail Often, by John Krumboltz and Ryan Babineaux. Their strategy so far feels a little like a learned faith. They studied the happiness and success of over a bajillion people, and have come to the conclusion that the most successful and happy among us act first, and plan rarely.

    Most of us are the opposite – we plan always, act never. The authors instead found that it’s through trying new things and failing, that people encounter the most opportunities for growth and success. Those of us that plan out all our actions before taking the first step tend to blame everyone for our failures, while the fault really lies in our lack of action.

    It is by fearlessly blasting toward little failures that we learn, and at the same time experience life in a way that the planners could no.

    The behavioral therapy these authors suggest are 1. follow your curiosity, and 2. if you feel like doing something, figure out how to fail at it as soon as possible.

    But how do I know if my curiosity is leading me in the right direction? And, if I fail a bunch of times, won’t I just go broke and lose my house?

    To answer these questions, we need a little bit of mathematics.

    Calculus!

    I know you failed calculus long ago (so did I!), and there’s no way some dry subject like this can help with human psychology.

    But it can. Give it a minute.

    Think about power lines hung from electric poles. They hang in a conspicuous “U” shape called a catenary. It turns out that every chain, rope, bridge, string of lights, whatever, suspended between two points, will hang in that same shape. It’s pretty easy to do experiments to investigate this shape. For example, get a chain necklace, or just a length of chain, and hold it between your hands. That U is the catenary.

    If you get a friend’s help, you can demonstrate something surprising about the catenary. While you hold the chain, have your friend pinch the chain somewhere else gently, so the chain stays pretty still. Now, you let go of the string on that end. The rest of the chain will remain in the identical catenary shape.

    If you follow this experiment all the way down to the smallest bit of chain, the shape continues to remain.

    German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz discovered that the shape goes all the way to the smallest conceivable length of chain, of length zero. He called that smallest length the infinitesimal. That infinitesimal can’t be a straight line, but must be some shape that represents the catenary’s curvature.

    Leibniz showed a surprising relationship between that infinitesimal and the full catenary curve. He invented a new math called integration, where all those infinitesimals can be added together to form the entire, beautiful catenary curve.

    In other words, the smallest bit of action, constructed properly and repeated over and over, is sufficient to recreate the full goal of the curve.

    The challenge Leibniz and his collaborators, like Johann Bernoulli, faced, was to create a new mathematics to both describe this minimum-maximum relationship, but also to discover the relationship for new types of curves. This mathematics is today called “Calculus”, and it is crucial for understanding all areas of physics.

    Tiny Actions, Giant Results

    We can apply the laws of infinitesimal calculus to our own lives. I call this “trust the process”.

    The way this works is by identifying certain behaviors that tend to aim towards success, and then practicing those behaviors even when they lead to failure. And when failure strikes, learn from it.

    In fact, Krumboltz and Babineaux stress that failure, itself, should be a daily behavior!

    The authors pack their short book with examples of people who apparently bumble into wild success. For example, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter (now X). Dorsey got interested in the network problem of dispatch – like, selecting the best cops to get to the scene most efficiently. He got hired to a company to work on their dispatch software, and the company soon went bust at the end of the 1990s. Instead of jumping back into programming, Dorsey went and dabbled at massage therapy, botanical illustration, babysitting, and fashion design. Several years later, while working as a programmer again for a podcasting company that was on the verge of bankruptcy, he pitched the idea that would become Twitter. The rest is history.

    Krumboltz and Babineaux show, from various angles, that trying new things and failing is not only a great path toward success, but an efficient path. Instead of pinning your hopes of success on some future goal that you might never get to, you spend your time doing little experiments and learning from them.

    They suggest a few ground rules for picking an action to take, so you’re not just failing for failure’s sake. Here are the ones I thought most important, found in the chapter called “Think Big, Act Small”:

    1. Keep it specific

    Don’t pick something vague, like “start writing better”. It needs to be something that happens at a point, like “send a sales email to a bunch of my friends and family this afternoon”.

    1. Keep it easy

    Instead of trying to bench press 500 pounds right now, and getting discouraged, try benching 50 pounds instead.

    1. Keep it fun

    Cutting off a finger is not fun, though it’s probably pretty easy and specific. Do something that will make you smile instead.

    1. Keep it immediate

    If the action occurs way in the future, like planning to hit up a networking conference two months from now, you’ll have too much time to talk yourself out of it. And, that’s two months wasted not taking any other risks! Pick something you can do today.

    1. Keep it cheap

    The point here is that the only hurdle should be fear. You don’t want to stick your life savings into something that might pay out in a year. It needs to be something that, if it results in failure, doesn’t set you back at all but rather provides some form of lesson.

    1. Keep it real

    “Think about the good things that happened yesterday” doesn’t count. The action has to be something that will move your life forward, like “show my coworker my productivity side project and get his feedback.” Or, “send my most recent article to ADDitude magazine and see if they’ll publish it”.

    1. Keep it social

    This was the “ah ha” step for me, since I tend to be on the bashful side. A key to success is to be seen and heard by others. Remember, ultimately, other people give you money and other valuables. These things do NOT grow on trees in your own personal garden. Showing your little project to someone else will provide some form of feedback, and may open a door to a new experience or opportunity.

    Trust the Process

    That cycle of “act small – fail – learn” may sound somewhat awful. Like some kind of tedious homework assignment that never ends. But here’s the surprising bit Krumboltz and Babineaux drive home: this process actually builds happiness along the way.

    When you manage to take just one tiny, low-risk step driven by curiosity, you get a little jolt of confidence. That confidence delivers its own ounce of joy. And that little spark of joy? It creates momentum, making you want to try the next small thing. Suddenly, each tiny step you take – even the ones that end in a “teaching failure” – has the power to make you happier right now.

    Sure, trusting that these small, sometimes fumbling steps will eventually lead somewhere worthwhile might feel like a leap of faith. But isn’t it more realistic, more attainable, than rigidly following a complex set of rules towards some vague future state that might contain happiness?

    So, what can you do today that could lead to a teaching failure?

    If you liked this article, please leave a comment below, share it with someone you know, and get on my email list!

  • Slaughter the Friction before Friction kills the Action

    Slaughter the Friction before Friction kills the Action

    So you’re going to take action that will make you awesome, like making cold calls to mining experts to fish for leads. You picked a time, a date, your phone is charged, you got a name and a phone number, nothing will stop you this time!

    The time comes and goes, and you never made the call.

    What happened?

    Something got in the way, and that something is what we call friction.

    Friction is anything that delays the completion of an action. In the case above, maybe it was that you couldn’t come up with a good sales pitch. Maybe you wore yourself out coming up with ways to overcome rejections. Maybe you needed to find a quiet place to make the call, but spent all day wandering around town. (I have done all three of these.)

    Whatever it was, some activity YOU did prevented the action from happening.

    We’re going to look today at how to identify sources of friction, and how to remove them, so there is nothing standing between you and success.

    The Source of Friction

    When you decide to start practicing some periodic action, from brushing your teeth twice a day to writing out your daily morning pages, there is always a force that will prevent you from doing that action.

    I count two main reasons that make it hard to slip a new action into your day.

    1. Fear

    Fear is the biggest factor that keeps me from taking action. For example, I get panic attacks before talking to new people. That’s the main reason I (and others) have yet to make cold calls.

    But the friction doesn’t present itself as fear. It presents itself as extra steps added between now and the target action. When I’m planning to make a call, I tend to think I need a fully worked out script, including responses to objections. I’ll spend an hour fighting with that script, then boom, no calls.

    1. Routine

    Your daily routine comes with inertia. It’s not easy to just throw something else in there.

    I think the daily routine is a human adaptation to living in a world. The daily routine can be done mostly on autopilot. This allows you to think about other things, instead of constantly considering “what do I need to do next?”

    But whatever the origin of the daily routine, your daily activities tend to fill all the available space of that day, like a gas. There’s rarely an hour in there where you’re staring at the wall thinking “wow, I wish I could fill this time with a new activity!”

    More likely, if you’re a grown up like myself, that hour is really only about five minutes long, and taken up by a well-needed break.

    Identifying Friction

    Now that we know whence the friction comes, let’s find all the points of friction in the way.

    For example, exercising every day takes a lot of time out you could be doing other things. It makes you sweaty, so you need to shower afterwards. You don’t want to exercise on a full stomach or you’ll barf, so you need to time your eating an hour before, or maybe get up earlier than usual to do it in the morning. But, that would mean going to bed earlier, which means rearranging the schedule the evening before.

    That’s a heavy lift, and a lot of it is unnecessary. But exactly which parts are the friction?

    Here’s a method for identifying what is friction versus necessary actions.

    First, list out the steps it takes to complete the target action.

    1. Get a gym membership
    2. Design a workout routine
    3. Schedule an hour for the workout
    4. Put on workout clothes
    5. Grab a bottle of water
    6. Hop in the car
    7. Drive to the gym
    8. Go into the gym
    9. Work out
    10. Drive back home
    11. Take a shower

    Second, identify the target action itself. The important step here is number 9 – Work Out!

    Look all those steps before step 9!

    Third, examine the other steps. Friction has a smell. That smell is “this could take forever”. Anything with that smell is friction

    Step one was to get a gym membership. Imagine how long it would take to find a gym, compare membership plans, compare amenities, and so on. You could spend forever on step one.

    Do you really need a gym membership to begin exercising? Maybe you can come up with a different set of exercises you can do at home.

    Notice also, the gym membership actually comprises several steps – 1, 6, 7, 8, and 10. That is a lot of work for a requirement that is not the target action.

    The gym membership is friction.

    How about step 2, coming up with the routine? This could certainly be friction, if a “routine” in your mind is more elaborate than running around the neighborhood and doing some push-ups. You could take a long time trying to develop a routine, and never actually get to the exercising part.

    Step 2 is friction.

    How about step 3, scheduling? Even this could take a while, if your calendar is a mess. This is seems like friction, but it’s not really a step that can be avoided. Maybe it can be reduced.

    Step 3 is also friction.

    Or step 4, workout clothes. Maybe you don’t have any. You need to either drive to the store and find some, or do some online shopping. Personally, any activity I pick that starts with “buy appropriate clothes” is unlikely to happen. I take forever picking clothes unless I’m in a special state of mind. But maybe this isn’t a big deal for you.

    Step 4, friction.

    Even step 5 could be a point of friction. Maybe you don’t have a bottle. Maybe you’re nuts, and think you need special water from the health food store. That’s going to steal time and momentum to solve!

    Whether or not some step can be dragged out ad infinitum depends on you. You may already have those exercise clothes, or a water bottle you’ve been hoping to take out for a run. One person’s friction could be someone else’s fuel.

    Rely on that smell of bad infinity to identify what is truly friction.

    Next, we decide what to do with all these smelly pressure points.

    Kill All Sacred Cows

    If you’re serious about your target action, then you need to be serious about eliminating the friction. You can always add some additional steps back in, but only after that target action itself has been established as part of your routine.

    All points of friction can either be completely eliminated, or shrunk to an almost trivial action.

    In the above example, you need to get down to maybe one or two steps before the exercise step. You don’t need the gym membership. Skip your lunch break tomorrow, wear your jeans and dress shoes, and exercise at home – whatever you absolutely need to do to have zero space left between you and the workout.

    Wait, wear jeans to exercise?

    Yes. If your target action is to exercise, then EVERYTHING that gets in the way can be friction. For example, how stupid would it be for you to die a few years early just because you were stuck picking exercise clothes, and could never get to the actual exercising!

    You need to look at all intervening steps as sacred cows that should be sent to the slaughter. You don’t have a pair of shorts? How bad would it really be to take your oldest pair of pants, the ones you don’t even wear anymore, hack off the legs, and just run in those?

    There used to be a crazy marathon in Australia, where the competitors run from Sidney to Melbourne, a distance of 544 miles. Back in 1983, the world record was beaten by almost two whole days! The new record holder wasn’t a high performer funded by Red Bull and Nike. He was a farmer. He ran the race in his work boots and overalls, beating the other runners by over 10 hours.

    Do not let the sacred cow stand between you and success.

    Do it!

    In summary, if you’re having trouble getting from now to target action, do the following:

    1. List the steps to accomplish the target action.
    2. Identify where that target action is in the list.
    3. Interrogate all the other steps as potential friction.
    4. For each step, ask yourself if it smells like “this could take forever”.
    5. Imagine how to complete the target action if each other step is removed.
    6. If you absolutely can’t remove a step, shrink it to something trivial to complete.

    Next time you find yourself unable to accomplish what you set out to do, interrogate yourself for friction. Assume you’re either scared or battling inertia, and find all those steps in between now and the target action. And gut them.

    You can do it.

    If you liked this article, please leave a comment below, share it with someone you know, and get on my email list!

  • Focus on Your Fears: A Strategy for Action

    Focus on Your Fears: A Strategy for Action

    Once upon a time – OK, fine. All the time, I’m faced with fears, and risk being a coward. I’m afraid I can’t cover the bills, I’m afraid my wife will think my latest get-rich-scheme will be nuts, I’m afraid the shoes I want will look stupid on my feet. When there is something I need to do, the biggest impediment to taking action is ALWAYS my fear.

    All men have fears, but real men are not governed by them.

    Recently, I stumbled on a way to make my fears an advantage, both at work and in my personal life. If you follow the advice below, you too can make your fears a source of power, and start crushing life.

    The Problem

    Here’s the pattern; see if any of this pertains to you.

    Let’s say I’m facing a problem I don’t know how to solve, like a big bill I can’t afford to pay by the deadline. A great plan here would be to call the biller and work out a payment program, or defer the bill to a later date, or take some money earmarked for another more lenient bill. Maybe none of these are the right strategy, but they’re at least trying to solve the problem.

    Instead of taking action, I tend to think to myself, “I’ll just deal with this later today.” Later today turns into tomorrow. Tomorrow turns into the next day. Before you know it, the deadline’s here and I need to panic and do something now! It doesn’t help things that I also need to tell my wife what’s wrong, and pretty much force her to go along with my panic plan.

    It’s usually some variation of this.

    1. Get confronted with a situation that inspires fear
    2. Plan to come up with a plan to deal with it at a later time
    3. Keep planning to think about it
    4. Slam into the situation with no plan or preparation, and cause a cascade of other problems.

    Sometimes, I’ll even forget about the problem I fear, until it’s too late.

    The deep issue here is clear – I’m trying to protect myself from getting hurt in the near term, by putting that hurt into the future and trying to wish it away.

    Imagine if this was how the US Congress worked when considering the national deficit! Oh, wait, that is how the Congress deals with things like this.

    There must be a better way.

    If you watch Instagram, you’ll know that the only way to deal with fears like this is to feel your feelings and stare your fears down and come into yourself and not be a victim of trauma and whatever.

    Instead of that, I’ll present here a realistic, concrete way to deal with fears, by hunting for them and making them work for you instead of against you.

    The Clue, from Work

    I stumbled on this technique while worrying about something at work.

    I’m a data engineer for a pretty successful hedge fund. One of the situations I get faced with often is data quality. In other words, for a given data set, do we have all the data? Are we missing any data? Is there any overlap or double counting? What should I even expect to see?

    One day, I was given a data set that had been manually loaded by someone else months ago. My job was to automate the loading, but make sure everything got loaded properly.

    A gnawing fear started to grow in the pit of my stomach. How do I determine what “properly loaded” even means in this case? I don’t even know what the data is supposed to represent! Maybe the existing data set isn’t even loaded properly!

    While dealing with this mounting pile of fears for a specific project, it struck me: a document that laid out how to know if the data was right, complete, and nothing more, would quickly help me get peace of mind. Well, why shouldn’t I be the one to write the document? It could help someone else who was faced with a similar problem down the line; it could even help future me.

    The problem here was not that I didn’t know how to validate data. The problem was that the fear was causing paralysis.

    The solution, therefore, wasn’t a series of steps to ensure data quality in a messy data set. The solution was rather a strategy to face down a specific fear that stops me from acting.

    For this specific case, I’ve adopted a habit now of starting every project – whether new or hand-me-down – with the documentation. If there is no existing document, I’ll create one; if there is documentation, I’ll add to it. Besides standard boilerplate information (owner’s email, source and target locations, etc.), I’ll address any question about the project that give me the least bit of worry or uncertainty.

    Three steps to courage and universal acclaim

    I’m still in the process of distilling the strategy; here is the current working version.

    1. Identify your fears

    Right after lunch each day (or at 1:00 pm if I miss lunch), I spend about 2 minutes brainstorming about things that are giving me the willies. These get scrawled out on whatever scrap of paper is near me – usually a catchall notepad on my work desk. After doing this, I’ll eat a small, tasty dessert to reinforce the habit.

    Sometimes I have a hard time getting started, even though I know those fucking fears are in there. In this case, it helps to have a few categories to interrogate. Maybe you will have a different list, but here’s mine:

    • Relationship with Wife
    • Kids and school
    • Upcoming social events
    • Bills
    • Upcoming trips
    • Work
    • Communications (emails, texts, phone calls that need to happen)
    1. Pick one and dress it down

    Trying to take on all the fears will just overwhelm you, so for now just pick one. Schedule fifteen minutes later that day to interrogate this fear. Right now, open your calendar app (get one if you don’t have one – Google, Microsoft, Apple, whatever), and block out fifteen minutes.

    Now, when that time comes, dig into that fear and figure out why it gives you the heebie-jeebies, or at least why you’re avoiding action.

    For example, say your utility bill is way over budget – isn’t it always? Maybe the gateway fear is, “I don’t know where I’m going to get the money for this.” What happens if you don’t pay the bill? More fears – “what if they shut off the electricity?”, “What if they charge a late fee?”, “What if Wife finds out?” Tear the fear into pieces so you know exactly what you’re dealing with.

    1. Identify a core fear that prevents action

    Your core fear identifies one uncertainty that prevents you from taking action. That uncertainty then points to a new habit you can build, so the fear can get effectively neutralized.

    Take our bill example from above. The core fear is “I don’t know if I’ll screw myself later by paying for this bill now.” In other words, it’s fear of an unknown money situation.

    1. Create a habit to address the fear

    Now that you have shined a light on a specific fear, build one habit to start handling the cause of the fear.

    The habit to build in in our bills example is, start tracking your money. Granted, easier said than done. But, a relatively quick first solution here is to start using some kind of budgeting software to track your income and expenses. These programs usually do a mildly good job of forecasting where you will be a short time in the future, like a few months. Some good apps are Simplifi, You Need A Budget, or EveryDollar.

    Your habit can be to open that app every day during your first coffee break. Spend 5 minutes to look at your current balance and review bills coming down the line.

    The path to integrity

    Notice, this is NOT a strategy to help deal with that one particular problem. It’s a strategy for hunting down weak spots in your life, so these areas can be strengthened. It’s a strategy for becoming a more powerful person overall, which will in turn make these small problems far easier to handle in the future.

    Right now, grab the nearest piece of paper and a writing instrument, and take two minutes to write down the tasks that worry you. Afterwards, pick one and use its underlying fears to guide you towards stronger behaviors.

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