I am terrified of heights.
Not "slightly uncomfortable" terrified. I mean standing on a second-floor balcony and gripping the railing like my life depends on it. My brain starts building scenarios I didn't ask for. Every surface feels unstable. Every edge feels like a decision I'm not ready to make.
Last year, I did a bungee jump.
Not because I stopped being afraid. I was petrified the entire way up. Every metre higher made the voice louder: this is a mistake, you don't need this, nobody is watching, just turn back. I've heard that exact voice in other situations too. Before starting businesses. Before entering markets I didn't know. Before conversations I'd been putting off for months.
I jumped anyway.
And here's what happened: it was over before the fear finished its sentence. The catastrophe I'd been constructing in my head for hours — dissolved. In four seconds. The thing fear promised would be unbearable lasted about as long as it takes to read this paragraph.
Fear is a very convincing liar. It presents fiction as fact. And it presents it loudly.
What fear actually is
Fear is a story. And like all stories, it's written by a narrator — in this case, you, drawing on past experiences, incomplete information, and a brain that's wired to overestimate threat.
That wiring was useful when the threat was a predator. It is considerably less useful when the threat is starting a business, having a difficult conversation, making a decision you can't fully control, or standing at the top of a bungee platform in Vietnam.
In those situations, fear doesn't protect you. It freezes you. And frozen is the most dangerous place an entrepreneur can be.
How fear shows up in business
The first time I built a business, I had no idea what I was doing. I was scared. What if I failed publicly? What if I ran out of money before it worked? What if I couldn't deliver what I'd promised?
I moved anyway. Not because I was fearless — I wasn't. But because I recognised that the cost of staying still was higher than the cost of making a mistake and learning from it. Inaction has consequences too. They're just quieter and slower than a visible failure.
Every business I've built, every market I've entered, every partnership I've formed required walking through some version of fear. Not around it. Through it.
The ones that didn't work taught me things the successful ones never could. And none of them were as bad as fear had promised they would be.
The pattern I keep noticing
Every time I've done the thing I was afraid of, one of two things happened.
It went better than I feared. Almost always.
Or it went badly — and I survived. I adjusted. I moved forward with more information than I had before.
Fear has never once correctly predicted a catastrophe that then happened exactly as advertised. Not once. It has correctly predicted that I would feel temporarily uncomfortable. That part it gets right. What it consistently gets wrong is mislabelling discomfort as danger.
The bungee jump was uncomfortable. It was not dangerous. My first business was uncomfortable. It was not the catastrophe fear described. The difficult conversation I'd avoided for six months was uncomfortable. What was on the other side of it was resolution — not disaster.
The practical side of this
I'm not suggesting you ignore fear entirely. Certain fears are signal — they point at real risk that deserves careful assessment. The fear of jumping into a business with no market research is different from the fear of publishing your first article online. Learn to tell the difference between signal and noise.
But for the fears that are just anticipation inflated into catastrophe — the fears that are keeping you from starting, from speaking, from deciding — the only way through is movement.
Start small if you need to. Find one thing you've been avoiding — a call you haven't made, a decision you've been sitting on, a risk you've been calculating forever — and do it this week. Not because you've stopped being afraid. Do it while afraid.
Fear shrinks the moment you move. It's anticipation that inflates it. The longer you wait, the bigger the fiction gets.
You don't conquer fear by eliminating it. You conquer it by acting in spite of it, enough times, that fear stops being the deciding vote in your life.
The bungee jump stays with me not because it was dramatic, but because the sequence was so precise.
Fear at its loudest, right up until the moment of action. Then action. Then silence where the fear used to be. Then: that's it? That's what I was constructing all that catastrophe around?
That sequence repeats. In business. In relationships. In decisions of all sizes. The thing you build in your head is always larger and more permanent than the thing that actually happens when you move.
This doesn't mean be reckless. It means be honest about which category your fear belongs to. Is this actual danger — a risk that deserves careful assessment and possibly avoidance? Or is this discomfort inflated into catastrophe by an imagination that runs fast in the wrong direction?
Most entrepreneurial fears belong to the second category. Most of the things keeping talented people still are not real risks. They're real feelings about imagined outcomes.
Jump. The cord will hold you. And if the landing is rough — you'll have lived more in that second than in a year of watching from the platform.