Nothing Drops Fear Like When You Punch Back!
This post is a word of encouragement for anyone chasing a dream. It brings perspective to our real fears and the value of our struggles.
Jerome C. Crichton, DMin, PhD.
6/16/20264 min read
Nothing Drops Fear Like When You Punch Back!
You have felt it — that tightness in your chest before a big decision, the voice whispering all the ways you could fail. Fear loves company, but it hates a fight. This essay is not about the reasonable fears that keep you from touching a hot stove or walking alone at midnight. Those fears serve you. This is about the fears that guard the gates of your greatest ambitions — the ones that masquerade as wisdom but function as walls. So, about those fears: nothing drops them like when you punch back.
The potential for failure underlies almost every great achievement and often positions fear as an incontestable motivator, an unavoidable barrier, or an insurmountable obstacle. Fear is formidable, and boasts that it does not beg for respect; it demands it. The annals of history attest to its landscape, littered with the corpses of unfulfilled dreams. These inevitably become the haunting ghosts of our dashed hopes and deepest regrets. What "might have been" is, for some, that indelible stain which is impervious to the detergent of seeming success—that can neither be Shout-ed nor Oxi-Clean-ed out. The fibers of the visceral fabric remain forever discolored.
The power of fear is such that there may not be any other noun known to humanity that has been as ubiquitously successful, yet equally as docile in the face of defeat. Fear, amongst other things, is a bully, at least in this aspect of its multiple identities. It requires critical scrutiny because as big and bad as it is, it is vulnerable. Nothing drops like fear when you punch back. It was the pugilist-philosopher Mike Tyson who said, "Everyone's got a plan till they get punched in the mouth." Fear is no exception; a two-piece—left hook to its temple and uppercut to its solar plexus—will effectively put fear in retreat. But lest the reader become overconfident, I must caution here that all fears are not equal.
Some fears are reasonable and serve the purpose of protecting us from physical harm by reminding us of our mortality. Other fears simply caution us to look before we leap and serve to ensure that we check the account before we write a check that we can't cash; and yet other fears are tied more to our identity and as such test our metal to prove what we are made of.
In fact, fear is a subjective experience, which no two people experience in the same way. Once the fight-flight-freeze response is activated, it will elicit a different reaction from each individual based on multiple factors ranging from socialization to emotional regulation or the lack thereof. Iron Mike also said, "Fear is like fire; it can either warm you or burn you." Whether fear comforts or consumes may be a function of how we respond to it once it is triggered. So, for the sake of this conversation, let's limit fear to the pursuit of a lofty goal.
It is precisely the potential for failure that gives value to the pursuit. If we only engaged goals that were measurably within our reach, we would never truly appreciate our gifts, our industry, our imagination, our vision, our determination, our resourcefulness, our resilience, or our heart. Not only would we be ignorant of our capabilities, we would be oblivious to our capacities. It is the tensioned guitar string that produces the sweetest note, the taut drum head that gives the cadence a certain sound, the pressed reed that conveys the purest tone. Tension and pressure create diamonds—though not all carbon becomes diamond. Without both, carbon will never become one. If the tension and pressure are too low, the mineral will result in graphite. But if they are extreme, along with arguably the most important aspect of this process—intense heat—the tension and pressure will turn the mineral into a diamond.
You are the mineral. The tension and pressure—that same incontestable motivator, unavoidable barrier, and insurmountable obstacle—can produce the genuine value of graphite. That is no small thing. But a diamond is worth millions of times more. The difference is intense heat. According to geologists, a diamond takes 1,000 times more years to produce than graphite. The exponential difference in time, plus the intense heat over that period, is nature's recipe for a diamond.
So, what is it that drives some people in the face of their fears to risk defeat, derision, or even despondency when they take on uncertainty and ambiguity? The answer is that they refuse to leave the kitchen. Harry Truman is credited with the quip, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." It is those who do not regard their risks as too great a price to pay who remain in the kitchen. They are the ones who have covenanted with themselves to remain there, no matter what! The reward of the vision neutralizes the natural flight and freeze responses, leaving fight as the weapon of choice and the means by which a form of self-actualization is realized.
This is why diamonds are often misidentified as arrogant when in fact they are confident. Their journey across the seemingly unnavigable terrain of ambition bequeaths them with an indelible mark of accomplishment: the discovery of a greater self than anyone might ever have known otherwise.
This is no elitist rhetoric; it is an acknowledgment that diamonds are rare and graphite is common. The difference is in how individuals see themselves and what they demand from themselves. The difference is in the presence or the absence of the existential imperative "must," because it is this imperative that refuses to bow to fear. Optimism without the possibility of failure is a recipe for mediocrity. So, fear is not the enemy; it is the furnace. Without the possibility of failure, achievement loses its value, and optimism becomes entitlement.
So, punch back! The question is not whether you feel fear, but whether you will stay in the kitchen long enough for the heat to turn your carbon into a diamond.
