Overcoming Fear

I have been reading a lot lately and that is one thing I'm going to try to cut back on in 2008. Both of the authors who I have been reading advise against the the folly of reading too many books and the accumulation of too much stagnant knowledge. Those are outrageously backward ideas on the surface and one has to speculate why an author would advise against reading. The answer lies in the way we are educated.

We are taught to read the most inane material under the guise of "classics" and we are told that such works hold the key to our lives. We are usually between ten and twenty years old when we are told these things. No one knows anything at that age. The work that finally did in Henry Miller and led to his dropping out of college was Edmund Spencer's "The Fairie Queen". Like Miller, I can't imagine a work more irrelevant to the lives of 99.999999% of the people on the planet.

The second author, Napoleon Hill, brings up the fact that the facualty of a great university commands the collected knowledge of civilization but by and large college professors hold a miniscule amount of the world's financial wealth. His examples of "uneducated" men who reaped great rewards from little formal education include Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.

Miller's and Hill's separate philosophies can be brought to assembled in one sentence:

Read deeply from a few books which hold meaning for you at this stage in your life and then put the knowledge gleaned from these books to use with an organized plan.

Both men ultimately write about success and self-realization. Like so many others before and after them their secret to success lies in following your personal dreams and passions. Believeing in yourself and your well-thought out ideas.

Miller didn't learn this secret to happiness and self actualization until he was forty years old. That’s when he left his postion as personnel director for Western Union and moved to Paris to live on the streets as penniless bohemian artist. Hill learned the philosphy over the course twnty years by interviewing more than 500 successful men from the first third of the twentieth century.

Miller and Hill both point out the symptoms of people who haven't discovered and pursued this secret to self realization. Hill goes so far as to lay out the principals of inaction as a series of fears:

Fear of poverty, fear of criticism, and fear of ill-health (which I transpose with fear of growing old). I recognize these fears in my own life and the result of these fears. Shortness with other people, lack of belief in one's ability to follow through and be profitable, cynicism, distrust of others, loss of enthusiasm, and a steady succession of minor sicknesses.

I always remember my grandfather, who was the only successful entreprenuer I've ever known, told me, "Don't let your life be dictated by fear." There is so much truth in these words. I plan to take his advise in 2008.