I wrote this book because I kept watching the same thing happen to people I care about. A friend stuck in a job that was clearly killing him, year after year, never once looking for another one. Somebody else staying in a relationship everyone could see was wrong.
Smart people. Good people. Hitting the same wall in their lives over and over, and never once walking up to it to find out whether it was solid.
And then I looked at my own life and saw it there too. Thirty-three years in corporate. In all that time I never seriously went looking for something better, never went back to school, and never really reached for the thing past the edge of what I already had. I was comfortable. That was my box, and I sat in it for over three decades and called it a career.
Once I could see my own box clearly, I started seeing everybody else’s. The same shape, over and over, in life after life. People standing in a small space they never chose, certain the walls were solid, never walking up to find out that they were not.
What is the box in Don’t Live in Fear?
A small space you never chose, with walls you have never tested.
That is the whole image the book runs on. People standing inside something, certain the walls are solid, who have never once walked up and pushed.
Some of the walls are real. The book has chapters for that, for when you cannot get out and for when somebody else is holding the wall in place. Pretending every constraint is imaginary would be its own kind of dishonesty.
Most of them are not. Four walls, one loose brick.
The book on this: Don’t Live in Fear is about the boxes people build around their own lives and never test, written by somebody who sat in one for three decades and called it a career.
Is Don’t Live in Fear a self-help book?
Not in the way that word usually works, because I am not an expert and I do not claim to be one.
What I have is a long time spent inside my own boxes and what I learned breaking out of them, most of it figured out the hard way and usually too late. The book is one person telling you what he lived, in the hope it saves you some of the years it cost me.
I am blunt in it, because blunt is the only way I know to be useful about this. That does not mean I think I know your life better than you do.
Your situation may be nothing like anything I describe, and you are the one who has to live in it, so you get the final say. Always.
What did the author deliberately leave out of the book?
Addiction, and I owe readers the reason.
Addiction traps people. It absolutely does. But it makes getting out of a box far harder than the ordinary fears this book is about, and I would be lying if I told you the advice in these pages is enough for it.
I never smoked, never drank, and never gambled, so I do not know what it takes to stop any of those. My own difficulties have been the everyday kind, and even those have been hard. Some I have changed. One I still wrestle with.
So I am not standing above anybody here. I am also not going to write confidently about something I have not lived, and a book that stayed silent about its own limits would be a worse book.
What is the wall under all the other walls?
You are not afraid of things. You are afraid of blanks.
Go back to the last time fear stopped you cold. The job you did not take, the call you did not make, the move you did not make. You were not afraid of anything you could see. You were afraid of the part after. The blank.
Your brain runs one stupid rule all day. When it cannot see what is there, it assumes the answer is bad. A door, a risk, a decision, and the space behind it gets filled in with the worst thing available.
Every box in the book sits on top of that one, which is why it comes early. The cave is empty and the mind will not accept an empty cave.
Why does the book say you can be afraid of winning?
Because that is the wall nobody admits to.
Everything up to that point assumes you are frightened of failing. Then there is a stranger and more common wall. Sometimes you are frightened of succeeding, and it sounds insane the first time anybody says it out loud.
Then look at your own life. The thing you keep almost doing and then fumbling on purpose at the one-yard line. The promotion you sabotaged. The relationship you torched at the exact moment it became real. The good thing you walked away from when it started working.
It stops sounding insane fairly quickly, which is why readers tell me it is the chapter that landed.
What about people whose walls are real?
The book stops and says so, in the one chapter that has to.
Everywhere else I walk a reader up to a line in the grass and tell them the current is off. There are rooms where a couple of the wires are still live, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and would cost me the reader.
The other version of that problem is the corner. I hand you your walls one at a time, push this one, now that one, as though life were a quiet hallway with doors in order. Nobody lives like that.
You live in the corner where the walls meet, and every direction you push, another one shoves back. You cannot leave the job because it feeds your children. You cannot stand the marriage. Your faith puts divorce off the table. Your whole life becomes a sentence that never reaches a period.
Four walls, one loose brick. You do not need all of them to move. You need one.
What do you do about somebody else in a box?
Nothing, and that is the hardest chapter in the book.
By a certain point a reader has stopped thinking about themselves and started thinking about somebody else. A spouse in a job that is killing them. A child too frightened to chase the thing they are obviously built for. A parent, a friend, a sibling, living in a space so small it hurts to watch.
And you want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them like a vending machine that ate your dollar, and shout that the wall is not real and the door is right there.
You cannot. You can hold a door open. That is the entire extent of what is available to you, and accepting it is harder than getting out of your own box.
Who is Don’t Live in Fear for?
Anybody who has been standing in the same place long enough to stop noticing it.
The chapter list is the honest table of contents for that. Quit the damn job already. You are worth more than you ask for. Stop marrying your fear. Nobody is watching you. Walk out of the bad movie. It is not too late, you are just scared.
There is also a chapter on why people are afraid to win, which is the one readers tend not to expect and the one that lands hardest.
And one on what you cannot do, which is drag anybody else out. You can hold a door open. That is the whole extent of it.
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