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 weren’t.
What’s the box in Don’t Live in Fear?
A small space you never chose, with walls you have never tested.
That’s 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 can’t 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 aren’t. 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’m not an expert and I don’t 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’m blunt in it, because blunt is the only way I know to be useful about this. That doesn’t mean I think I know your life better than you do.
I’m blunt in it, because blunt is the only way I know to be useful about this.Share on X
Your situation may be nothing like anything I describe, and you’re the one who has to live in it, so you get the final say. Always.
What should a book about fear leave out?
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’d 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 don’t 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’ve changed. One I still wrestle with.
So I’m not standing above anybody here. I’m also not going to write confidently about something I haven’t lived, and a book that stayed silent about its own limits would be a worse book.
What’s the root fear behind most fears?
You aren’t afraid of things. You’re afraid of blanks.
Go back to the last time fear stopped you cold. The job you didn’t take, the call you didn’t make, the move you didn’t make. You weren’t 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 can’t see what’s 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. That’s why it comes early. The cave is empty and the mind won’t accept an empty cave.
Can you be afraid of winning?
Because that’s the wall nobody admits to.
Everything up to that point assumes you’re frightened of failing. Then there’s a stranger and more common wall. Sometimes you’re 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. That’s why readers tell me it’s the chapter that landed.
What if your fears are based on real danger?
The book stops and says so, in the one chapter that’s 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 can’t leave the job because it feeds your children. You can’t 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 don’t need all of them to move. You need one.
What do you do about somebody else in a box?
Nothing, and that’s 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’s killing them. A child too frightened to chase the thing they’re 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 isn’t real and the door is right there.
You can’t. You can hold a door open. That’s the entire extent of what’s available to you, and accepting it’s 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’re worth more than you ask for. Stop marrying your fear. Nobody is watching you. Walk out of the bad movie. It isn’t too late, you’re just scared.
There’s also a chapter on why people are afraid to win. Readers tend not to expect it, and it lands hardest.
And one on what you can’t do, which is drag anybody else out. You can hold a door open. That’s the whole extent of it.