I am not normally a person who is afraid of big scary roller coasters or heights or anything like that, but I’m also not normally especially brave about them either. Well, not too long ago I found myself at Six Flags with my girlfriend. As we entered the park, we spotted the little cages that float serenely on wire over the park to give you a nice view of everything. We rode this first and as we did, I could feel a knot of fear building in my chest. The roller coasters and other intimidating rides that never used to faze me now seemed incredibly threatening. What’s more, even this slow ski-lift style ride was beginning to intimidate me. What if our little cage fell off the wire? What if I slipped out of my seat and fell out of the cage down to an untimely demise?
Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
The next ride my girlfriend wanted to go on was the Superman ride. You might have heard of it, it is HUGE! I’d been on it plenty of times during past visits, but for some reason this time it was absolutely frightening. As we waited in the line for about 45 minutes, I could feel my fear mounting. What was it that I was so scared of?
It was finally our turn to ride. The slow ascent to the first drop was the absolute worst. But then, a short 45 seconds later, it was all over and I was in one piece. More importantly, I was completely exhilarated! Now I felt like I wanted to ride every other ride in the park to see if any of them could scare me. They couldn’t.
Then I realized why I had felt so uncomfortable. Even though I’d been on that same ride plenty of times before, I had forgotten what it felt like. During the time since my last visit, I had become so accustomed to having everything be absolutely comfortable and ABSOLUTELY safe that even a ride I’d been on before could give me pause.
I can apply this lesson one step further into my own life.
As some of you know, I am moving to Norway soon to live with my girlfriend for (hopefully) a year at first and I’m looking for a job. I wanted to call this international school that teaches in English to ask about creating a filmmaking course. Well I already have a bit of a phobia talking on the phone to people that I’ve never met before, but combined with the fact that this call seemed so important and that the unknown person I was calling was going to be foreign and natively speaking a different language.
I hesitated. For a month. I would wake up early every morning (because of the time difference), set up my Skype to call the school and try to work up the courage to call. Every day I failed. For some unknown and completely frustrating reason, I could not make myself press the call button.
I went over every possible conversation in my mind, but I just could not make myself go through with it. I became frustrated with myself to no end and even began to lose confidence that I could perform the job in question if I couldn’t even have the courage to call them.
That’s when I remembered Six Flags.
With a little push from my girlfriend, I called and guess what, I was too late. I called 2-3 times with no answer. I woke up earlier the next day and called again, still no answer. School was out and all the teachers and faculty must have been on vacation. So now, I am forced to resort to email, and we all know how much people love replying to email.
The good thing, and I suppose you could call it the moral of the story, is that after I called that once, even though nobody even picked up, it became a lot easier to call again and again. I have a lot more confidence and I’m sure if someone picked up, it would not have been nearly as painful as my mind made it out to be.
Like the roller coaster, sometimes hurdles look huge when you’re staring up from the ground, but once get through that slow ascension and take that first dive, the rest becomes easy. I think Tim Ferriss says it perfectly in his book 4-Hour Work Week. He says: “Do one thing every day that scares you.”
