Date: November 10, 2020
Course Code: MASS2113/20
ID: 122598
TED Talks 3 title: “Why you should define your fears instead of your goals | Tim Ferriss”
Achieving Goals by Facing Fears
He was a senior in college, completely normal student, and a happy person. found his Tim Ferriss found himself in a dark place when he decided he was going to commit suicide. In 1999, Ferriss survived a suicide due to some lucky coincidences.
After the incident, Ferris decided to start thinking differently and help himself. He was diagnosed with bipolar depression. During the Ted Talk that was published in July 2017 he mentioned that he already had about fifty-plus depressive episodes through his life. But for normal people, they might have about six to ten major depressive episodes in their lives.
With the death of his close friend and his girlfriend leaving him, Ferriss was also working on his first real business for more than fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. He relied on stimulants and used depressants to go to sleep. And He felt completely trapped. One day he bought a book on simplicity to help him find answers. Fortunately, he found a quote by Seneca the Younger, it said “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”.
Ferriss started learning more about Seneca who was a famous Stoic writer. He found a helpful exercise called “Premeditation Molorum” which means the premeditation of evils. So he created a written exercise called “Fear-setting” that consist of three pages. First page, titled “What if…?” and it is where you define everything that cause you anxiety or fear. Second page is “What might be the benefits of an attempt or partial success?”. The third and last page is about “The cost of Inaction” physically, emotionally, financially…etc.
The major tool that Ferriss used to helped him save his live is Stoicism. “So around 300 BC in Athens, someone named Zeno of Citium taught many lectures walking around a painted porch, a “stoa” that later became “stoicism””. People in the past, in the Greco-Roman world, also used Stoicism as a comprehensive system. But today we use it separate what we can control from what we cannot control, and then doing specific exercises. “This decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower”.
URL: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-you-should-define-your-fears-instead-your-goals/id160904630?i=1000386546789


















