The End of Year | The End of Fear

Life is short. Entering 2024, time to leave behind your fear and risk-aversion instincts and try something different. Here are some tips.

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

This year I’ve written notes, made career moves, and made decisions that many would consider risky, even career suicide. As a result, I’ve received numerous pings lauding my fearlessness, including random folks on the streets of US/India. So I thought, on the last day of the year, let me expand a bit on this perception of fearlessness. Instances of purported fearlessness:

• Writing publicly about something you find troubling at workplaces.
• Changing jobs or job profiles from comfort zone to unknown territory.
• Having a candid career conversation with your management chain.
• Having uncomfortable, tough conversations with your reports.
• Building aggressive exec plan for your team and leading by example.
• Aggressively negotiating the terms of a job offer.

I’ve actually done all of the above in 2023, and without sugar-coating, since that can reduce the impact of doing these.

In reality, I am still quite fearful about certain things (especially spiders), and most of the time I am taking calculated risks that give the illusion of fearlessness. Fear is actually quite necessary for human survival, we all face many fears daily. In fact, while there are benefits to fearlessness, I don’t recommend being brash — we all have bills to pay. Whether it’s the past year or the year ahead, let’s talk about the illusion of the death of fear.

What do people generally do?

People tend to be heavily biased toward risk aversion. Specifically on writing publicly about something they find concerning at workplaces, they either (a) do not say anything at all, or (b) say only positive things. On jobs, careers, salaries, promotions, they are often not very proactive — they wait for external factors to drive things, e.g. a manager pushing for your promotion because it will in turn help their career.

Why do they do this?

• Firstly, there’s the basic instinct of fear associated with risk-taking.
• Then there are those not fearful, but also don’t care enough to express themselves or take chances. They are content with the status quo.
• Yet others have fear of failure — what if what they say or do backfires? What if they have overestimated their own worth or impact?

I’ve found, over the years, that the single-biggest reason to try being fearless is that we tend to overestimate the risk and underestimate the reward. The worst case is often not as bad as we fear.

• Asking for more money? At worst your manager will say “We don’t have budget”, might even start thinking of you at the next chance of a raise.
• Calling out a problematic process? Well meaning leaders in your company might have a conversation with you about the problem and how best to fix it. But more likely than not, they’ll ignore your POV.

But there are some special circumstances.

Outside of the basic instinct of fear associated with risk-taking, there are a few legitimate circumstances that induce risk-aversion toward being outspoken or taking chances, all of which are related to the potential downstream impact of losing jobs and stymying careers.

• The vulnerability associated with being on a work visa.
• The vulnerability associated with being the sole breadwinner.
• The ambition of professional success at all costs.
• Any combination of the above.

These are fair. If things like this apply to you, please proceed with caution.

Why bother being fearless?

• Life is too short.
• Expressing your true feelings can be liberating.
• Conversely, being fake and spewing BS positivity can feel dirty.
• Sometimes that’s the only way to get what you want.
• There’s a non-zero chance that what you say will change lives for the better, including but not limited to your own.
• If you develop a reputation of being fearless, the hawks and shills around you are less likely to mess with you.

How to lower the risk of being fearless?

• Don’t break any rules, laws, or codes of conduct such as confidentiality.
• If you aren’t officially the spokesperson for your company, make that clear via disclaimers or otherwise.
• To the extent possible, have a rational, logical explanation for everything you say and every action you take.
• Increase your leverage — if you develop into a high valuable asset, people tend to fear you and not the other way around. For many things, they look the other way, they let you be.
• Make good estimates of the best and worst case outcomes of being fearless, and use that to calculate the risk profile. As they say, pick your battles, and not every little thing is worth fighting for.
• If your beef is not with your company as a whole, be aligned with your company’s principles. That way, even if someone misconstrues your opinion as the company’s, it reflects well on the company.
• If you are looking to change jobs, make sure you have played out all the best and worst case scenarios in your head, e.g. if the new gig doesn’t work out, can you come back to your previous job?
• If you are looking to have a candid conversation with your manager about your career, have some defensible data points around your impact in order to justify a raise or a promotion. There could be blind spots.

As we get into 2024, it’s probably a good time to leave behind our fear and risk-aversion instincts and try something different. With another year passing, we are one year closer to our death. As I said, life is short.