During the filming of the movie Jaws, director Steven Spielberg intended to use a state-of-the-art animatronic shark for scenes throughout the movie. He had one problem: it broke.

Fixing it would delay filming and require more money, so he decided to pivot.

For a majority of the movie, the villain or monster feared by the characters isn’t seen at all. It is left to the audience's imagination rather than shown directly. This reluctance to show the monster, combined with the ominous music, allows the viewer to create a terrifying image of what lurks below the water in their mind.

Later in the movie, you see that it is just a poorly made robot shark from the 70s... not that scary. The image created in your imagination is much scarier.

This idea is now a common fixture in horror and thriller movies. Another example is the movie A Quiet Place, where the lack of sound and visual of what the villain or monster looks like creates more fear than if it was shown directly.

So what?

This highlights a heuristic that can be used to overcome fear in our lives. The imagined and unidentified creates a heightened sense of fear, but when we acknowledge, speak, accept, or, what I find most helpful, write down in full detail what we fear, it can show what is behind the veil. Most of the time, we see that which we fear is the equivalent of a poorly made robot shark from the 70s.

What creates the fear is the blurriness, the veil, the unknown. Attacking directly makes it tangible and allows us to take actionable steps toward avoiding the imagined scary scenario or neutralizing it by realizing its unlikelihood.

This is a tool I learned from Tim Ferris’s book Tools of Titans, which I just finished and highly recommend.

Action Step:

Write down exactly what you fear in detail in a journal. Seeing it on the page often makes you fear it less and makes it feel less scary because you can now take steps to avoid it.

Another Application

It is a beautiful realization to come to that you can do absolutely anything you want to do in this life.

But it results in a follow-up question: So what do I want?

We all have this “cloud of dreams” in our minds, a jumbled conglomeration of experiences, feelings, accomplishments, and events we would like to see materialize in our lives. This makes it feel big and overwhelming and doesn’t make it easy to make progress towards any of them. Just as the Jaws effect works on fear, it works for things we want to accomplish.

The unidentified feels bigger and scarier.

Action Step:

To avoid this, write down each and every one of these things that exist in your cloud of dreams, and rank them 1-10, with 10 being a non-negotiable. This allows you to attack these things directly rather than shooting in the dark and seeing what you hit.

To Conclude

One of my principles in life is:

“Do not allow yourself to be uncomfortable now due to the imagined fear that you may be uncomfortable later.”

I leave you with a quote:

Identify, go forth, and conquer.

Till next time.

G