As we grow up, we gain a lot of skills and habits which are beneficial to ourselves and others around us. From social skills, to technical ones and beyond. Unfortunately, we pick up and/or inherit some bad ones as well, that’s life after all. We’ll call those ‘baggage’ and personally I categorize them in two categories; evolutionary, and life baggage.

Evolutionary would be a trait you simply inherited, something primal and useful under different contexts but most likely problematic nowadays.

Life baggage on the other hand is little things you pick up as you grow up. Perhaps an addiction, or a propensity for being most of the time a couch potato. Arguably, some of life’s bad traits may have evolutionary root.

Darkest Dungeon makes a very accurate, in my opinion, representation of life’s character progression. In order to survive(and thrive) we picked up different traits along the way and even though each one of us is taking steps in order to gain more positive ones, not everyone is tackling their negative ones.

Identifying those bad traits is some times hard; we are all very content as we are. Sometimes though, those behaviors can be problematic for our professional and/or personal careers. A healthy amount of introspection is due in this case.

Character development is not only about addition, but about subtraction as well.

A couple of weeks ago I came across an old CodingHorror post and a certain sentence became a sort of revelation for me.

“I won’t lie to you. It’s scary to trade the security of a safe, salaried job for the unknowns of your own small business. But the way I look at it, if it’s not a little scary, then it’s not the right choice. Failure is always an option.”

Jeff describes how different choices in life usually lead us down to different paths and outcomes - a well known fact, right? While he expands on his thoughts on the subject though, he comes across one evolutionary guardian emotion of ours; fear.

Everone feels or felt fear at some point in their life.

It’s a trait that we must have spend millions of lifes to earn and it manifests in different forms. It comes in various shapes and intensities but this blog post - I guess - focuses on the fear of the unknown, uncertainty, unpredicability and survival.

Analyzing fear

Fear is a compass. It can point you in the right, or wrong direction so all you have to do is be able to interpret the readings and choose a course of action.

In modern society, fear is rarely helpful, unless you are living in the middle of the jungle or you wonder through the night in bad neighborhoods. In some cases, fear is an indication of a “gambling attempt”. There is something to gain and - occasionally - something to lose. It may also mean that you lack information, preparation or control for what you are about to do. So for me, fear is an interesting tool; it tells me where improvements may be made by certain choices and where gaps that require more thinking lie.

Fear is one of the most common emotions and yet you rarely hear people talk about it. I think that society raises us to think that expressing or communicating fear is a sign of weakness; it’s almost a taboo. I find the fact that noone gives you guidance on how to deal with these emotions even more perplexing so in the next blog post I’ll share some information on how I learned to deal with it.