Nothing is beyond my grasp is an internal compartmentalizing technique but I find it so powerful and used so often by myself that I might as well assign it as an identity. I do so cautiously. LWer So8res who coined the term, differentiates this technique from overcoming fear of failure. After thinking about it I tend to agree, so I separated it in to another identity which I call fearless.
The Fearless identity is pretty self explanatory. There are times when my will power and motivation are completely sapped because of the crippling fear of rejection, this is when I put on the fearless identity. Other times I will use the nothing is beyond my grasp identity when find my motivation taking a hit not because I am fearful but because I think I lack the competency to do a task well.
I have previously played with these ideas before but only recently formalized it for myself and actively use these identities more concretely than just reading about it. Looking back, before all these meta mind games I’ve learned, my greatest success in life and romance were when I was unreasonably confident and fearless. Nothing ever turned out to be scarier than what I thought it would be.
“Nothing is beyond my grasp” is an awesome identity indeed! It enables my “universal curiosity” and “jack of all trades” identities, in the sense that I not only want to understand everything about the world and build all the interesting skills, but also have the ability to if I put my mind to it. Did you always have this identity, or did you establish it deliberately?
Have you ever found the Fearless identity to induce recklessness? For me, it interacts with the “tough person” identity, and results in a tendency to neglect safety precautions that I have to consciously counteract—for example, I don’t feel sketched out by dangerous neighborhoods, and it took me years to stop being a road hazard cyclist. I do find the Fearless identity to be a large net gain in the social arena (comfort zone expansion practice was instrumental in establishing it).
These identities are a form of compartmentalization—phrased in absolutes like “nothing” and “no fear”, they appeal to System 1, while a more precise and technically correct phrasing like “at most 15% of things are beyond my grasp” requires engaging System 2 and is much less effective. I think they actually increase calibration—as you said, nothing ever turned out to be scarier than what you thought it would be, so the Fearless identity was counteracting a miscalibrated fear that never came to pass.
Two identities that I find very useful are:
Nothing is beyond my grasp
Fearless
Nothing is beyond my grasp is an internal compartmentalizing technique but I find it so powerful and used so often by myself that I might as well assign it as an identity. I do so cautiously. LWer So8res who coined the term, differentiates this technique from overcoming fear of failure. After thinking about it I tend to agree, so I separated it in to another identity which I call fearless.
The Fearless identity is pretty self explanatory. There are times when my will power and motivation are completely sapped because of the crippling fear of rejection, this is when I put on the fearless identity. Other times I will use the nothing is beyond my grasp identity when find my motivation taking a hit not because I am fearful but because I think I lack the competency to do a task well.
I have previously played with these ideas before but only recently formalized it for myself and actively use these identities more concretely than just reading about it. Looking back, before all these meta mind games I’ve learned, my greatest success in life and romance were when I was unreasonably confident and fearless. Nothing ever turned out to be scarier than what I thought it would be.
“Nothing is beyond my grasp” is an awesome identity indeed! It enables my “universal curiosity” and “jack of all trades” identities, in the sense that I not only want to understand everything about the world and build all the interesting skills, but also have the ability to if I put my mind to it. Did you always have this identity, or did you establish it deliberately?
Have you ever found the Fearless identity to induce recklessness? For me, it interacts with the “tough person” identity, and results in a tendency to neglect safety precautions that I have to consciously counteract—for example, I don’t feel sketched out by dangerous neighborhoods, and it took me years to stop being a road hazard cyclist. I do find the Fearless identity to be a large net gain in the social arena (comfort zone expansion practice was instrumental in establishing it).
These identities are a form of compartmentalization—phrased in absolutes like “nothing” and “no fear”, they appeal to System 1, while a more precise and technically correct phrasing like “at most 15% of things are beyond my grasp” requires engaging System 2 and is much less effective. I think they actually increase calibration—as you said, nothing ever turned out to be scarier than what you thought it would be, so the Fearless identity was counteracting a miscalibrated fear that never came to pass.