“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.
“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.