Overcoming Fear - The Secret of Life

One of the biggest challenges for humans is that with our ability to think we developed a deep need to plan for the future, or at the very least minimize risks associated with the future. When I say risk I mean uncertainty as the word risk can take us into totally different universes, from trivial dangerous situations to really bad things. So when faced with potentially dangerous situations we create mechanisms to minimize risks. This has lead us to create mechanisms to try to minimize the uncertainty from all sorts of unexpected events, creating large industries and products such as the financial industry with products like insurance, retirement planning and financial derivatives, the pharmaceutical industry and anti-anxiety drugs, the military industry and weapons, the consulting industry that tries to help us understand what the future will be like and so forth, all of which to give us a false idea that the future is totally in our hands. However the future, as I learned the hard way, is much further out of our control than expected.  .

I am not trying to advocate that planning is not important but quite the contrary, I believe that to live a fully productive, healthy life we need to overcome fear and manage the risks associated with everything we do.

Let me recap what I have done in the last 10 years, all of which with an unknown brain tumor inside my head:

- Quit a great job and sold a fully paid car and apartment to get an MBA in another country (moved from Brazil to the US)

- Left the comfort of being close to family and long-lasting friendships to start from scratch in a new country

- Graduated from the best MBA program in the world (sorry Harvard, Stanford, MIT etc. Carnegie Mellon is the best), where I met amazing people and made long-lasting friendships

- Got married to my wonderful wife and had two amazing daughters

- Decided to stay in the US after graduating and started a new career in Marketing, meeting and working with amazing people and making great friends

- Purchased a house, obviously borrowing lots of money

- Made great new friends and got closer than I had ever been to my American side of the family 

- Completed 2 seasons playing in an adult soccer league 

- As my knees got destroyed by soccer I decided to ride bikes, encouraged by my "older brother" and my uncle

- Joined the Mount Lebanon Caffeine & Cycling Club, where I made great friends 

- To balance all this leg work I started swimming

- I then decided to do triathlons,swimming in 55 degrees water at my first short-triathlon and moving up to complete 3 Half-Ironman events

- Quit a great job and sold two fully paid cars and a partially paid home in the US to go back to Brazil and start-over, now more safely working with the same company I worked at in the US

- Worked and partied hard on every step of the way

Looking back I wonder what my life would be like if I had known that a brain tumor was growing in my head. This is not a self-celebratory blog, it is just to highlighted that my risk profile would have probably been much different. My challenge now is to not let fear overcome my life, and yesterday I reached a milestone: I left the safety of my bike trainer and faced the mad traffic of the city to ride my bike on the road, by myself!

I never thought that such a trivial, taken for granted activity would feel so liberating. I felt like I have finally overcome my fear of having seizures, which I hadn't experienced since my first one last year. Riding where I was I should have been much more worried about traffic, bike thieves or getting lost, but those were simply not in my risk checklist, just like my brain tumor wasn't in my risk checklist when I left Brazil in 2001.

At every stage in life we face decision time, and we should never let our fear of what might happen, which can quite frankly be an infinite list, overcome the joy and feeling of accomplishment that makes us all feel life is worth living and fighting for.

I hope you read this and stop worrying about what can go wrong, life can only be truly fulfilling when we find out how we can be happy if things go right, even if your idea of life going right is a mere bike ride.