Patrick J. Sweeney II - Fear Is Fuel: The Surprising Power to Help You Find Purpose, Passion, and Performance

Patrick J. Sweeney II has been dubbed the Fear Guru for his work with more than five hundred global CEOs, actors, professional athletes, Navy SEALs, and corporations. He inspires tens of thousands of people each year through keynote speeches and seminars teaching tools to live the biggest, most fulfilling life possible. In addition to founding the Fear Institute for executive seminars and research, he also lectures at leading universities from Harvard Business School to the University of Virginia. He was the founder and CEO of four technology companies, holds seven patents, produced award-winning adventure documentary films, and is an angel investor in more than thirty start-ups. Before earning his MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia, he placed second in the Olympic Trials in rowing the single scull, and is the only person to ever summit and then ride down from Mt. Elbrus, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and Mt. Everest Base Camp by bicycle. In 2018 he won the Race Across America in a four-person team. He was the chair of the Young Presidents Organization Sports & Entertainment Network and has been a member for more than ten years. Sweeney has appeared on CNBC, CNN, Good Morning America, Fox News, and the Today Show. He sits on the Business School Advisory board of Trinity College Dublin. He is a licensed commercial pilot and competes in competitive aerobatics. Sweeney was graduated from the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and Chamonix, France, with his wife, three children, and two dogs.

T he research, writing, and creation of what peaked at more than 120,000 words of prose and was carved down to the book you now hold in your hands was only possible with copious help from all over the world. My family was incredibly patient as I spent hours upon hours planted on the couch listening to interviews repeatedly to get the essence of some esoteric neuroscience theory or research and then trying over and over to translate it to what I hope is easily understandable language. My Young Presidents Organization forum of friends, who convinced me to search inside myself for my true genius and encouraged me to pursue what I love and feel passionate about are at the top of my list of people to thank as well. Al, Ann, Gerry, Jim, Mark, Mark, Nat, and Rosa were a great source of motivation and each one provided invaluable feedback and inspiration. Nats creativeness inspired the name Fear Frontier for the concept I was trying to convey, Als questioning my presentation and logic was especially helpful in boiling my concepts down to their essence, and Jim and Rosa did a great job of making sure I kept it fun and readable. My wise counselor Diana challenged me constantly and laid the groundwork almost a decade ago for us to find our genius.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed to the book with their time, wisdom, and energy. Shout out to the Olympic Training Center docs like Shane Murphy, mentalists and supporters like Warren Negri, Bill McGillicuddy, Bob Bullock, and Will Maney, who taught me how to change my own body and mind and supported me when I needed it most. Im sad that Coach Allen Rosenberg didnt get to see the final copy; I think hed be proud. Thanks as well to father Eddie Hathaway and Father Joe Clarke, who kept me in touch with God as well, without getting caught up in dogma.

I wrote one of my best chapters, and refined several more, while sequestered in a Jack Nicholson, Shining-like state at the Lamberts Cover Inn on Marthas Vineyard during the winter of 20182019, when the hotel was closed and deserted for renovation. Thanks to everyone there for the great support.

Thanks to Daniel Pink for clarifying his curiosity about courage.

There were so many helpful and engaging neuroscientists, neurobiologists, and psychologists I spoke with that it would be tough to name them all, but the ones I spent the most time with, or was particularly influenced by, include:

Professor Sian Belliott; Anna Beyeler, PhD; Alia Crum, PhD; Professor Karl Friston, MD; Dan Gilbert, PhD; Professor Werner Helsen; Joseph LeDoux; Abigail Marsh, PhD; Mo Milad; Earl K. Miller, PhD; Shane OMara, PhD; Scott Orr, PhD; Elizabeth Phelps, PhD; Professor Karl Pillemer, PhD; Maxwell Ramstead, PhD; John J. Ratey, MD; Thomas Ryan, PhD; Kay Tye, PhD, Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD; and Linda Van de Voogd, PhD.

Now, if youve read this far into the details, I feel that I should let you in on a little secret. Several times in the book I purposely use the phrase face everything and accept responsibility. If you notice, the acronym that forms is FEAR, although I never call that out in the text.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Marie Curie

Y ou can tame fear or fear can tame you. It is a fundamental choice. Fear can cause any one of many different emotions from uncertainty all the way to terror, but fear itself is the combination of inputs from our bodys physical reaction to an event. Fear tries to tame us by taking over our central nervous system. You can learn to keep that from happening. Fear is not an emotion; its the combination of reactions to sensory responses. Before you can tame fear you need to learn the language of fear; like any other language as we start to pick up expressions and phrases we begin to understand more and more.

At 4:30 every morning for the past eight weeks a group of sailors, who look like they have lost a year-long battle with a tsunami, gather relentlessly to fight their fears. A penetratingly cold wind whips spray off the Pacific Ocean into their faces. Looking out from puffy, red-rimmed eyes, the men still manage to sprint into formation on a slab of black asphalt that could have been a parking lot or basketball court in any other life. Eerily, silhouettes of about one hundred pairs of feet are orderly stenciled in white paint a perfect arm-span apart in all directions. Less than half of the painted feet now have real boots, filled by men, standing upon them. The other half have ghosts and terrible memories clouding them. Empty pairs echo of failure and fear. The men dont look at the empty places, however. Chappie fights back images of his spot being empty tomorrow; hes forcing his mind to focus on getting through this moment. Clearly, this place has a special purpose. Each remaining sailor puts his left foot and right foot on a painted set of prints. Several weeks into the worlds toughest physical training, some of the men actually have to consciously focus on right and left to make their feet comply. This is the Grinder. It is the infamous location of Navy SEAL physical training or PT. Its also where the bell lives.

When most people get cold, theyll sprout goose bumps, then start to shiver. Think of the last time you got cold enough to shiver or make your teeth chatter. You probably had the luxury of being able to put on a jacket or crank up the heated seat while the defroster blasted out increasingly warmer air. If there was any uncertainty about how or when youd warm up, you might have felt the twinge of uncertainty or anxiety. You probably had one big advantage over these sailors who were chosen for Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUD/S) training or SEAL training. Your advantage was the fact that you knew you could do something soon to make the cold stop. There was an end in sight for you, so there really wasnt much to be afraid of.

Theres only one thing the men on the Grinder can do to escape the bone-numbing cold or to ensure that they live through terrifying underwater fights blindfolded, getting stripped of their air source, or shot at as they climb a thirty-foot wall drenched to the bone, forearms pumped with lactic acid pooling in their muscles like a blazing river of pain under their skin. But most of these men would rather die than use the sure way out. They will be wet, cold, and sleep deprived for five more days now that it is the start of Hell Week. Terror of all sorts has been their constant companion and isnt going away anytime soon. Interestingly, they would find different ways to describe the fear or anxiety or terror to themselves and others. For the frigid cold and relentless challenges that have penetrated their organs there is only one known end in sight. Thats the bell. If one of them staggers over to the drop area as its called, and pulls the rope on the bell, he rings out to the world that he is a quitter; he is not physically tough enough to become the most feared and fearless of the worlds warriors. The pressure is even more intense because the Grinder, and the bell, sits in the center of a series of buildings, like a quad, that houses active duty, combat proven decorated SEALs. These experienced frogmen can look out, can stare out, can cast judgment out, on all the sailors outside suffering on the Grinder who think they might be good enough to wear the coveted trident patch of a Navy SEAL.