Question for Self Mastery: So What?


– Seneca

What are you afraid of? What keeps you up at night? Money fears? Health fears? Relationship fears? Afraid you’re going to be a failure just like your old man? Afraid she’ll never love you if she knows the truth?  Afraid you’re going to die alone?

Take fifteen minutes.  Get real, get dark.  Ask yourself, “What am I most afraid of?”  Write down your answers.  (Note: be sure to destroy the evidence after the exercise. This info is for your eyes only and you should feel completely unfettered from the judgment of others.  (I’m not paranoid, I’m prepared.)

Your enemies are going to attempt to use your fears to their advantage, so it’s best to head them off at the pass.  Knowing your fears and controlling them, empowers you and disempowers the opposition.  You can’t think straight if you’re scared.

How to control our fears? I’ve found a marvelously effective technique used by Andy Warhol.

I know that sounds odd, but hang with me. Warhol grew up as an extremely sickly child in a working class neighborhood in Pittsburg. He was often bedridden and developed skin pigmentation blotchiness as a complication from scarlet fever.  He became a hypochondriac.  As a young man he was extremely self conscious of his appearance and was isolated because of his awkward manner and sexual orientation.  He was afraid.  Afraid of being rejected by his crushes.  Afraid of his art being rejected by his contemporaries.  Eventually, Warhol devised a truly elegant solution to manage these debilitating fears:

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, ‘so what?’  That’s one of my favorite things to say.  ‘So what?’…I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick.  It took me a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.”
– Andy Warhol

Take another fifteen minutes and go through your list of fears one by one. Ask yourself, if this happened “So what?” Would you still survive?  Would you be put in jail for life?  Would you starve to death?  Would you never find anyone who would want to go to the movies with you?

Of course, we must be responsible for our fate and take all appropriate actions to prevent bad things from happening.  But, it is counterproductive and a tremendous waste of energy to be a slave to the fear that those bad things might occur.  You don’t get paid to worry.  Next time you’re afraid that something bad might happen or if something troubling actually does happen, ask yourself  “So what?”  You may find that asking that little question defangs your fears, disables your foes and helps you get some sleep at night.