12
We suffer more in fear than in fact
Echoes, in his own writing
On his own blog, Ferriss says defining the worst case ended his worry and “None of my disasters came to pass”. He quotes Seneca only for a nearby point, practising poverty.
- c. 64 CE
“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca, Moral Letters. Earliest we can find, about 1,950 years earlier.
- 2017
“As soon as I cut through the vague unease and ambiguous anxiety by defining my nightmare, the worst-case scenario, I wasn’t as worried [...] None of my disasters came to pass”
Author’s own words, from tim.blog. Tim Ferriss, ‘Why you should define your fears instead of your goals’ (2017).
This book is still in copyright, so we read the author’s own words about it, not the book.
Sources
tim.blog: tim.blog/