The Opportunity Cost of Fear

Many of you know that I’m spending the year traveling with my fiancée, who I met only half a year ago.

Some people said, “wow, that’s fast!” Comparatively, that’s probably true. Others have said “wow that’s too fast!” That—unlike the prior statement—is a judgment.

It was sometime in mid-January at a Full House facilitated by Jim Herbert when the words that make up the title of this blog post first emerged from my mouth…

Monica and I had been nearly inseparable for a month at that point. She is (IMHO) staggering beautiful, and the fact is that she is a Mexican citizen whose daughter lives in Boston.

I had—and had openly discussed with Monica—2 concerns that I judged plausible enough to take seriously: (1) Were there financial motivations, and (2) were there immigration motivations? But by mid-January these concerns had proven demonstrably unfounded.

It was around this time that the irrational “monkey mind” fears began to run full force. Why would someone that brilliant, that spiritually connected, that self-aware, and yes—that sexy—be interested in me?

Jim recently referred to the wonderful book “Feel the fear and do it anyway” in an article. I don’t think that’s always true. The generalized financial and immigration concerns were plausible enough to not “just do it anyway.” But any fears beyond those were just that…fear.

The fears weren’t totally unjustified. I lost the vast majority of my life savings and got stuck in North Carolina for 7 years because I trusted someone I shouldn’t have…at least in retrospect. But the reality is that—with Monica—I had none of those nagging qualms, nor did I have any hints of contrary evidence the way that I did when I was 39 and freshly distraught by the end of a 23-year marriage.

So, with the help of a Byron Katie “turnaround” (google it), I flipped the “what if these fears are true” question to “what if these fears are false, but I act like they’re true?”

The answer, in this particular situation, was clear: it would mean the end of the relationship. This particular situation wasn’t conducive to “just try it out for a year or two”—even if our anxiously attached selves wanted to.

An Opportunity Cost, in case there are those unfamiliar with the term, is what you give up by using the resource for a different investment instead. For example, a 5% return on my rental properties might seem like a decent profit, but it’s actually not a great opportunity if I can make that same 5% putting money in a CD in a bank. In simplistic terms, the interest I could collect on the CD is the opportunity cost of investing in the rental property. I used to love the Silicon Valley term. “Ramen success,” which means the startup in technically, but only because all the are putting in 18 hours a day and living on Ramen noodles. That 18 hours is opportunity cost.

By mid January, the only thing preventing me from wholehearted like committing to this relationship with Monica was monkey mind fears. And the opportunity cost of investing in those fees would’ve been a relationship itself.

I don’t know if it’s endorse the concept “feel the fear and do it anyway,” but I have gotten pretty decent at catching myself when I’m tempted to act on fear, and taking a pause until I can determine whether that fear is fact or fiction.

So I invite the question…What are the costs of your fears? Are they worth it? Are there any that aren’t worth the opportunity cost? For those—feel the fear and do it anyway.

With love, and the relentless quest to catalyze more of it,

Yitz Miller
WickedAwesomeMan Counseling