Change the Mind, Not the Venue
Sweet Bites for July 5, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we kicked off our monthly theme of Fear (links below).
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Choose Your Dessert for the Week
🍰 Mini Bite # 1
Don’t Run, Act
After the loss of Kurt Cobain, and the end of Nirvana, Dave Grohl went on a trip to the Ring of Kerry in Ireland. “I did a bunch of soul searching and I decided ‘okay, I'm going to disappear, I'm going to go to the most remote place on earth, I am just going to get away from everything, and figure it out.’”
But even being across the world in a place that is “the most remote place on earth,” he couldn’t shake what had happened.
“And I was driving around in my rental car on a country road and I saw this hitchhiker kid and I thought ‘well, maybe I’ll pick him up.’ And as I got closer to him, I saw that he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on. And it was Kurt’s face looking back at me in the middle of nowhere and I realized, like, ‘oh, I can’t outrun this.’”
He came to realize that the only way to overcome the loss was through, was looking the loss in its face and marching right through it.
“So I needed to go home and get back to fucking work. And so I did.”
This is what Seneca meant when he said we must “change our mind, not the venue.”
“You must shed the load that is on your mind: until you do that, no place will be pleasing to you.”
No amount of running conquers fear. No amount of running fixes the problems in one’s life. Only action does. Cold hard analysis of the issue at hand and an understanding of how to move forward.
“Once what is amiss is gotten rid of,” writes Seneca, “then every change of place will become pleasurable.”
📚 This Week’s Monday Meditation
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📰 Article Worthy of a Read
To fear well is virtuous and more important than being brave by Ami Harbin
🍰 Mini Bite # 2
Success Does Not Eliminate Fear
The punk-rock band Green Day has built itself into one of the most successful and long-standing music acts over the last 30 years. Album after album, they reinvent themselves while simultaneously staying true to their roots. They have found so much success that they now often play to sold-out concerts with hundreds of thousands in attendance.
But even with all their success, even with being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Green Day’s front man Billy Joe Armstrong still gets stage fright. As he explained to Marc Maron on the WTF Podcast:
“I get massive stage fright.”
“Really? To this day?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s the anticipation of all day, going on and getting ready to go on stage, uh, in front of like, in a stadium or something.”
After the success of Dookie, Armstrong calmed his nerves by drinking. But like any crutches, this could only last so long.
“I think the record after Dookie where I would get so nervous I like—”
“Insomniac”
“Insomniac. I started drinking more before shows. And I was like, ‘hey, that works, I am just going to keep doing that.’ … I keep drinking after the show, I keep drinking during the show… But then the alcohol kinda started to become an issue and yeah, it started to kick my ass.”
We want to find crutches in life for our fears. Crutches are like capes, when we lean into them we feel invincible, like we can handle anything.
The problem is, crutches break. Capes rip. And then all we’re left with is what is beneath those facades.
The truth is, something scares everyone in the world. And sometimes, regardless of how much it scares us, we still need to just do the act.
As Susan Jeffers once said:
“Feel the fear and do it anyways.”
Often times, the fear is built more in our head than in actuality.
“We suffer more in imagination than reality.”
🛠️ Tactic
In this now famous TED talk by Tim Ferriss, Ferriss breaks down his method for tackling fear and the backstory of how he discovered the process.
🦉 Wisdom
“You think of all the traveled lands, the images and tattered strands of all the women you could not hold.
And suddenly you realize: there's nothing there.
You rise to your feet, and before you appear the fear and form and empty prayer of the absence of another year.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Source: Surfing with Sartre
🏋🏻 Exercise
In this video, Mel Robbins, best known for her book The 5-Second Rule, outlines the exercise she does before every live performance or any time she feels nervous and fearful of something she has to do.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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