Arthur Brooks and Simon Sinek describe a decision-making framework based on three gut feelings: excitement, fear, and deadness. The ideal mix is roughly 80% excitement and 20% fear, with zero deadness. A completely fear-free choice signals boredom, not wisdom.
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It should be 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness. When anybody's facing a new opportunity, whether it's a marriage proposal or moving to a new city or having a new career or whatever it happens to be, there's 3 sensations that you're gonna feel based on the data inside the right hemisphere of your brain, sort of the episodic memory beyond words. That's your gut. When you feel like you have a gut feeling, that's why your stomach feels that, because your stomach is weighted to the left side of your body, which is controlled by the right hemisphere. That's why we have that emotional feeling. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, those 3 feelings when you're facing an opportunity are excitement, fear, and deadness, which is that sense of emptiness when you're looking at opportunity, it makes you feel dead inside. Like, I really should get married to that woman, but it makes me feel dead inside to imagine myself 80 years old with her, right? That kind of thing. The right mix when you know it's the right step to take is 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness. That's the right combination. It's not 0% fear because you might fail. But that's the point.
If it's 0% fear, totally, and if there's no risk associated with it, it's going to be boring. You're going to be bored. You're explaining almost everything worth doing. I mean, every entrepreneurial venture has to be more excitement than fear. Because the chances of you failing or things going badly are very, very high. And so you have to have the irrational excitement to get over the fear to say, we're going to do this.
