Deconstructing Fear

When I was little I could do anything I wanted, the confidence was enormous, there were no boundaries. Then something changed (I blame it on the horror movies I started watching at the age of 5) and I was scared of a lot of things, the scariest of them all was the dark, which later I interpreted as being the unknown.

There is a scene in Oldboy (2003) in which one character wants to avenge his teeth with another teeth pulling session done with a hammer. And he looks at the man who caused him several front teeth to be made from gold now and simulates a "hammer job" on one of his teeth. The future victim screams scared. But the golden teeth man does nothing, laughs and says that people tend to shrivel because of their imagination and if you imagine nothing you'll be fearless.

If we put the two paragraphs together and couple them with the TED speech below, we have a basic recipe for tackling fear, fear of anything: of public speaking, of people on the street, of relationships, of huge exams, of 2012 :)) etc. etc. etc..