Ranjay Gulati

Because the default answer to fear is not fight or flight.

It's freeze or flight.

Sometimes doing nothing is riskier than doing something that might not work out.

My mother's calculus was doing nothing was not an option.

But it required her to deal with her fear.

Because she could have just sat back and waited it out to see how this plays out.

But if you saw this guy as a violent outburst, you would have known that he wasn't going to stop.

I am not leaving here till you sign this.

This thing was going south very fast.

So I think you're right.

There is always going to be a fine line here.

And not every courageous story we know ends up with a happy ending also, right?

But the question is, how do we learn to tame fear?

How do we learn to understand a fear?

And how do we learn to then take the best course of action we possibly can versus fear clouds judgment, fear clouds the amygdala, fear clouds the prefrontal cortex, and we are just paralyzed.

So what I've discovered is these people who are courageous, as we characterize them, they somehow instinctively

have created a system in their own minds about learning to tame fear, even sometimes trick fear.

They have a relationship with fear that somehow allows them not to be paralyzed by it.

Now, I tried to find the social science research around it, saying like, what are these people doing here?

And I was looking not at like famous characters only, right?