You’re Not Lazy—You’re Scared to Death

Here's How You Wake Up Before It's Too Late.

Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,

Killer whales kill great white sharks by flipping them upside down.

This supposedly puts them in a trance long enough to suck out their liver.

Farmers can do the same thing with chickens. They take a pen and draw a line outward from the beak. The chicken’s eyes are trained on the moving point. It puts them in a trance. They’re hypnotized.

And they stay frozen with their neck stretched out for seconds or minutes…

Long enough for the farmer to chop off the chicken’s head.

You’re the Chicken. You’re the Shark.

Every day, the world draws a line in front of you.

Your job. Your routines. Your phone. Your fears.

And just like that chicken, you stare at it, motionless.

Or worse—like the great white, you’re already flipped upside down.

Your power is being drained from you while you sit there, thinking you're safe.

And the worst part?

You don’t even know it’s happening.

But here’s the thing about trance states: they can be broken.

You’re not tired. You’re not unmotivated. You’re just scared sh*tless.

Because if you actually tried—no excuses, no safety net—you might fail.

And if you fail, you have to admit you wasted years hiding.

That’s why you scroll. That’s why you procrastinate.

That’s why you stare at the damn line.

But here’s how you break it:

Look away. Move. Act. Do anything but stay still.

Stop consuming and start creating.

Stop thinking and start moving.

Stop waiting and start fighting for yourself.

Because the truth is, no one is coming to flip you back over.

No one is erasing the line for you.

It’s up to you. Right now.

Wake up before it’s too late.

“But we humans are higher lifeforms.” You say…

“We wouldn’t be so primitive to be so easily duped — would we?”

I hate to break it to you…

We have a multitude of cognitive glitches that distort our perception.

Often, the distortion is so significant that we don’t even live in the same reality as other people.

Off in our world.

In this case, I’m not just talking about the many cognitive biases well documented in scientific literature.

Biases like our negativity bias cause us to focus on the negative naturally.

Or the recency bias makes us favor things that happened recently over things that happened further out in the past.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs.

This glitch is so massive… it allows us to hide entire aspects of our personality from ourselves.

You are living a whole secret side-plot that you know almost nothing about.

How do I know?

I just healed this part of myself, and I’m blown away by what I’m discovering.

I just spent 15 years as a freelance copywriter.

In retrospect, I’m asking myself why I was stuck in this subservient role for so long.

Well…

Every time I thought about launching my product.

Or building a real agency…

I would damn-near pass out from fear.

My brain would shut down.

I literally could not fathom what life beyond the scope of my comfort zone would look like.

But now that I can do the fathoming, I’m seeing the apparent limitations of my freelancing career.

This whole time, I couldn’t see the thing staring me in the face…

Because every time I tried…

I’d get so triggered that I couldn’t think straight.

And this is what all human beings are like.

We always have a cover story.

You get triggered, and you don’t see how your mind twists reality to cover up your existential terror.

This is your inner child having a severe meltdown.

You can’t see how you swept all those emotions under the rug and went about your day as if it never happened.

You’re so paralyzed…

You can’t even see that you’re paralyzed.

You can’t even see a whole side of yourself that’s plain as day.

So, for years… I felt comfortable playing a supporting role in other people’s lives.

But any time I thought of doing my own thing.

Claiming my greatness…

I got triggered and stuck.

But, I couldn’t see it.

This severely limited my potential.

But I couldn’t even detect what was happening.

We always have a cover story…

A rationalization…

You say you’re tired, you don’t feel like it.

You procrastinate.

You self-sabotage.

But you can’t see what’s happening.

No rational human being wants to admit that the reason they’re stuck isn’t because they’re lazy, or distracted, or don’t have the time…

It’s because you’re scared to fucking DEATH.

Every time I took even one step outside of my freelance copywriting comfort zone, I would have a panic attack.

The fear was overwhelming.

That’s what made it undetectable.

It was more terrifying than I could even fathom.

By at least an order of magnitude.

Humans are so irrational; it’s WILD.

But we can’t see it.

The mind plays tricks to keep you asleep.

This conspiracy runs so deep that it’s almost like saying The Matrix was a documentary.

You’re walking around. The Earth seems flat.

That’s because the Earth is so big…

Too big to fathom.

Too big to detect its roundness.

It is too big to grasp that it’s hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour.

Likewise, we feel the sun’s heat at 92 million miles away.

It feels hot.

You fall asleep at the beach… You get a sunburn.

So you tell yourself you know how hot the sun is…

But your mind can’t process the fact that the sun is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s off the Richter scale.

That more or less explains why we can’t detect what’s happening while we’re triggered.

The feelings are so overwhelming that your brain shuts down.

But the view of your life while you temporarily fall asleep is very telling.

You would learn a lot about yourself if you had more awareness.

You could discover the answer to mysteries that have evaded you your whole life.

Your life would make a whole lot more sense.

You would discover a side to yourself that you have long forgotten about.

What will it take to see it finally?

The only way out… is to wake up.

And that comes from taking a good, sober look at what’s happening.

Reflecting on it after.

Talking it out in therapy.

Doing the hard work.

After Tony Robbins fired me, I had to adapt or die.

That meant I had to confront all the fears that kept me stuck in the freelance copywriter role.

The fear was profoundly deep.

It was a prison cell.

I avoided doing the very thing I already knew I had to do.

That I already know how to do…

Yet, still, I couldn’t do it.

I could deliver outstanding work for other people…

But at the end of the day, I couldn’t do the same thing for myself.

I would panic…

Then I’d return to consciousness and go about my day like nothing happened.

The bizarre meltdown would go completely unexamined.

I would stay stuck.

But after I got fired…

I no longer had that luxury.

I started coaching my therapist in exchange for free therapy.

The coaching was a kind of therapy, so it was like winning twice.

Teaching others affirms what you know.

It helps you to see yourself anew.

Your knowledge deepens.

Something about talking with someone every week about business got the ball rolling.

It was enough to plow through when I got triggered.

And I had space to process what had happened after the fact.

I’m so shocked at how terrified I was underneath it all.

It was the only thing standing in my way.

I didn’t need new knowledge.

I needed to un-paralyze myself.

After that, I produced new content and reinvented myself enthusiastically.

A lot of the time, you don’t need more knowledge.

More insight…

You need to face yourself.

Now that you see the truth…

How much longer will you pretend you don’t?

You can’t unsee it.

So what are you going to do?

What happens next is on you.

Until next time,

Dancer, Writer, Buddhist.