Matt's Audio Letter of the Week

Hey everyone. Today I’m going to share a more straightforward—and shorter—message. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The willingness to confront and transcend fear is the key to truly living.

Here’s what I mean.

There’s a big difference between surviving and living. Fear is oriented toward survival. If you track any fear down far enough, at its core it’s about survival.

And if you make life only about surviving, then you end up taking precautions in every direction. Of course, some of this is natural—that’s part of being human. But eventually it can get to the point where you stop living altogether. This is the balance we each have to confront.

Because if your entire objective is simply to survive, then logically you’d live in a padded room, hooked up to machines that keep your body alive. You wouldn’t take any risks at all.

But the willingness to take risks is the bridge between surviving and living.

And on the other side of that fear is your potential—your ability to actually live. To reach that other side, you have to be willing to confront and transcend your fears. That’s what living really is.

If you think about it, many things we do don’t make sense from a pure survival standpoint. If life were only about survival, I would never drive a car, never get on a plane, never try new foods—never do anything that introduces any risk. I would stay in a narrow lane that feels “safe.”

But here’s what you learn the more you confront and transcend fear: fear is actually your biggest enemy.

You don’t need fear to survive. Your instincts and intuition guide you far more accurately than fear ever will. That internal nudge you can’t quite explain doesn’t exist in the realm of fear—it exists in the realm of intuition.

Interestingly, living in fear all the time tends to attract negative situations. When your body is stuck in fight-or-flight, it creates more internal and external chaos. The more you follow fear, the more destructive life becomes—even though your mind keeps trying to convince you that becoming “safer and safer” is the answer.

But have you ever lived in fear and genuinely felt like you were living? There’s an intuitive knowing inside all of us that life is about more than just surviving.

In my perspective, fear is the barrier to that deeper experience of life. And your ability to confront, transcend, and release fear is the bridge between surviving and truly living.

If you’ve been on both sides of this, you know how true it is. When you really understand this, you see that the real key to living is your willingness to confront and transcend fear—and to live in spite of it.

I hope this was helpful. I hope it served you. Wishing you all a great day and a great week, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

-Matt