A friend of mine sent a link to this TED talk yesterday. The speaker inspired my friend to change their life along the speaker’s guidelines:

“The very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear.

That feeling, you can’t help but strive for greatness at any cost.

The more I work to be successful, the more I need to work.”

I wasn’t similarly inspired.

For one thing, a fear memory isn’t undone by behavior that covers it over and tamps it down. Fear extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously acquired responses provided evidence for what happens with a fear memory.

What I saw expressed in the TED talk was an exhausting pursuit of substitutes for feeling loved.

This February 18, 2016 blog post by Dr Arthur Janov framed the TED talk in the context that I understood the speaker:

“Most of us thought that once we choose a profession and follow it and succeed at it, becoming an expert and well known, that would be fulfilling. We would feel like a success.

Success is not a feeling, loved is.

Fame is other people’s idea of success; it is in a way their feeling…admiration, humbling, important, etc.

And why does the person, even most accomplished, never feel satisfied nor fulfilled?”

What do you feel is the appropriate context of the TED talk?

What do you think are likely outcomes of a person following the speaker’s guidelines?