Fear
I am well acquainted with fear. As a young child, I suffered from many fears, anxieties, and worries — dogs, heights, extraterrestrials, rollercoasters. I think many of these fears came from a combination of a biological predisposition to anxiety and an overactive imagination.
I spent the first eighteen years of my life largely letting these fears govern my behavior and set strict limits on what I would do. I refused to go to the amusement park with friends for fear of riding the roller coasters. I would not jump from the diving board or the high dive at the pool. I was reluctant to visit neighbors or friends who had dogs.
Becoming a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — going to a far-off land and speaking a foreign language — taught me that I was capable of more than I supposed. The world is often not as scary a place as I could build it up to be in my mind. I came back to BYU nearly 23 years old and committed to a new philosophy: face my fears head-on.
Heights
There is great power in finding the courage to face your fears. Armed with this new philosophy, I had to pick which fear to attack first. Heights had always been a source of deep anxiety for me, so that would be my entry point. I found a local climbing gym and bought rock climbing shoes and a harness so I could intentionally scale indoor walls 20, 30, 40 feet up and rappel back down.
Choosing to do this did not mean my fears magically evaporated. I was properly terrified. Knuckles white from a death grip on the rope at the top of the wall, I would be almost paralyzed at the thought of starting down the face. Taking deep breaths, calling down to my partner belaying at the bottom, I would slowly sink into my harness and begin kicking off the wall, descending.
Going to school in Utah, there is ample opportunity to climb and rappel in the beautiful outdoors. My cousin Erin was part of a group that frequently went canyoneering — a combination of hiking and rappelling — through national parks and other parts of the Utah wilderness. Leaving the sterile, safer, more predictable environment of the climbing gym, I joined him on a few of these excursions and further expanded the limits of what I believed I was capable of.
Between my first and second year at Harvard Business School, I interned at Blue Origin in Seattle. My roommate was an undergraduate aerospace engineer named Roberto, and he invited me to go skydiving with him. In some sense, this was the ultimate destination in confronting my fear of heights. I told him I would go. I spent the night before our appointment with destiny watching YouTube videos of people jumping out of planes.
I baby-stepped my way onto the plane. I decided I could sign the consent and waiver form. I could put on the jumpsuit without losing my option to bail out. I could walk onto the tarmac without committing to getting on the plane. I even deluded myself into thinking I could board the plane and still keep the option of riding it back down to the runway.
As we passed 9,000 feet, we were above the clouds — and we still had roughly 10,000 feet to go. We would be jumping from 18,000 to 19,000 feet above sea level. Because I was one of the first people on the plane, seated near the rear exit, I could see Mount Rainier more than a hundred miles away in the distance. I would be one of the last people off.
By the time the other eight or ten people had jumped, solo or in tandem, we had passed the jump zone. My tandem instructor and I had to sit and wait as the plane circled back for another pass, lengthening the terrifying anticipation of what was to come.
We got to the edge of the airplane, my feet inches from the sky below, as my instructor counted down from three. Before he hit one, he launched us out of the plane. It was an otherworldly experience, and though exhilarating, it was not as deathly scary as I had built it up to be. When I landed, I was still in a daze, riding high on a wave of neurotransmitters and adrenaline. The experience taught me that I could do anything, no matter how scary.
Run from fear and it gets worse. Turn and face it and you find it was smaller than you thought.
— Bear Grylls OBE (@BearGrylls) July 12, 2026
To Others Who Are Afraid
I assure you that I am well acquainted with the feeling of extreme anxiety: pulse beating like a hummingbird’s, mind racing, heart thudding with palpitations, a sense of existential dread. Yet despite all of this, there is within you the ability to draw a deep breath, center yourself as best you can, and take one small step toward your fear. You can choose to face it. It is a form of self-imposed exposure therapy, and over time you’ll see that your fears are needless restrictions, governors, and limitations on your life. You hold the key to the cell that keeps you captive.
To my sons: do not let your fears confine the trajectory of your lives. Do not take counsel from fear. Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to stare it down and proceed anyway.