People have a tendency to romanticize fearlessness. But be careful about that. Fearlessness is a denial of a highly adaptive evolutionary tool. It's nature's pause button. It exists to ensure your safety so you can assess whether a threat is existential or just inconvenient - whether it's your life, your comfort/ego that's at stake. If it's the latter, you can choose to continue and rely on your ability to learn from your mistakes. If it's the former, you can back off and live to fight another day.

We call these existential threats "cliffs," as in "If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?" It's what you're mom's really worried about: a mistake you can't recover from.

We want to be open to mistakes, but your mom's got a point. To do things first and figure them out second, you have to have the opportunity to figure them out second. If you throw yourself off a cliff without knowing if you'll survive the fall, you may be cheating yourself out that opportunity. Death, jail, psychological trauma...these are all obvious problems because they severely hamper your ability to keep trying. The good news is, there's a lot of room for error before you arrive at these.

We don't want to eliminate fear. Fear is adaptive. It's your deep brain saying, "Hold on a second. This doesn't feel right." Listen to it. Assess the actual danger, then decide how you're going to take action. But in taking action, remember that taking action is not about ignoring your fear. It's about acknowledging your fear and deciding, given your fear, what you're ready to do.