In the Ted Talk, “Smash fear, learn anything”, Tim Ferris talks about fear and how it can influence our life positively. He shares a story of when he was young he went to a summer camp and on a particular day the campers went swimming. When Ferris tried to jump into the water a local bully grabbed his ankles causing him to fall in the water headfirst. Luckily, when he started to drown a camp counselor rushed to his rescue, but ever since then he was afraid of swimming. He never learned how to swim until he turned 31. Ferris took swimming lessons and eventually got over his fear. He even swam a kilometer in the ocean. He also discuses how he was terrible at Japanese, but he still wanted to pass the class and so by trying every method he discovered he became fluent in Japanese. What Ferris wants us to take away from his experiences is exactly what he accomplished. Anyone is capable of becoming a great swimmer, a great doctor, a great lawyer, etc. All you have to do is ignore your fears and try. Try, because you will never know what could happen if you don’t try. Like Ferris says, “what’s the worst thing that could happen”. He is making the argument that we need to realize that fear is not our enemy but our friend. Fear can point us in the direction of finding ourselves and it can also point us in the wrong direction but the point is to try so we know what we are capable of. I for one completely agree with Tim Ferris. It is true that trying helps us not only overcome our fears but allows us to find ourselves as well. If all our life we let fear get in the way of trying we will get nowhere in life, just like Holden Caulfield from “The Catcher in the Rye”. He has a very negative outlook on the world and fears growing older. He is afraid of losing childhood innocence and so he never tries to succeed in school or prepare himself for the future. All he decides to do is depress on the idea of life. He says, “I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be” (Salinger 225). He just doesn’t want to grow up and magically fall into a life long career. In a sense he wants to remain a child forever. He is too afraid to let go of the innocence, the past, and he doesn’t try to overcome this fear and so he remains dull and sad. This Ted Talk was very inspiring and motivating. It plays a significant role in the idea of the American Dream we all so deeply desire. Everyday we go through life and find ourselves holding back because we are too scared to take the risk of falling. But how will we ever achieve our American Dream if we don’t try. What we need to understand is that the only thing stopping us from obtaining our American Dream, whatever it may be, is ourselves. We need to wake up, get up, and try, try, try.