Only 20% of Americans are morbidly afraid of death.

That's called thanatophobia, and it's in the DSM-5 manual.

But only 20%, I mean, none of us is like, oh, hooray, death.

But we're not really afraid.

You and I are not afraid of death.

But we almost all have our own death fear.

So if you're afraid of failure, that's your death fear.

If you're afraid of irrelevance or being forgotten, that's your death fear.

And one of the things that I ask my students or anybody to do is to figure out what your death fear is.

What is your concept of your life that you're afraid to lose?

That's your death.

Then the way to cope with that, because you can't break through.

You can't get to the second curve.

You can't actually find your bliss until you conquer your fear, because that stands in the way of your love.

That stands in the way of the real life in your life.

So the way that I do this has been very helpful to me, and now I do it with my students, particularly with fear of failure, because my MBA students at Harvard are ultra achievers with very little experience of failure.

And they're self-objectifiers, a lot of them, because they consider themselves to be success monsters, success machines, homo economicus.

Like, of course, I always get As.

Of course, I get into the best schools.

Of course, because I'm the special one.

And some of that comes from their parents, but a lot of it is internally generated.

So the way that the meditation on death works, that can be adapted to our own particular death fear, it's called the Maranissati meditation of the Theravada Buddhist monks.

If you go to a monastery in Thailand or Vietnam, you'll notice that in a lot of monasteries, they'll have photographs of corpses in various states of decay.

And the monks will stand in front of them and say, that is me.

And they'll walk to the next one and say, that is me.

And it's just like horrible until you realize it's exposure therapy.

You can't be fully alive when you're afraid of not being alive.

It just doesn't make sense.

And yet the nature of our brain is to block out this cognitive dissonance.

You know, the mortality paradox is that we know we're going to die, but we can't conceive of non-existence.

And that intense discomfort makes us terrified.

So this, it turns out that that meditation, that nine part meditation, if people Google it, the Maranissati meditation will come up.

And if you do that, you will be free.

But if you do that in the case of your fear, you will be free as well.

So I have a nine part fear of failure meditation that I ask my students to contemplate.

It's one of the exercises.

Every lecture ends with an exercise, much of it based in theological or philosophical tradition.

And it's like, I'm not doing well in class.

Starts easy, right?

And then it gets a little bit harder.

My friends from college seem to be doing better than me and getting better jobs than me.

And then a little bit later, it's like, I think my parents feel sorry for me.

And sometimes the students will weep at this point because the concept of confronting that terror of what is effectively their own death, but they will be free when they do that because it can't hurt them anymore when it becomes ordinary.

The phantasm, when it's exposed to light, evaporates.