What If You Already Had The Answer?
Jul 30, 2026
Written By Bart Berkey | Founder of Most People Don't
When I Started Sliding Toward Fear
When I left corporate America to build Most People Don't, I knew it was going to be hard.
I just didn't know what hard was actually going to feel like until I was standing in the middle of it.
In the early days, before the business had real momentum, before the speaking engagements were consistent, before any of this felt like it was actually going to work, I watched the money I had saved start to disappear.
The runway was getting shorter and I could feel it every single day.
And somewhere in that stretch of time, I started sliding toward fear.
The questions started showing up uninvited.
What if I run out of money?
What if this doesn't work?
What if I have to go back to corporate America and give up on the thing I believed in enough to bet everything on?
Those thoughts were real and they were heavy.
I am not embarrassed to say, "they scared me."
The Slope
I came across a video recently that put language to exactly what I was experiencing during that time.
The idea is simple.
Imagine a slope.
At the top is everything you desire, everything you are working toward, everything you want your life to become.
At the bottom is everything you fear, the worst-case scenario, the outcome you can't stop thinking about, even when you are trying your hardest not to think about it.
And you are standing somewhere in the middle of that slope every single day.
The natural tendency of the human mind is to slide downward toward the fear and toward the worst possible outcome.
It does not take any effort to slide.
It just happens quietly and gradually when you stop paying attention to which direction you are moving.
What takes effort, and consistent deliberate effort at that, is choosing to climb toward what you want instead of drifting toward what you dread.
So I Asked for Help
When I felt myself sliding, I did something that did not come naturally to me at all.
I asked for help.
I called some very dear friends and opened up about how I was actually feeling, not the version I was performing for the rest of the world, but the real version that was scared and uncertain and watching his runway disappearing.
And something shifted during that conversation.
Not because they had all the answers.
Because saying it out loud, to people who genuinely cared, made it feel smaller somehow.
Solomon's Paradox
There is a concept called Solomon's Paradox.
This is something most of us have experienced without ever having a name for it.
We can give brilliant, clear, compassionate advice to a friend who is struggling, and then turn right around and be completely unable to give good advice to ourselves.
We are simply too close to our own situation to see it clearly.
Distance creates wisdom and we rarely have enough distance from our own lives to access it.
So I decided to create some distance.
I went back and watched a few of my own videos.
Things I had recorded.
Words of advice I had given to other people, ideas I believed in enough to share publicly.
While I was sitting there watching myself on a screen I started laughing because I was learning from me.
Imagine that.
The answers I needed were already there.
I just needed to get out of my own head and far enough from my own fears, to actually hear them.
You're on a Slope Right Now
You are on a slope right now.
Everyone is.
The question is not whether the slope exists.
It's whether you are paying attention to which direction you are moving and whether you are making a deliberate choice about it.
What are you telling yourself lately?
Are your thoughts pulling you toward what you want or sliding you toward what you fear?
These are great questions.
What if, you get quiet for just a moment?
Pause.
Think.
Take a breath.
What advice would you give your very best friend who was carrying exactly what you are carrying right now, what would you say?
If you still don't know, ask a friend.
Ask for help.
Because that answer already lives inside you, or is a mere phone call away.
So, What Are You Going to Do?
Wow.
Think about that for a minute. It's right there, within reach.
Today is the first day, of the rest of your life.
What do you want?
Are you pointing uphill or downhill?
What are you going to "Do"?
Most People Don't stop long enough to listen to their own advice or the suggestions of mentors, colleagues, family, or friends.
But you're not most people.
- Bart
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