Unexpected consequences of curing a fear of flying

After a decade of almost completely avoiding flying by traveling internationally only via train, ship and several thousand-mile car journeys, I set myself the target of flying once every ten days for two years as a way to brute force enough exposure to air travel to get comfortable with it.

Didn’t matter how far I went or where I was going, just go on the apps, find a cheap return and go. At the time I saw this as a fairly big net negative in life, especially at the start when the flying phobia had least been dented by at least the first few trips. It was costing me money, stress and time and I just felt like I had to do it so that I could continue to work in the kinds of jobs I am good at. A necessary and unpleasant cost of being slightly off mentally.

But it actually had some interesting payoffs. Because I set myself this target of flying every ten days for two years I ended up having a bunch of extra meetings with people and attending conferences in foreign places which I wouldn't otherwise have bothered with, but since I had to go ‘somewhere’ I thought I might as well go. And each of those people I had meetings with had a higher chance of becoming someone who would remember me because I was open about part of the reason for the meeting being needing to fly places as part of my self-cure exposure programme, which obviously is a bit unusual (and I think made them more likely to take the meeting in the first place because I was doing it for personal reasons rather than trying to sell them something or whatever). So my problem actually made more meetings happen, and each meeting even more productive.

And then if you're flying all over the place meeting people, you get exposure to very unusual combinations of bits of knowledge and people, which turns out to be quite valuable and make more people want to meet with you and share their knowledge, so it sort of self accelerates. As you become “known” as someone willing to fly around at the drop of a hat, people consider you for things (jobs, speaking engagements, social opportunities) far away from your home rather than assume you won't want to come, which started to mean that each trip was more valuable and sometimes somebody else would even pick up the tab for the flights.

So my project whose goal was just to be able to carry on working without hitting a career ceiling because I wasn’t willing to fly ended up being a significant investment in human and social capital with a substantial payoff. At the end of two years not only was I ok with planes but had a much bigger network and a bunch of esoteric knowledge which directly led to at least two jobs I couldn’t otherwise have got, easily justifying the ticket and time costs in investment terms, but not something I ever would have predicted in advance. It kind of made me conclude that it’s very difficult to make specific life plans if odd side projects like this can end up spilling giant positive impacts into a domain they were never intended to affect.

It also made me much more sympathetic when I see people stuck in bad patterns or repeating mistakes, which can be frustrating to observe. What if they’re trying really hard not to repeat the mistake by targeting it directly, but actually it’s caused by some other ‘side quest’ behaviour whose relationship to the problem isn’t visible to them?

But overall it was a reminder that social and human capital really count- they’re harder to measure so easier to miss but dedicating some time to developing relationships and knowledge does seem to be a pretty good use of spare cash. At least it was for me.