A Mental Trick to Make Any Task Less Intimidating

All you have to do is picture yourself on the other side

Laura Vanderkam
Forge
Published in
4 min readFeb 19, 2021

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Illustration by Dora Godfrey for Forge

A few years ago, one of my children became obsessed with roller coasters. He watched video after video to study them from afar. He designed his own in computer games. There was just one problem: He was terrified of actually riding one.

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Laura Vanderkam
Forge
Writer for

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management books including Off the Clock and 168 Hours. She blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.