“great careers are a matter of luck,” “only geniuses hold great careers”) as we place a mental wall between us and our passions. Professor Smith explains that these self-rationalizations diminish aspiration and can, for the most part, be distilled down to fear. During a first listen to the TED Talk, I understood what was being said as fear holding us back. However, when I replayed the example Larry Smith gives about a man speaking to his son about having settled (rather than following his dreams), I pieced together how fear successfully establishes dominion over man by being an intergenerational, socially reproducible concept: the fear that prevents one man from following his dreams is vertically transmitted, very much like a disease, to his son and so on. This makes it all the more important to surmount fear, achieving our own success and simultaneously acting as a proxy (and modeling one’s