American poet John Berryman once wrote, “We must travel in the direction of our fear.” That instinct is easy to admire and hard to practice—especially in a business where caution is often the responsible choice.
Jordan Vaughan, a luxury spec developer building across Georgia and Florida, offers an unlikely illustration. As a boy, he was afraid of dogs—he wouldn’t enter a room with one. By thirteen, he was training them, and eventually selling dogs worth tens of thousands of dollars. The fear didn’t announce itself as an opportunity. He moved toward it anyway, and it became a skill.
It would be easy to draw a straight line from that story to “fear is always worth pushing through.” But that’s not quite right, and it’s not the lesson worth taking.
Builders operate in a business where risk is real. Capital is expensive. Markets shift under a project that’s already underway. A decision made too quickly, or for the wrong reasons, can be costly in ways that take years to recover from. Caution is not cowardice. Often it’s the accumulated judgment of every project that didn’t go according to plan.
The useful question isn’t whether to move toward fear. It’s what the fear is actually telling you.
Every builder eventually sits with a decision they’d rather not examine too closely. A construction method that has always worked but may no longer be the most productive one. A market that once produced reliable margins but is harder to justify now. A GC relationship that’s comfortable because it’s familiar, not because it’s still serving the business. Sometimes it’s more personal: a responsibility that needs delegating, a conversation with a partner that keeps getting postponed.
Some of that hesitation is well-founded. Some of it is just familiarity wearing the costume of safety.
The difference matters, and it’s not always obvious from the inside. That’s why the fear is worth investigating, rather than obeying or ignoring it outright. What information is this hesitation pointing to? Is the risk real, or does the alternative simply feel unfamiliar? What would need to be true—what would you need to learn, verify, or change—before this stopped being something to avoid and became something to decide on with confidence?
Those questions don’t guarantee a comfortable answer. Sometimes they confirm that the caution was right all along—that the risk really was too large, or the timing genuinely wrong. But the decision will have been made through investigation instead of avoidance, and that’s a different thing entirely, even when the outcome looks the same on paper.
The bigger risk to a business is rarely the unfamiliar opportunity it’s afraid to pursue. More often, it’s the familiar limitation it stopped questioning long ago—an assumption nobody has tested recently simply because nobody wanted to.
Moving in the direction of fear doesn’t mean charging in blind. It means getting close enough to actually see what’s there. Sometimes that’s a dog. Sometimes it’s a contract, a market, or a conversation avoided longer than anyone wants to admit.
Hear Jordan’s full story on the latest episode of Sound Capital’s Builder Straight Talk.
