Jack Reacher's Rules

“I’m not scared of anybody … But certainly I preferred it when he was dead.”

Some things are worth being afraid of. And some things are not.

To be afraid of a survivable thing is irrational.

Focus on the job at hand.

“Reacher didn’t like crowds. He was a mild agoraphobic—from agora, the Greek word for a crowded public marketplace. Random crowds … organized crowds … riots and revolutions. A crowd is like the largest animal on earth—the heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop.”

A courageous guy is someone who feels the fear but conquers it.

“Why are you going back?”

“Because they told me not to.”

“Sometimes if you want to know if the stove is hot the only way to find out is to touch it.”

Try not to get trapped in the dark in close, tight spaces.

“He was a guy who survived most things, and he was a guy who was rarely afraid. But he had known since his early boyhood that he was terrified of being trapped in the dark in a space too small to turn his giant frame. All his damp childhood nightmares had been about being closed into tight spaces.”

Confront your enemies.

Take things exactly as they come, for exactly what they are.

Analyze your fear; it’s probably not rational.

Turn your fear into aggression.

“You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it.

Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.”

THINGS YOU’LL NEVER HEAR REACHER SAY

My knees are trembling and my hands are shaking.