The question

What is your greatest fear?

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Alex Honnold

Rock climber; first person to free solo El Capitan

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
I think when I was younger, I had a lot of the fears that, that you expect from people. Like I was kind of afraid of spiders and things like that. And I think with, you know, years of dealing with fear nonstop, they've all sort of fallen away. I, I mean, I guess my greatest fear is like public embarrassment or public performance, or like what I said earlier about opera singing I'm like, that is still for sure that would be a nightmare. And like, yeah, I could do it. But I would be so bummed.

Adam Grant, Re:Thinking with Adam Grant, TED, 20 September 2022 source ↗

Others on this question

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I never want to go back; I fought so much through my life, that I have to keep going forward.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 8 April 2023 source ↗
Alan Cumming Scottish actor, producer, director, writer and presenter
Dying on the same day as someone much more famous than me.
Recorded Rosanna Greenstreet, The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 August 2009 source ↗

More from Alex Honnold

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Question How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? Failure & regret
Yeah. I, I think an interesting thing with that is that like, is it even failure if you've learned from it and you've taken those lessons onto your next project or the next thing that you're working on? And it's like, that's not necessarily a failure. It's all just part of a long-term learning process.
Recorded Adam Grant, Re:Thinking with Adam Grant, TED, 20 September 2022 source ↗
Question What is your favourite side project? Craft & work
Thanks for asking, this is a bit of a cool side project for me. The main thing that motivated me to start it was just a general feeling that I had more than I needed and that I should give back. I donate money through a charitable foundation (rather than just through personal checks) in the hope that it will inspire others to consider supporting causes that they believe in.
Recorded Planetmountain.com, 2014 source ↗
Question Which writers or artists most influenced your work? Taste & recommendation
I didn’t have a lot of mentors when I – I mean I kind of just grew up in the gym, just climbing a lot. So I didn’t really have mentors. I mean I definitely had people that I looked up to and people in the climbing community, but that’s just sort of the typical hero worship style, you know. Like Peter Croft was a really prominent soloist from the generation before me and I was like, “Oh, Peter’s the man!”
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show, The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss, 1 January 2018 source ↗

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