In the well-known Biblical story, God tells Jonah to go talk to his people, and to tell them things they do not want to hear.
Jonah refuses because he is too scared. While he is on a boat with others, a storm appears out of nowhere. He elects to be thrown off because he knows it’s his fault, then he is swallowed by a whale. Three days later he appears on the shore to pursue his proper destiny.
The moral is: if you don’t follow the path you’re supposed to follow, the seas will become stormy and you’ll be in a terrible place for a length of time, and then if you’re lucky you’ll be spit back out and you will get the opportunity to do what you’re supposed to do.
Maslow wrote about the impediments that stand in the way of man’s self-actualization – why man is afraid of his own greatness and of his own destiny, even though in some moments, imagining the highest possibilities for himself brings the greatest joy. He called this fear the “Jonah Syndrome.”
It is what we would expect from a weak organism, to shy away from the full intensity of life.
“For some people this evasion of one’s own growth, setting low levels of; aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock-humility are in fact defenses against grandiosity.”
Maslow