One can judge the relative importance of a value by the extent to which it makes life bearable to live. Life becomes unbearable when it cannot be salvaged from a broken state, so the highest values therefore are those which facilitate transformation and redemption...
... You have more to learn, and yet a genuine perspective to share; but when you hide it from the world, you deprive both the world and yourself of something necessary—something that makes the difficulty of life bearable...
... This is part of what it may mean to say:
“You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world. ”
To put who you could be above who you already are, and to live honestly, despite the trouble that may cause you.
When you face the unknown, you learn about more than just the world. In wrestling to make sense out of places that used to be nonsense, you gain the perspective necessary to step out of who you were, into who you could become.
It's not a "nothing but" to have a fear of something trivial (or not). A fear is a fear to you, which means you don't just master the snake, the spider, the speech, the fight — you come to master transformation itself.
Perhaps if you voluntarily went into the unknown, faced your fears, had your fights, and accrued the experience from beyond the pale, you could reveal and rectify your hidden faults and blind-spots, and come to be a master of transformation, rather than its periodic slave.