The Fear of Failure
“However, for some reason, those dreams and goals occasionally get lost along the way. For some people, as they get older they start to think their goals are no longer important. For many others, something else gets in the way… a new job, school, significant other, etc. But for a majority of people, including myself, it is fear.”
I wrote that in my first post on the blog, but I knew that “fear” was the single most influencing thing that stops us from starting or finishing a goal. I wanted to take some time and really think about the problem. What are we actually afraid of?
Fear is a very irrational feeling. It defies logic. Some people are scared of the dark, even if they know nothing is there. Some are afraid of flying, even though it’s statistically much safer than driving. I could go on and on, but it’s easy to see that fear is quite irrational. However, we all understand that it’s a real feeling, and we all have our own fears.
But there is one fear that I, and countless others feel over the course of their lives. It’s unexplainable. We all know the feeling of thinking up a great idea or declaring that your going to do or change something. but when it’s time to motivate ourselves to do it, something holds us back. It’s the fear of failure.
In my last post, I talked about how I wanted to write a novel, and how every time I sat down and started writing I told myself that I wasn’t good enough. The fear of failure discouraged me, it told me that I couldn’t do it, and it told me that I shouldn’t even try.
One of the guys over at Yin vs. Yang commented on one of the other writer’s posts. He was telling a story about his grandfather who fought in WWII, and quoted him. He said “Courage is not about being unafraid, its about being afraid but going forward in the face of fear.”
We all have a fear of failure. They key is to keep it in balance. Imagine someone who wasn’t afraid of failure at all. They would never question anything that they did, and they would constantly fail, and just not care. Now imagine someone who was so debilitated by their fear of failure that nothing was ever good enough. They would fail because they were too afraid to try.
Now, imagine someone who understand their fear, someone who can harness it and use it to their advantage. They can then look failure straight into the eye and prove it wrong. If you can do that, you are one step closer to being successful and happy.
