Co-Active Coaching keenly stated, “fear of failure is the number one killer of grand plans and good ideas.” Whenever we want to strive for something more in our lives, the fear of failure will inevitably rear its ugly head. We can overcome it by celebrating it. Each time we fail is an opportunity to learn so that we never make the same mistake again.
When I was in high school, I was a top 50 Warcraft 3 player in all of North America. I hated to lose, but I enthusiastically watched the replay of every game I lost so that I could figure out how I had lost. As I got better with this process and lost less and less, I was even more excited to view the replays I did lose because they were usually the result of incredible ingenuity on the part of my opponent. It was an enjoyable process for me to learn how to fail gracefully and to improve from my mistakes–and so I was able to overcome my fear of failure.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
– Theodore Roosevelt (The Man in the Arena)
Teddy Roosevelt had a different approach. He sold the nobility of daring greatly–that failing at a noble task was superior to never having tried at all. If you truly believe this idea, then you will be willing to overcome your fear of failure and enter the arena.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
All of us feel fear. It is an innate human emotion. The question is: what do you believe in enough that is more important than that fear? When I played competitive Warcraft 3, I wanted to be the best player that I could be–and that was more important than whether I lost any individual game. For Teddy Roosevelt, daring greatly was more important than fear. Entering the arena–regardless of outcome–was superior to him than not to enter at all.
“It’s not as though I just have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. There are just times when something is important enough…that you do it in spite of fear…people shouldn’t think, well, ‘I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn’t do it,’ it’s normal to feel fear. Like, you’d have to have something mentally wrong with you if you don’t feel fear.”
– Elon Musk (How to Build the Future)
If Elon Musk can overcome his fears to attempt to revolutionize electric cars, get mankind to Mars, build underground freeways, and merge the human brain with AI–all seemingly impossible endeavors–we can probably learn to overcome our fear of failure in whatever it is that we’re attempting. Here’s how Elon manages fear: “Something that can be helpful is fatalism, to some degree. If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear. When starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose everything.”
If you can accept the worst case outcome of what will happen and still convince yourself that it’s worth pursuing, then you have conquered your fear. Fear only controls you if it’s hiding something that you’re not expecting. But if you pull fear out of the shadows and shine a light on it, it may not be as scary as it seems.
Another way of looking at it is to consider that failing at something does not mean that you are a failure as a person.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
– Michael Jordan
Failure is the fastest way to learn. Few have the courage to try to enter “the arena”, so if you do, you’ll already have a leg up on everyone else. You’ll have differentiated yourself just by trying. In the worst case, you’ll have dared greatly and accelerated your learning–both of which are worth celebrating. And who knows, with enough perseverance, your wildest dreams may even come true. So what’s something you can believe in that’s more important than fear?
Photo by Debora Cardenas on Unsplash
