Fear of Fear Itself

Hey all,

I'm traveling this week so I've mostly been reading and relaxing. Japan is quite hot this time of year, but sightseeing and immersing myself in the unique culture have made it worth it.

This week, I have one point in mind:

Sometimes what holds us back is not fear of doing risky, impactful things, but our fear of the negative emotions that come with failure and risk. More than anything, we fear feeling like we've failed rather than failure itself.

People fear true failure: failure that makes them feel helpless, incapable, or afraid - in some sense, we only fear the failures that suggest that we are less than what we believe ourselves to be.

Too trivial, and the failure doesn't matter. Too hard, and the task was way out of reach anyway. Just hard enough and our failure to perform a task starts to convince us we’re not who we thought we were.

Unfortunately, that Goldilocks zone of tasks barely outside our reach is the growth zone. We only grow by attempting goals that are barely possible and that means we only grow by exposing ourselves to the possibility of true failure and the negative feelings that come with it.

As a result, we must choose what to purge from our lives: our ability to fail, feeling like we’ve failed, or our attitude toward feeling like we’ve failed.

Today, I urge you to work toward changing your attitude toward feeling like you’ve failed. Because, if you stop granting yourself the ability to fail you will never take risks or grow. And, if you stop allowing yourself to feel like you’ve failed, you are just in denial - unable to be motivated by setbacks.

Rather, allow yourself to feel the negative emotions that come with failure, but do not allow yourself to fear those emotions. They are not malicious, they are simply there to push you toward greater things. Allow yourself to feel those negative emotions in the moment, but do not let them drag you down in the future.

Once you’ve done that, you become mentally invincible. Because if setbacks motivate rather than demotivate you, then what else can really stop you? All you’ll do is seek out challenges, gaining something whether or not you succeed or fail.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Bit of a weird post because I think I was feeling a little preachy today, but really, I’m mostly preaching to myself to get ready to take more risks and find more opportunities during the next year.

Until next week!

-Ethan