Stealing success from the fear of failure

Once quite a while ago, there were three college kids, let’s call them William, Allen and Paul. Their classmates in the Lakeside School where they studied recognized them as nerds, though the word didn’t exist back then in a time before computers, Windows, software and programming. The three boys, however, were quite convinced of their own brilliance in the newly minted science of computer programming.

In those days, Seattle traffic surveys used to be done by stretching pneumatic rubber tubes across streets. Passing vehicles would create air pulses which would be recorded by roadside counters and mechanically punched as 16-bit patterns on rolls of paper tape. Private companies would be hired to manually process and analyze this data.

The three whiz kids of Lakeside School were convinced they could write a program to automate the entire process of data capture and analysis. Using a newly released Intel microprocessor, they invented a device that could directly read the punched tapes, digitize the data and help analyze it. After several test runs, they proudly invited the county officer for a demonstration.

Except — nothing worked. The allegedly ground-breaking software was an epic fail. The boy wonders had pie on their faces.

What would you have done if you had been William, Allen and Paul? Run for cover in shame? Switched to something safer, like selling used cars?

It is human nature to flee from failure and run towards success. Sometimes a single failure is enough to trigger flight. Worse, there are some who don’t even try anything new, just in case they might fail. A 2015 survey by the social network Linkagoal found that 31% of 1,083 Americans surveyed, or one in three, suffered from fear of failure — also called atychiphobia. This was a larger percentage than those who feared spiders (30%), being home alone (9%) or even ghosts (15%).

Did you believe in that old proverb, If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again? Well, turns out that fear of failure virtually paralyzed people in the survey and stopped them from taking a second shot.

The three lads of our story, though, were apparently cut from a different cloth. Instead of being disheartened, they were energized by their first failure. William, Allen and Paul — otherwise known as Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert — went on to create the world’s most ubiquitous operating system, Windows, build a corporate megalith called Microsoft, bring computers to the masses, and in the process make Bill Gates the world’s wealthiest man and philanthrope.

Do you have fear of failure?

Imagine the first time you tried to lace your shoes by yourself but got a tangled mess instead. Imagine you had been alone and no one had been there to laugh at your disaster. Would you have tried to lace your shoes again or given up in shame?

You know the answer: no one saw you fail, no harm done.

Psychologists know now that fear of failure is more accurately fear of the shame that failure often brings. Fear of failure is usually fear of public failure.

Albert Einstein, whose mind and thinking have changed the way we see ourselves and the universe was, incredibly, an abject failure in his young life. He suffered speech difficulties till he was four, was expelled from school for being a trouble-maker and failed the admission test to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. He was openly considered to be a failure in life. He was profoundly unhappy at work in his job as an insurance salesman. But in 1921, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, and gave the world the General Theory of Relativity.

He said: “Success is failure in progress.“

Some of the typical tell-tale behaviors that signal that a person may be afraid of failure are —

• Trying to lower other people’s expectations by telling them in advance that he probably won’t succeed;
• Having trouble figuring out what he could have done differently to succeed;
• Developing last-minute headaches or other physical symptoms that prevent him from completing the task;
• Procrastinating and ‘running out of time’ just in time to back out of the job.

Give yourself this quickie ‘fear of failure’ quiz —

• Have you ever postponed doing something just because you were unsure if it would turn out right?
• Do you avoid situations where you might have to do something you’ve never done before in front of people?
• Have you ever deferred doing something that you know will dramatically improve your life, without any good reason?

If you answered yes, chances are that you do fear failure. Well, the good news is that once you understand its origins and nature, you can systematically learn how to overcome fear of failure and turn your professional life around 180°.

Where does fear of failure start?

No one laughs at an infant when she stumbles while learning to walk. A baby feels no shame or insecurity on the journey to walking two-legged. By the time you reach school, though, things have changed. Getting answers right is important. There are no second chances if you don’t get it right the first time. You only get one chance to pass your tests; the wrong answer will get you low grades, a lost year, shame before your mates and probably a scolding. School taught you that even one failure will damn you.

Your fear of failure is actually fear of failing the first time.

But is that how life works? Did William, Allen and Paul get it right the first time?

How many times was JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book rejected? Correct answer: 12. But the 13th try made her the world’s first literary billionaire.

One of the richest people on the planet, Richard Branson, persisted through a string of business failures and setbacks that would have kneecapped anyone else. Today, his Virgin Atlantic airlines is a byword for quality and customer service. Branson is arguably one of the most fulfilled people on the planet.

Dealing with fear of failure

Everyone can overcome fear of failure, with reliable techniques proven to work.

1. Treat failure as the first step towards success: You wouldn’t easily find a single example of anyone who became an outstanding success without steadfastly negotiating a string of devastating, crushing failures. Repeated failures yield repeated lessons, every one of them is a milestone on the path to success.

2. Reframe your goals: Education, upbringing and today’s highly competitive work environments teach you that it is important to succeed at first pass. Now that you understand that the fear is of failing the first time, set your success target further down. Once you aim at succeeding at your, fourth or fifth try, the first few failures will not affect you at all.

3. Make two plans: Work for success but plan for failure. Make a Plan B of what you will do next if your primary goal becomes too elusive. This calls for you to focus on the worst that could happen, take it seriously and plan a way forward despite failure.

4. Visualize positive outcomes but consider worst-case scenarios: There is abundant anecdotal and psychological evidence supporting the power of visualizing positive outcomes. However, while visualizing success, cultivate detachment and carefully examine the worst-case outcomes, and systematically deal with each.

Live outside your comfort zone

Common sense tells us that once an action or skill is only uncomfortable when it has not been mastered. Once it is familiar, through practice and repetition, it becomes a part of your comfort zone. Systematically acquiring new skills and activities that are outside your comfort zone will not only increase your professional standing and self-confidence but it will also reduce the number of things you could fail in.

Think of yourself when you were a child brushing your teeth by yourself for the first time. You were completely outside your comfort zone and this was the most challenging thing you had ever done. But over time, you mastered it and brushing your teeth became an effortless daily skill, something you could without even paying attention to it.

Today, you are the world’s best ‘tooth-brusher’. When it comes to your own teeth anyway.

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