Fear of Failure

I have a massive fear of failure.

I know, I’ve read it, said it to myself, and others.

• There is no such thing as failure, only learning.
• You only fail when you give up.
• Failure is nothing but a step in the journey towards your eventual destination.
  

Yet, there is a part of me that is ruled by this fear.

This fear is connected to the feeling that “I am not enough”, which is connected to yet another voice that says “I have potential”, as my teachers in school mentioned to my parents during parent-teacher meetings.

While everyone growing up had the truest of intentions - I truly believe most humans are well-intentioned and very rarely is someone truly evil and acts from a place of malice - but despite having the best intentions, you have no idea what impact your words or actions might have on others.

And only recently, through therapy, did I uncover the interconnectedness of my different parts, and the impact that my childhood experiences had on me.

In my therapy sessions, one of the biggest threads in my life that have become clearer is just how many actions or motivations had two energies, but I was never able to distinguish between the two. They looked the same

Energy 1 - my natural inclination and curiosity to become better, explore more, expand my horizons. This is a positive force, driven by abundance and optimism.

Energy 2 - my fear that if I did not do so and successfully, I will never “be enough” and therefore never “realise my potential”. Without a sharper lens, this force looks positive, but is in fact driven by fear.

Why write about this now?

One of my long-standing goals is to learn to code.

I’ve tried to learn to code since 2018, and reached various degrees of progress. Always, something or the other would lead me to drop off from the journey.

Many reasons why I dropped off - I lacked direction, mentorship, self-confidence that I can do it, something else in the business came up and that became my #1 focus, and so on.

The detours weren’t for naught. Those other things are now valuable skills in my toolbox. I’m grateful for those journeys and everything it allowed me to learn about and practice, such as marketing, SEO, product design, cold outreach, taking sales demos, and so on.

This year, 2024, I restarted my journey to learn to code, with the intention that this will be the final time I start this journey. Because I intend to go through with it, and not allow anything external or internal to derail me.

And as I embarked, these fear-based emotions and feelings that I wrote about came up and hit me with their strongest force.

But something is different about this time. This time, I am aware of the parts acting within me, and the fears that drive some of these parts.

This time, I am in the driver’s seat.

Self-sabotage

It’s a saying that you become the thing you hate or try to run away from. Fear, which is the force that makes you run away from something (as opposed to the positive force of running towards something), helps manifest the very outcome you’re trying to avoid.

In the past, I’d chalk this up to self-sabotage. But I understand better now. It’s a misalignment between my various parts.

Get shit done - this part of me likes to hustle hard and through that hustle get to the next, next, next, next and final step as quickly as possible. It’s a powerful, positive force, but left unchecked, it can leave me completely drained and injured (in case of exercise).

Get shit done is the part that has helped me quench my feelings of not being enough, that if I work hard and really try, rack my head for long enough, I can figure things out. Because if I don’t, I won’t “realize my potential” and therefore never “be enough”.

I am running towards

Thanks to therapy, my partner, my closest friends and the people in my life who have positively impacted me, I understand and believe in myself more than I used to.

I believe my positive forces will carry me in the direction I deeply desire to. Without my fear-driven parts taking over the driving seat, and causing me to steer and potentially crash without realising it.

This time, I will complete my journey to code.

Because I am already enough.

‍

--

‍

Conversations inspired by this post

A friend reached out and sent me a few messages. I'm sharing their messages in bold, followed by my replies.

Friend: Few questions came up on my mind, while reading your blog and drawing parallels to my own life:

1.⁠ ⁠Have you actually failed really badly at something? Which liberated you from people's acceptance? (This happened with me, and I stopped caring after sometime, because I realised now that I am a failure, how can a failure fail more? It was a very liberating feeling)

2.⁠ ⁠⁠Can you feel pleasure of win without fear of lose? (Was reading this book called "dopamine nation", where the author speaks about pleasure and pain balance, which is actually managed by dopamine levels. Alot of gamblers would like to lose before they won big, because that's when they felt higher dopamine kick. You can see the same with sportsman and atheletes as well).

Me: I agree with both these thoughts, but these are very logical reasoning based thoughts.

Logically reason with the fear telling it that I cannot become a bigger failure anyway. I think it works, but I think emotional parts don’t resolve through logic (but logic can be used to carry an emotional part when it’s not feeling up to it).

Whereas the feeling from within that is driven by fear is an emotional part of a person. Everyone has fear due to evolution, and then there is fear due to life experiences.

I am more referring to the fear developed from life experiences, which builds on top of evolutionary fear.

Friend: I think you can't really eliminate fear.

Fear can be used as a fuel for you to get where you want.. or cripple you down (I think that's what you meant by positive and negative force?)

Me: The purpose is definitely not to eliminate fear. After all, being human is to fear.

I think the purpose is to untangle sources of fear that do not need to be. You work on the root, the fear disappears. You don’t need any reasoning with the emotion after that.

The other is to understand if and when fear does come up, to recognise it, be kind to it, say thanks for informing me of what could go wrong, I got it from here. And continue marching forward, informed by the fear, but not directed by it.

Friend: Why is it so important to you to learn how to code?

One of the pillars of my life is the pursuit of freedom. One aspect of freedom is building the skills/abilites that help me get there.

When it comes to the business side of things (i.e. work aspect of life, things we do where end outcome is money from the world), my vision of the future is that as building software becomes more democratised, the ability for smaller and smaller teams, the ultimate small team being one person, to build software becomes bigger.

Another vision for the future is the mom-pop-ification of software. Everyone won't be using one software to do one thing. If this were true, there would only be 1 note taking app in the world. I believe more people will discover niche versions of software that tickle their unique tastes. That taste could very wide, for eg. it could even be that they simply match the ideas of the person making the software.

Anyway, that's how learning to code fits into this vision - so that I may be able to be that one person company/builder.

This leaves out so many nuances. I can think of a dozen of them by myself, and I have full context of my own thoughts. Feel free to drop your thoughts! For eg. Why not build with a cofounder? Well because building with a cofounder doesn't satisfy my own itch to learn.