For years people were scared to take action because they had a fear of failure.
Starting a band and becoming a career musician in the 1930’s was a really scary thing. The economy wasn’t great, many people could barely afford to eat, and people simply didn’t have the luxury of getting to choose what they wanted to do for a living.
But that was 80 years ago and things are different now.
Now we can learn any skill we want to just by googling it or watching YouTube videos.
Now any can write a blog post, click a button, and instantly get it in front of millions of people.
We know that if we try hard enough then we have the resources that will allow us to succeed.
In 1930 people had to worry about feeding their families. In 2018 there are soup kitchens and food drives you can go to. In a worst case scenario you at least know that you won’t starve.
So this fear of failure mindset is shifting.
Now we have fear of fear.
We’re so scared of feeling the emotion of fear that we avoid actions that may cause us to feel it.
It’s easier to avoid fear than to face it and live with the benefits.
This is especially common with the millennial generation (myself included).
Millennials grew up with cell phones and computers to hide behind.
Instead of doing scary things like walking up and awkwardly talking to a girl, we would just friend them on Facebook.
We never had to learn to face our fears to make relationships happen. We simply chose a path with less resistance. A less scary path.
I’ve even been broken up with via text message, because the other person feared the pain and discomfort of breaking up with me face to face.
In a society where we have unlimited options, doing the scary thing is pretty far down on the list. We fear that it will be uncomfortable.
But how many of these fears are grounded in reality?
How many times have we gotten ourselves so worked up about something we were scared to do, only to do it and realize that it really wasn’t that scary after all…
We don’t fear the consequences, because doing the scary thing like starting a business or talking to the girl of your dreams could result in tremendous benefits.
But what we do fear it the fear itself.
We’ve been conditioned to avoid anything that may cause us to experience the emotion of fear.
Fear is not your enemy. It is a compass pointing you to the areas where you need to grow. – Steve Pavlina
For a practical exercise on how to deal with your fear, I recommend watching the Ted Talk on Fear-Setting by Tim Ferriss.
He walks you through an exercise where you define exactly what you are scared of, what the worst case scenario would be, and what steps you could take to recover if the worst were to happen.
By going through this process you get very clear on specific worst-case outcomes if everything you fear were to all happen at once (which is very unlikely).
And then you come up with action steps for what you would do to repair the damage and recover from the worst-case scenario.
So where many people would have you define your goals, Tim Ferriss would have you define your fears, because it’s usually our ambiguous fears that stop us from taking action and doing what would really make us happy.
And for more encouragement I want to share with you a short blurb from Seth Godwin’s Blog, offering some wisdom on fear in one of his recent blog posts.
I give you “I have fear” by Seth Godin.
There’s a common mistranslation that causes us trouble.
We say, “I am afraid,” as if the fear is us, forever. We don’t say, “I am a fever” or “I am a sore foot.” No, in those cases, we acknowledge that it’s a temporary condition, something we have, at least for now, but won’t have forever.
“Right now, I have fear about launching this project,” is quite different from, “I’m afraid.”
If you liked this post and want to get similar inspiration delivered right to you, then I suggest signing up for the SAI email list by clicking the green button below. I’ll send you an occasional email with inspiration, encouragement, and content meant to help you level up your art career.
4