The fearful parts of our brains are on overdrive. They constantly scan for danger, working harder than an insomniac CEO on a caffeine kick. There is, after all, plenty in the world to be afraid of, including wild tigers, authoritarian governments, Pepsi shortages, and grammar.
Fear is a natural part of life, and works to keep us out of harm’s way. But it also has a habit of cropping up in places that you don’t need it.
Failure is something that many of us have been conditioned to dread, and to avoid at any cost. Our education systems hammer that into us. We value the destination (the right answer) over the journey (the thought process).
This makes sense in a lot of situations — particularly if you’re a bus driver. No passengers are going to be happy when the bus to the airport ends up outside a derelict Asda, no matter how pretty the drive was.
But fear of failure can hold us back from creative pursuits. Because when we’re afraid of something, we avoid it. This ingrained survival mechanism is trying to protect us, but instead it just makes us miserable.
1,000 boxes, one big prize
Here’s a way I tried to reframe fear of failure: imagine you’re in a room with 1,000 boxes, each of which is locked with a combination lock.
All bar one of the boxes is empty; the box that is full contains one million pounds, or some Bitcoin, or 17 Martian Elons or whatever the currency is when you read this.
You know the combination to the lock on the box with the massive cash prize inside. But you don’t know which box, and therefore which lock, that combination is for.
The chances are, if you want that money you’re going to have to make quite a few wrong choices first. You’re going to put the wrong combination into a lot of locks before you get it right.
So would you give up, on the basis that you’d fail a lot before you finally succeeded?
Failure is a necessary path to success
Life is a bit like the box game. The dividends of playing may not be quite so massive, nor arrive in one windfall.
They may not even be that obvious. You may never see a single Martian Elon, depending on the exchange rate.
But things go wrong all the time. You’ll do things and they won’t work out. But all you need to do is remember the box game — every time you discover one of the wrong boxes, you’re getting closer to the right box.
Failure is a necessary path to success. You’ll never wake up cradling an Oscar that wasn’t there the night before and think, ‘Hey, guess I should go into the movie business seeing as I know it’s going to work out!’
As long as you’re trying to open boxes, you’re doing good. Unless you’re a burglar, in which case: step away from the safe.
