Why am I scared of failing fast? Why do we spend hours and hours in preparation for important things only to tank them anyway? I think it comes from a belief that “opportunities are limited”. And for me, that comes from my parents’ upbringing, and hence mine. When they got opportunities in their time, it was critical for them to make the best of them – because opportunities were indeed, limited.
For me however this is barely true anymore. I’m privileged enough to have more than a basic set of skills, tools and financial support to sustain myself. A few missed opportunities is probably barely going to make a difference for me.
I know it sounds like I’m coming at this from a “work and career” perspective here but I mean this for everything. I have a terribly strong fear of failure in me. It shows up in long-term “important” actions like wanting to quit my job sometimes (and here maybe it’s aligned with my values for that to exist), but it also shows up in the most minuscule of actions. I only put up code changes once I’ve made them “as perfect” as possible, because I’m afraid of “too many” comments or feedback on them. (Even though I don’t need to be.) Failing fast should probably work much better for most communities, and at some level I do know this. I should be able to bring up issues and problems out in the open, as fast as possible. It’s not “on me” to fix everything. The more problems that exist, the happier my company would be, ideally. These are people who enjoy problem solving.
I’m afraid of going on dates until I feel like I’m in a good place, even though.. I think, in reality – all of that barely makes a difference. I can be the most perfect version of myself and it still won’t work. Or I can be flawed and rough and it still might. Plenty of people in the world, right?
(Emotional) tunnel vision probably has a big role to play here too.
It’s the same thing with difficult emotional conversations as well. Scared of testing the waters. Afraid of saying the wrong thing too soon.. when in reality – the faster you fuck up – the faster you improve and grow. I’d heard this advice from someone on how to do college best. It was that one should try to get a C or a B right in the first semester itself – it’ll free you up. Though it made sense to me even at the time, I wasn’t fully able to absorb it. And then there’s this other piece of how a bad grade might also not feel like enough of a failure sometimes. I still think it’s brilliant advice though. I see one problem with it however – it’s often hard to fail deliberately. It’s hard to go into something “knowing” you’re likely to fail at it.
The only thing you can really do is continue to set yourself up for failure (without thinking you’re doing that), by doing every little scary or difficult thing that you’re pushing away. Probably best to do a quick cost-benefit analysis though – we don’t want to be impulsive and risk getting traumatized.
The other reason could be low self-esteem, of course. The lack of trust and confidence that I’ll be able to cope with failure, that I’ll be able to build myself up again. I’ve been beating myself up lately about how “I haven’t really failed enough” and that’s the reason these new failures feel so big. But today as I’m thinking about it, I think that’s not correct. I have failed enough. I do remember how much some of the “hardships” I’ve had to face in the past have affected me. Like if I made a list – I’m sure I could come up with at least 10 ten things which at the time felt like “the end of the world”. Yet, this month, I felt like everything bad that was happening to me was for the first time in my life. So maybe we forget how strong we are? Maybe we forget how much we’ve coped with? There’s a famous quote by Donald Winnicott, which is – “The catastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened.” It makes sense – trauma is probably so painful that it makes sense for us to suppress it when it happens – but often it manifests as fears instead.
Does that mean my fear of failures points to a bunch of unprocessed failures? It’s possible.
I’m sure personality types do have a role to play here. What makes some people grow from failures, and what makes some people more fearful instead? It’s possible that different people are afraid of different types of failures though, so it might just feel like we’re alone in our fears.
Didn’t really get too far on this but here’s what I have so far (for myself, at least)
- Beliefs about scarcity and limited opportunities, people
- Beliefs about self’s inabilities to cope with failure, to cope with the emotions that accompany failure
- Hazy memory, inability to collect and remember past failures
- Potential unprocessed failures
- I might not truly be as fearful as I think I am
- This might have some truth to it since I’m up at 5 am not giving fucks about my sleep schedule, even though last week was traumatic and I’d told myself I that I need to be disciplined
Okay, I think I have one more. People like me don’t value our time enough. And I don’t mean this in a harsh way. But if I did, I’d probably be getting more done – I’d be failing more and succeeding more. I’d spend more of my time facing my fears than I’d spend living in those fears. This one’s good, this one’s important I think. And seriously fuck the pandemic excuse. Anyone who’s saying they’re not growing during the pandemic is probably not being creative and intentional enough*. It’s interesting, this one was present in the question all along. We were talking about failing “fast”. There’s clearly a time dimension there. 🙂
*Of course, assuming one is safe, healthy and has a job.
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