Do you have Fear of Failure? Or Success? 🤔 · Selling Online / Prime Mover

Do you have Fear of Failure? Or Success? 🤔

The big ol’ fear of failure… We all know it and we’ve all had it at least in one part of our lives. It’s a sneaky and a very deadly killer. There is a lot of aspects of this phenomenon but I want to focus on its effects on procrastination.

You don’t want to start the work at hand because you’re terrified that you’ll screw it up or it won’t be perfect, or maybe someone will criticize you. But here’s the truth—you are never going to be fully ready. These fears are illogical yet unbelievably logical.

Hear me out; mistakes are what make us human. There is nobody, and I mean nobody, free from mistakes. If you’re waiting for the “perfect” time to start, that time will never come by waiting. Because you have to understand that, perfection does not exist in human nature. We are made of mistakes. And the closest we can come to perfection comes from imperfect action. Let that sink in. Internalize it.

Or here’s a twist—maybe you’re actually afraid of succeeding. Yep, it sounds strange, but sometimes, we may be scared of what success will demand of us. We know if we succeed, the bar will be set higher next time, the next quest will be way harder and we won’t be able to keep up, and that pressure can paralyze us.

It mostly comes from self-limiting beliefs that we have deep inside. Even though you can crush the next task at hand, you simply do not have any belief in yourself that you think you’ll be the one getting crushed in the next step.

I know this feeling very well. While I was applying for game developer jobs 2-3 years ago and the companies would want me to do a demo for them and more often than not, the requirements were a piece of cake for me. But yet, I did not do most of them. Because that I had such fear of failure, that If I would fail, I would be ashamed and everybody would think less of me.

And the worst part is that I also had a fear of success, and it was bigger than the fear of failure. I thought it was a “lucky chance” that I got this demo, which was easy for me, and the job would be way much harder, and of course, the company would regret accepting me after a maximum of 1 week.

Yeah, it was a tough time.

You wonder the solution to these? Forget perfection. The only way to succeed is to start messy, make mistakes, and learn. And forget the next step. Crush your current step. And realize that you had crushed “a step”. You can do it because you proved that you have ability to the thing. And the other thing is; others have done it, so can you.

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