Fear of Failure
In the industrialized world, the world of driveways,
parkways, dishwashers, and dumbwaiters, a rational fear
for our individual survival isn’t even in the top ten. Wild
animals don’t threaten our existence, the diseases that
were rampant a century ago do not exist, and crime in
our biggest cities is more rare than ever before.
So what is there to be afraid of?
Failure.
legs, you can’t run a marathon. Successful marathon
runners haven’t figured out how to avoid being tired,
they’ve figured out where to put the tired when it
arrives. If you’re not willing to be tired, you cant run.
If you’re willing to imagine failure, you’re unable to be
free.
In just a few generations, we’ve gone from “The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself” to “The fear we feel
is the fear of freedom.”
What happened at the Solvay?
Our schools, our marketers, and our culture reinforce
this fear daily. The heartbreak of psoriasis, the
humiliation of underarm odor, but most of all, the utter
horror of trying and failing.
In 1927, the Solvay congress in Brussels assembled 29
physicists. This photo captures the all-star line-up, titans
including Heisenberg*, Einstein, Curie and Bohr.
Failure is almost never as bad as we fear it will be, but
it’s our fear that we fell, not the failure.
Seventeen people in the photo won the Nobel Prize in
Physics.
Worst of all, we’ve so amplified our internal narrative
that we can’t help but associate freedom with failure.
*There is some uncertainty as to whether Heisenberg
was actually there.
And so our fear of failure transfers effortlessly into fear
of freedom.
The thing: Many of these people won the Nobel Prize
after the conference was held.
Consider our avoidance of feeling tired. If you’re
unwilling to be tired, unwilling to feel fatigue in your
They didn’t get invited because they had won the
Nobel Prize. They won the Nobel Prize because they
got invited.
PEOPLE LIKE US DO THINGS LIKE THIS.