Episode 18: Failure vs FEAR Of Failure

Believe it or not, one of the biggest obstacles to achieving financial freedom and an abundant and successful life can be summed up in three words: FEAR OF FAILURE. Notice that I did not say, Failure. I said Fear of Failure. In reaching any goal worth having there will be failures along the way—often many of them. No, it is the Fear of Failure that dooms most people to lives of frustration, living far below their potential.The reasons are actually quite simple. Fear of Failure does several things, all of them bad.1. It persuades us never to try, or2. It makes us give up on ourselves or our dream at the first major barrier,3. It paralyzes us at exactly the times when bold action is needed.4. And, it undermines the inner belief of “I can do that” that we have talked about already and are starting to build.But to deal with the fear of failure, we first have to look the possibility of failure in the eye. Every time I start on a new project that I think has any risk of failure, I do something that most of us find very uncomfortable. It is not comfortable for me either, but I have learned that doing it is one of the best predictors and guarantors of success I know. What is that something?Before I ever take action, I ask myself these questions:1. “What is the worst thing that could happen if I try this?”2. “Can I survive if the worst thing goes wrong?” I’m not thinking about the kind of physical survival that could happen in a war or natural disaster I mean can I survive it economically and can the relationships that I cherish survive it.3. If the worst happens can I do more than just survive the failure; can I rebuild my dream and try again?My experience has been that in almost all cases, even the worst case situation can be overcome, but looking at the risks squarely, in the beginning, takes the fear out of the equation.Fear of Failure is the biggest cause of actual failure, usually because of one basic reason: Fear of failure causes us to give less than our best. It is human nature to build in an excuse, “I could have succeeded but I didn’t have the chance to give it my full attention.” Whatever that excuse is, banish it from the beginning. It is a little scary to put all your hopes and dreams into a project, but anything less almost guarantees failure. There is a saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Mark Twain turned that around into a saying that is much better when you are talking about committing to a project. His phrase was, “Put all your eggs in one basket: and watch that basket.”The lesson from all this is very simple: Look the risk of failure squarely in the eye and decide if you can deal with that risk if it happens. If so, commit completely and make sure that failure doesn’t actually happen.Every successful business I have ever created has had one or more “near-death experiences” in which failure was possible. But because I had faced those possibilities in advance and was committed to success in spite of those risks, I managed in almost every case to turn potential failure into success. Out of 11 businesses I founded, one did fail, but the failure was of the business. It was not my failure and I went on to more successes. You can too.