Fear of Failure: Why Avoiding Risk Can Make Your Life Smaller
Fear of failure can stop people taking the risks required for growth, creativity and meaningful change. The answer isn't reckless risk-taking. It's learning to tolerate uncertainty, take intelligent risks and treat failure as information rather than a verdict on who you are. Avoid every possibility of failure and you also remove many of the possibilities that make life interesting.
Avoid failure. Avoid life.
Most of us spend an enormous amount of energy trying not to fuck up.
Pick the safe option.
Don’t look stupid.
Don’t lose the money.
Don’t say the wrong thing.
Don’t leave the job.
Don’t start until you’re certain.
Don’t jump until you know where you’re going to land.
Excellent.
Now imagine you succeed.
You remove uncertainty from your life completely.
Congratulations.
You’ve also removed a fair amount of life.
Welcome to NO RISK MODE.
Imagine Apple releases the iPhone 34.
Its killer feature?
NO RISK MODE.
Every choice is guaranteed.
Every relationship works.
Every investment pays off.
Every idea is approved.
Every new job is better than the last one.
Nobody rejects you.
Nobody criticises you.
Nothing embarrasses you.
You already know how everything ends.
Sounds fabulous.
For about a week.
Then you’d be bored shitless.
Because certainty is comfortable.
But uncertainty is alive.
Risk is not recklessness.
This is where the usual motivational crap falls over.
“Take risks!”
Okay.
Drive at 180 kilometres an hour with your eyes closed?
No.
Put your entire retirement fund on a horse?
Probably not.
Risk isn’t stupidity.
Intelligent risk means something worthwhile is possible, the outcome isn’t guaranteed, and you’ve decided the possibility is worth exposing yourself to the uncertainty.
That’s different.
And that uncertainty is the price of admission.
You can’t have creativity without the possibility the idea won’t work.
You can’t have courage without something to fear.
You can’t have change without leaving something known.
You can’t ask somebody out without giving them the opportunity to say no.
You can’t build an interesting life while demanding a guarantee first.
Creativity requires the possibility of failure.
Wieden+Kennedy gives us one of my favourite examples.
Old Spice.
The campaign everyone remembers as the bloke on the horse was actually “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”
The commercial became a cultural phenomenon.
But more importantly, it moved the business.
Wieden+Kennedy says the objective was to increase body-wash sales by 15%. By May 2010, Old Spice Red Zone Body Wash sales were up 60% year over year. By July, sales had doubled.
Here’s the bit people miss.
It wasn’t some genius waking up one morning with a guaranteed winning idea.
Wieden+Kennedy describes the campaign as the product of years of experimenting and learning with the brand.
Trying.
Learning.
Adjusting.
Risking.
Exactly.
What happens when organisations become afraid to fail?
Everything becomes safer.
Research it again.
Run another focus group.
Put another layer of approval around it.
Ask Legal.
Ask Finance.
Ask the CEO.
Make it a little less confronting.
A little less different.
A little less dangerous.
Until finally everyone is comfortable.
And nobody gives a shit.
The idea didn’t fail.
You killed it before it got the chance.
Failure isn’t the opposite of success.
Quite often it’s part of the price.
And yet we personalise it.
“My idea failed” becomes “I’m a failure.”
“I got rejected” becomes “I’m not good enough.”
“The business didn’t work” becomes “I shouldn’t have tried.”
That’s where fear gets its power.
Failure stops being an event and becomes an identity.
Don’t give it the promotion.
You tried something.
It didn’t work.
Now you know something you didn’t know before.
What next?
No risk. No story.
Think about every good story you’ve ever told about your own life.
I doubt many begin:
“Everything went exactly as planned.”
The things you remember are usually the edges.
The decision.
The uncertainty.
The ridiculous idea.
The moment you nearly didn’t.
The time you had no bloody clue what would happen next.
That’s where life was.
So yes.
Avoid failure if you want.
Just understand what else you may be avoiding with it.