Fear of Failure: Are You Lying to Yourself?

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. – Richard Feynman

Why do some people accomplish great feats like Elon Musk whereas, most others lag behind? Its true that the law of averages dictate that most people will have average lives and only some will live a truly outlier life. Yet, it remains true that almost all of us have the necessary tools to make our lives better. Then where does it go wrong?

(Follow me on YouTube- RaihanRiad)

Have you ever wanted to help someone else? To turn someone else into a proper human being? Probably your own children, or someone else you are responsible for? Well, no matter who that is, you are at most 50% responsible for how their lives turn out to be. You know who you are 100% responsible for though? That would be you, yourself. Yet why is it that we find it hard to conjure up enough motivation to do something about our own lives?
It’s becuase of fear of failure. It would suck if you tried to do the right things and then failed. You’ll be 100% responsible and you will feel miserable. Fear of failure is one of the worst internal enemies that each of us battle with regularly. It lies to us and makes us work on projects where we can shift the blame on other people.
For example: how many people would say they want to solve humanities biggest problems? Better yet, how many people think that they could actually do better than the people currently responsible?
Yet when you look at their personal lives, maybe one of their parent is fighting with depression. Don’t you think that person should try his/her best to solve that problem first? What about your big aspirations that you gave up on when reality became unbearable? Don’t you honestly think, if a human can climb Mount Everest, walk on the moon, make a space shuttle company with only 100 million dollars (i’m thinking Elon Musk) then a human, namely you, could also break into the music industry or learn about Artificial Intelligence, or become a heart surgeon (or whatever your dream was that you gave up on)?
You are a very special being with incredible powers of neuroplasticity, adaptability and resilience. Don’t sell yourself short. Fear of failure will make you shift focus to other people’s problems and justify that by saying that its nobler. But the reality is, deep down you are just afraid.
Tackle the problems that would immediately make your life better. Stop cowering behind projects that would either take an eternity to complete or where you can easily shift the blame of failure to others. That’s how you beat fear of failure.

Life is precious: Do what you love.

How improbable was human life on earth?

First, our universe had to come into existence out of nothing. Then laws of physics had to be sufficient to create us. Stars and galaxies had to form so that earth and other necessary materials get created. Almost nothing in our body is created by our sun. Heck even water is thought to have come here from outer space. Countless supernovae burnt to forge the elements we see all around us and is crucial for forming human bodies. Then evolution had to occur in such a way that humans were formed. And after all of these miracles, here we are. Singing, dancing, forming tribes and fighting, exploring, building relationships and dreaming about outer space. How sacred and precious existence is!

When I consider how improbable our existence is, it astonishes me. It also makes my heart fill up with gratitude. For a brief moment in the space-time continuum, we get to live. To listen to music. To laugh with each other. To explore, learn and share.

Hard work is overrated, do this instead

Extraordinary achievement is less about talent and more about special opportunity – Malcolm Gladwell.

21^st century civilization has stopped believing in the racist notions of ‘Good genes’ and ‘bad genes’. It used to be a very popular belief not so long ago. White people thought they were better than black people, Nazis deemed themselves better than the Jews and India was divided into ‘The Brahmans’ and ‘The Kshatriyas’, ‘The Vaishyas’ and ‘The Shudras’.

Now, when we see someone prosper, we take a different approach to justify it. We tend to assume that, the successful people are more hardworking. We think maybe they have made sacrifices that we failed to make.

This idea is way better than the former racist and culturist notions of ‘purity’. It has given us a solid blueprint of what it takes to be a better individual than the absurd notions of the past.

However, this modern way of thinking omits one of the biggest contributors to success- Luck.

This is Malcolm Gladwell. He has written several best sellers. In 2008, he published a book called Outliers.

(For those of you who don’t know what an outlier is: it’s the values that are very distant from the averages.)

Bill Gates is an outlier, The Beatles were an outlier, Lionel Messi is an outlier.

Outliers tend to outperform the masses by unfathomable margins. We the common people, can only dream about such results.

Malcolm digs deep into the lives of these types of people and finds out an uncomfortable truth. Luck plays an undeniable factor in their success.

Take Bill Gates for example. His school was very expensive and only wealthy parents could afford to get their children there. A mother’s club in the school, which had enormous funding set up a facility for computer programming, in the early 80’s, that most Universities didn’t have. This portal was extremely costly to access. But Gates having a rich mom, had no problem accessing it. When this facility was shut off, gates hung around University of Washington to practice coding as his house was at a walking distant from the U o W.

How many of us can expect to get such a head start? Malcolm’s book, which I urge you to read, is full of examples like this.

So, stop over idolizing the outliers and start looking for opportunities. What matters most in life is being in the right place in the right moment.

You don’t have to wait for luck to bring you the perfect opportunity. Go out there and look for opportunities. There are a lot of them hiding in plain sight.

(For starters, students can try: youthop.com

I’m sure there are many other online and offline resources out there to find you opportunities. Reach out to the local clubs, go to the toastmaster’s meetings, meet the Olympiad committees or just search for opportunities in your field in google. Even Facebook can help you find the right communities.)

( The title is there to catch eyeballs. I don’t mean to say hard work isn’t an essential factor for success. But it’s far from being the only one.)