Okay, so I may be the only one with a thing against fester, but I bet when you were a kid, you weren’t supposed to say fuck in front of your parents, right? (Or, according to some Amazon reviewers, use it as an adult 732 times in one book.) And you were probably also not supposed to bring home a test or a report card bearing a big red F as a symbol of your poor grasp of trigonometry or inability to memorize pertinent details of wars that were fought two hundred years before you were born.
That F was for FAILURE, and it struck another F-word—FEAR—into the hearts of schoolchildren everywhere. Forget about your own level of personal integrity for a moment: Would an F lose you TV privileges? Would your allowance be withheld? Would you be forced—the horror—to attend summer school?
Unacceptable! (And I’m sure there were much worse consequences/punishments depending on what kind of school you went to or what kind of parents you had.)
Well, it’s no surprise that kids who were brought up under a constant threat of failure might internalize it a step too far. Some of them (about half, according to my survey) become adults for whom the teacher’s scrawl has morphed into a proverbial scarlet letter. Fictional Puritan minx Hester Prynne had to sew an A for adulteress on all of her clothes. These peeps are staring down a big red F—not on their report cards, but emblazoned on their chests—branding them for life as FAILURES if they don’t stay seventeen steps ahead at all times.
Eventually the fear of failure becomes just as powerful and punishing as the failure itself, and it can be crippling. (Not to mention ruin a lot of perfectly good shirts.) By being afraid of a potential bad outcome, you cause yourself even more agony surrounding the whole endeavor—whether it’s passing a test, getting a promotion, or correctly assembling any piece of IKEA furniture on the first try.
The resulting mental röran* leads to…
Have you ever worked with or for someone who just couldn’t make a decision to save their ever-loving soul?
I once had a coworker whose to-do list was composed entirely of avoidance. Avoid approving that marketing plan. Avoid signing off on that copy. Avoid responding to those emails. This woman emphatically did not have her shit together and she—and everyone around her—suffered accordingly.
Her problem was not perfectionism (a battle all its own, which I’ll discuss in the next section); perfectionists tend to do, and redo, and re-redo things as opposed to never doing them at all.
It wasn’t lack of understanding about what the job required; she’d been in the industry for a long time and was supersmart.
It wasn’t even a personality thing; she was charming and lovely when she wanted to be—she just never “wanted to be” returning your calls.
No, I think her inability to make a decision—to either focus or commit—was about fear. Maybe she feared being reprimanded (although she may have been bringing more ire down upon herself by not doing anything than she would have by doing some things poorly). Maybe she feared getting fired if she made too many bad decisions in a row—but of course, you have to make one to get to the whole “in a row” part.
Whatever the case, her strategy—avoidance—was shit.
And ultimately, fearing things to the point of paralysis seemed to catch up to her—in addition to being on the ass-end of many irate voice mails, she eventually did get fired. Not winning.
As FDR once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I would add unruly dogs, skydiving, and cancer to the mix, though I do not personally fear failure. But for everyone who does, as I said here, there are very few situations in which anyone is going to die on the table because you made the wrong decision. It doesn’t have to be so fear-inducing.
And if you’re just a regular person with regular decisions to make, I’d wager that none of them are so critical that they should keep you up at night at your virtual sewing machine embroidering virtual Fs onto all your polos.
Instead, I suggest sewing yourself an A—not for adulteress, but for acceptance!
When you accept that failure is an option, you move it from the realm of anxiety-inducing anticipation into a reality that you’ll deal with when (and more importantly, IF) it ever happens. Your energy is better spent on accomplishing goals in the here and now than on worrying about failure in the abstract. And if you do fail, it’s not the end of the world—unless you were supposed to warn us about that world-destroying asteroid I mentioned here.
Failure is just a thing that happens. Sometimes you bring it on yourself, like when you go to Burning Man without adequate sunscreen and Wet Wipes. Other times, it just sort of happens to you, like when you majored in astronomy without knowing Asteroid 4179 Toutatis was going to collide with the planet on your watch. You can’t win ’em all.
In other words: In order to get your shit together, you need to stop giving a fuck about failure. Which is an excellent use of F-words, if I do say so myself.