Fear guarantees failure
You're afraid of being mediocre.
I know this because almost everyone is. It's the ambient hum underneath everything ambitious people do. The nagging sense that you're not quite where you should be. That your work isn't good enough yet. That starting something new will just reveal, once and for all, that you don't have it.
That's the problem, your fear is the only thing actually keeping you mediocre.
The Two Fears
The graveyard of the projects you've abandoned, the opportunities you've let pass. I know the grim reapers responsible for those bodies.
The fear of failure and the fear of success.
They sound like opposites but they're not. They're two masks for the same underlying terror: the fear of finding out what you are ACTUALLY capable of.
Let me tell you that you don't have to succumb to your fears. That people beat them every day. The ones you look up to, the ones who seem to do extraordinary things, they're not fearless, they've just learned to move toward the fear instead of away from it.
What If I Fail?
You know this one.
It's the voice that says don't start because you might not be good enough. It tells you to stay in the comfortable uncertainty of "I could if I wanted to" rather than risk actually finding out if you have the chops.
The funny part about the fear of failure is that it's seldom REALLY about the failure itself. You've failed before. You've survived rejection, disappointment, things not working out. Instead, the fear is almost always about what failure might mean. That you're not as talented as you thought you were. That you might have than what it takes. That the gap between who you are and who you want to be is insurmountable.
So you don't cross it. You don't even try. After all, if you don't try, you can't fail, so you'll never need to even face the possibility that you might not be good enough.
This fear makes you procrastinate on important projects. It makes you overprepare until the window closes. It makes you set goals so modest that achieving them proves nothing. It whispers that you need more training, more credentials, more certainty before you can begin.
The cruelest part of this is that the fear doesn't actually put you in stasis. By not trying, you guarantee the outcome you were trying to avoid. You fail by default. You lose by forfeit.
The fear of failure produces failure with 100% reliability.
Here's what you need to know: everyone who has done great work has went through a phase where their work was embarrassing. The initial attempt is ALWAYS humiliating, and the first draft is ALWAYS garbage.
But all this is not evidence you should stop. In fact, that IS the path.
Failure IS the path: there is no way to the good version except through the bad. The people who make great things aren't the ones who skipped the rough phase. They're the ones who pushed through it.
What If I Succeed?
Fear of success is a strange one and it's hard to admit you have it.
But think about it. Have you ever been on the verge of a breakthrough and suddenly found reasons to pull back? Maybe you picked a fight, or missed a deadline. Perhaps you coerced a partner to convince you that this particular opportunity wasn't quite right.
That's the fear of success.
If you actually become the GREAT person you've been saying you want to be, your entire life reorganizes around that new reality. Your relationships and identity will change.
Some people have built their whole self-concept around striving. Around being the underdog, the almost, the one who would be great if only circumstances were different. Success would destroy that identity. They'd have to become someone new, and they find the idea to be very scary indeed.
There's also the fear of what comes next. Success doesn't end the game. It starts a new level where the stakes are higher and more people are watching. If you write a successful book, you have to write another one. If you get the promotion, you have to perform at that level. The destination you've been dreaming about turns out to be just another starting line.
It's the fear of your own potential. The evasion of your own destiny. The strange human tendency to shrink from the very greatness you're capable of.
The fear of success makes people sabotage themselves at the exact moment of breakthrough. Not when they're failing, but when they can finally see that success is possible. That's when the internal alarms go off. That's when they find a way to blow it up.
My Personal Fear Of Success
I have a funny, personal story around this. The SysLS childhood was tough and traumatic by most standards. I struggled through school and failed upwards in every way you can imagine.
I made a million dollars playing poker and lost it all within a few months long before I turned 21. My first start-up died before it took off, and my second burned mid-flight and came crashing down into rubble.
None of these really hurt me, because they played into my identity that I was the underdog.
Somewhere along the way, I had the choice between joining somewhere that would reinforce the idea that I was playing from behind, or to join a place that most people would consider, undoubtedly, world-class. It was like being a tennis player and having the choice between being Djokovic or a high school coach, and I almost went with being the high school coach.
My wife was absolutely flabbergasted, and said: "SysLS, if you are an underdog your whole life, then you are not actually an underdog, you are just a dog."
That was the day things really changed for me. It made me realize I was actually, unconsciously self-sabotaging myself, and that needed to stop.
The very next day, I went on to make the choice that would allow me to BE Djokovic.
They're The Same Fear
Anyway, let's get back to the topic.
Here's what I want you to see: these aren't two different fears. They're two expressions of the same underlying terror.
Both fears are about change. Both fears are about discovering who you actually are when you stop hiding. Both fears are about the death of your current self and the birth of someone new.
Fear of failure says: if I try and fail, I'll discover I'm not good enough. Fear of success says: if I try and succeed, I'll have to become someone I don't recognize.
Either way, if you give to either of these fears, you stay the same. Either way, you remain in the comfortable purgatory of potential, never tested, never transformed. The fears work together to keep you exactly where you are.
You Need To Realize The Fears Are Lying
The fear of failure tells you that discovering your limits would be catastrophic. But you've already survived failures. You've survived rejection, disappointment, plans that didn't work out. You're still here. The imagined catastrophe is always worse than the real thing. And on the other side of failure is information. Clarity. The chance to try again with better knowledge.
The fear of success tells you that change would be unbearable. But you've already changed countless times. You're not the same person you were five years ago, or ten, or twenty. Change didn't destroy you then. It won't destroy you now. The person you'd become through success isn't a stranger. It's you, expanded.
A man cannot step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not same man.
- Heraclitus
Both fears are using outdated threat models. They evolved to keep you safe in a world where standing out from the tribe meant death, where trying something new meant risking starvation, where change meant danger. But you don't live in that world anymore. The greater danger now is stagnation. The real risk is staying exactly where you are while your potential slowly erodes.
Move Toward The Fear
Here's my little secret about people who do extraordinary things: they don't have less fear than everyone else. They just have a different relationship with it.
They've learned to read fear as a signal that something important is at stake. The presence of fear means they care about the outcome. It means growth is possible on the other side.
They move to where they need to go DESPITE the fear, not away BECAUSE of the fear.
This doesn't mean being reckless. It means recognizing that the fears lying to you, that they're magnifying imaginary threats while hiding the real cost of inaction. It means choosing the discomfort of uncertainty over the deadening comfort of never finding out.
You can start small. Take one step toward the thing that scares you. Write the first page of the thing you've been avoiding. Send the email. Make the call. Apply for the job. The fear will scream at you to stop. Do it anyway. And then notice: you survived. The catastrophe didn't happen. The fear was lying.
Each time you move toward fear and survive, the fear loses power. Each time you prove that you can handle the thing you were afraid of, your capacity expands. This is how confidence is actually built. Not through positive thinking, but through accumulated evidence that you can face hard things and come out the other side.
The Real Choice
You have one life. You can spend it running from fear, staying safe, keeping your potential wrapped in protective packaging so it never gets tested or scratched. This is dying with your music still in you, as the saying goes.
Or you can move toward the fear.
You can accept that failure is information, not identity. That success is growth, not destruction. That the fears keeping you stuck are ancient survival mechanisms misfiring in a world they weren't designed for.
The person you could become is waiting on the other side of the fear. Not a stranger.
Just you, larger. You, tested.
You, transformed by the act of facing the thing you were afraid to face.
I can't promise that if you move toward your fear, everything will work out. Maybe you'll try and fail. Maybe you'll succeed and find that success brings its own challenges. What I can promise is that you'll find out who you actually are. And that's worth more than a lifetime of wondering.
The fears will always be there. The question is whether you'll let them run your life.
Move toward the fear. Start today.
