I'd like to start off this sub-board talking about how it is okay to fail. In fact, failure in some form is pretty much inevitable in our lives, and we must not spend our whole lives fearing failure and then malding over those failures when they do occur. I know because I've done both before in my life and I don't think that it has benefited me much, if at all.
Yes of course the fear of failure in a healthy dose can help you become motivated, however when we worry too much we become completely paralysed and may end up actually inducing the failure we were worrying about so much in the first place. Some might call that "the law of attraction" or "manifesting", however I prefer not to use such terms, but rather to think in terms of the anxiety we create for ourselves, which occupies our subconscious, interferes with our sleep and relaxation, and ultimately sabotages our performance to an extent it creates the very situation we feared the most.
I believe the answers to a lot of problems surrounding the fear of failure, as well as how to deal with failure when it does occur, can be found in literature. I would like to draw attention to the concept of
Amor fati or the concept of loving fate. The concept of fate can be traced back at least as far as Ancient Greece with myths surrounding
Moirai, or "the fates" as they are known in English. I will not go into detail here about them, but in simple terms, it was believed that these Moirai were divine entities that ensured that each person lives out their prescribed destiny that was assigned to them "by the laws of the universe". We find references to the concept of loving fate in the early Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, although the idea of
Amor fati elucidated most cogently by Friedrich Nietzsche in his writings entitled "Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is" which I must confess I have not myself read, although I do plan on getting around to it at some point
Nietzsche tells us the following:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it
Now, that might sound quite pretentious and complicated, so I will do my best to explain it in layman's terms. I believe what Nietzsche is getting at, is the idea that many things will happen to us in our life, some of them will be good, but some of them will be bad. Outside rare irredeemably bad occurrences, most bad things that happen to us can provide some opportunity for growth and or education. Now, that doesn't make these things any less bad when they happen to us, but the point is that
we cannot prevent bad things from happening to us, but we can control our reactions to them. We can let it destroy us, or we can learn from the experience. Moreover he would go as far as to say we should relish every opportunity for growth and make this our narrative. I will discuss more on narratives later.
In the context of the fear of failure, despite how hard we try we will inevitably fail at things. I don't for a second mean to suggest that means we shouldn't try our hardest and take every reasonable precaution to prevent failure, but rather when it does occur, we temper our reaction to it and act in ways that promote future growth. No one is perfect, and everyone will fail at something!
The Control Dichotomy.
I would now like to raise the subject of the "Control dichotomy". The basic premise is that some things are under our control and some things are not under our control. Our friends Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius have quite a lot to say on the matter as well.
Marcus Aurelius blesses us with the following nuggets of wisdom regarding the dichotomy of control in his
Meditations which are translated from the original ancient Greek and worded in such a way to make them more accessible.
Our control and power are limited to our own thoughts.
as well as
Do not waste time on what you cannot control.
and finally
You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
We know that Marcus Aurelius himself read the Discourses of Epictetus and was heavily influenced by him. I will now quote from Epictetus.
Epictetus tells us the following:
it is not in our control to have everything turn out exactly as we want, but it is in our control to control how we respond to what happens
as well as
The key to control is not in controlling external events, but in controlling your own mind
Why am I sharing all these quotes from ancient Stoic philosophy? The point I intend to make is that we will be blind sided by factors outside our control, but we must do the best with whatever situation we find ourselves in. We can choose to react and how we want to proceed. A key realisation I made that there are facts which in themselves are not necessarily good or bad, but rather it is our perception of those facts and the narratives we create for ourselves.
Let's say we have failed at something important to us. We can choose to create a narrative that we ourselves our "failures" or we can instead choose to take it as a learning experience about how we respond to pressure and stress, as well as our own strengths and weaknesses, and change our plans accordingly. Narratives are very powerful, and the most important narrative is the narrative we tell ourselves in our internal monologue.
Do not let your internal narrative be a negative one, I promise you that is under your control, no matter how bad you think things are.
Dealing with failure
Something I still struggle with myself is not being number 1 at everything I do. Throughout most of my teenage years, I was able to succeed at pretty much everything I tried and when a rare failure did occur it was absolutely devastating for me personally. Even to this day when I lose in a competitive endeavour, it deeply pains me. In these times, I try to remember another quote from our good friend Epictetus.
Epictetus tells us:
Socrates and men of his stamp.—Why then, pray, if we are endowed by nature for such greatness, do not all men, or many, become like him? What, do all horses become swift, all dogs keen to follow the scent? What then? Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates; but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest.
Simply put, we are naturally talented at some things, and not naturally talented at other things. Again this takes us back to the control dichotomy, our natural talents are not under our control, and we can only do the best with what we have and whatever our natural talents are. Rather than worrying about what others have achieved, we should concern ourselves only with our own performance. If we know we tried our hardest then we have no reason to feel sad, if we know we could have done more than we can use this pain of failure to drive us to try harder next time.
I've played chess for a lot of my life, and something that it has taught me is that in every failure there is a lesson, sometimes multiple lessons and through careful analysis we can know ourselves better, and through knowing ourselves we can play to our own strengths and achieve far more. I'll end on a quote from Sun Tzu's "The art of war"
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Further reading:
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_fati[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirai[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(book)
[4]
https://www.stoicsimple.com/stoic-quotes-on-control-the-best-stoicism-sayings-phrases/[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War