Is fear of failure the ultimate dream killer, or do you nurture it as an excuse for your refusal to try? Loser avoidance behavior can become a compelling drug to paralyze you from taking action.
Bill Whittle and Zo Rachel step into the battle. The Virtue Signal is a production of our Members, who have succeeded in advancing great ideas for more than a decade with their generous contributions. Join the team.
Video below hosted at Rumble.
6 replies on “Loser Avoidance: How You Nurture Fear of Failure to Excuse Your Refusal to Try”
Zo, your remarks in the previous episode about Shame were absolutely liberating to me. God has given you a spirit that is sensitive and obedient to His Spirit, and that is invaluable. I will always be eager to hear what He has to say through you.
This reminds me of that great line from the end of Southern Cross:
“And we never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do”
Bill’s ticket example reminds me of my days as programmer/systems programmer and more. 20+ years of programming. Whenever I made a mistake affecting someone and knew it, I immediately let someone know. Generally who was affected. I did so reliability that when something went wrong and I was asked if I did it, and said “” No” I was believed. Sometimes I said “I’m not sure”. And over 80% of the time I said that, it wasn’t me. Big example of a ” whoopsie”: I recently as a Systems Programmer got heavily involved in upgrading the Operating System on an IBM enterprise server (mainframe). My area was to clean up the JES spool. (print que specifically) I dropped the wrong one 😵. It still had reports to print. I immediately went into the senior System Programmer office, with the other junior Systems Programmer (but senior over me) and told them. The senior one said, very calmly: “Congratulations. You are now officially a Systems Programmer.” They both told me they had done that multiple times. Was I in trouble? Not really. 1) It only had two prints on it. 2) Those prints were easy to create. 3) For 6 weeks before the whole company was told to print everything or it would be gone. Gone date was in two weeks. So the people who needed the prints got into much more trouble than me.
To Bill’s point about the consequences of failure being less catastrophic than our imaginations make them out to be, I have repeatedly reminded my wife that ninety nine percent of the things we worry about never actually come to pass. Her response: “See, it works!” All kidding aside, this is a great topic to discuss, as this is something that has hindered most people from fulfilling the God given potential that they were created with.
Most of us have heard the story about Thomas Edison trying 1,000 times before he finally succeeded in inventing the light bulb, and his response when allegedly asked what it felt like to fail that many times was something like, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times, it just took that many steps to succeed.” While this is likely ridiculously over exaggerated, the point remains – those that view what many would call “failure” as simply another step on the road to success, are those who are the most likely to succeed.
I have a saying I’ve seen somewhere. “If you try to never make mistakes, you will do nothing at all. And that is the biggest mistake of all.”
I think there are a number of factors involved. Pride is definitely one of them, but I think competitiveness combined with good sportsmanship is also up there. Other areas that contribute are:
Back when I was working, (I’m now retired), sometime in the late 80s / early 90s we had to take a number of classes in personal accountability. Does anyone remember the Accountability Ladder? It went something like this:
ACCOUNTABLE BEHAVIORS – Things that happen because of you
VICTIM BEHAVIORS – Things that happen to you
Sadly, I think the lower half of the ladder describes where a vast majority of the younger portion of our society exists.