Everyday Canvas

Fear of Failure

Prompt: Where do you think fear of failure comes from? Was there ever something that you had feared you’d fail at but didn’t?

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I think the fear of failure comes from the vision of the desired outcome and from surmising that one doesn’t have the necessary means or circumstances to make that outcome a reality.

Once a person realizes that such a vision is just that, a vision, and an imaginary one at that, he doesn’t mind failure all that much. If anything, he may see failure in more positive terms: as a trial run or a test result. If science and scientists have made progress to change the world through failure, why can’t anyone else, also? Thinking of failure as a test result helps, for test results always bring success closer.

Yet, that fear is always there, isn’t it? It is something boiling in us, which most of the time, we cannot help.

Did I have a fear of failure ever? Surely, I did. Tons of it. Most of it, however, proved out to be false. Through it all, a Montaigne quote helped me immensely. Since I couldn’t find the exact quote now, I’ll re-word it as: The worst disasters that happened to me are the ones that I imagined/feared.

The essence of this quote saw me through many a dilemma in my life. To start with, the one huge fear I had was of marriage, based on the disaster that my parents had and the prattles and rants of the women my mother had made friends with. Still, I took the plunge and have been married quite successfully for 49 years to turn 50 in January.

It has been decades since I read Montaigne's essays, and out of that book, the idea behind this little quote stuck out among the many other impressive ones. Who says quotes are just quotes? Some of them can be lifesavers.