I’m scared, or, Why there really is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Many people fear failure, so they’d rather not try at all. That way, if they do fail, they’ll at least have that excuse to hide behind. “Sure I didn’t do well, but if I’d bothered to try then I could have.” “Why didn’t you then?” The answer seems obvious: because while I might have succeeded, I also might have failed. It’s something we don’t like to confront.

For many students, this severely affects life in a slightly different way. Students theoretically value education, or at the very least understand the cost of tuition, so they don’t not try at their assignments. Often-times, they’ll just do them at the last possible minute. And if they do well, awesome. And if they do poorly?  Well, they did their best under the circumstances.

Under the circumstances. Under the time constraints that they created.

Procrastination is just another excuse for fearing failure.

Now, I’m a solutions kind of guy and I’ve looked into many articles on the subject. Be warned, many of these articles on how to stop procrastinating were found as a method of procrastinating. Fear is crafty.

There’s a few different ways around fear. The first is to think of it as a good thing. If you fear failure, it means that you consider whatever you are putting off to be important, that you care about it. And if you care about something so deeply, you owe it to yourself to put your best effort forward.

Now that’s the wisdom of about a dozen commencement speeches rolled into a paragraph. There come those times though when a particularly important task is coming up and it’s just so important, so critical, that you just get petrified at the prospect of actually working towards it. This is where the old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” comes in.

See, you might fear failure. But I’ll bet you hate regret even more. Fear of failure might dog you during the day, but when it’s all said and done, it’s the what-ifs that’ll keep you up at night. So if caring about something isn’t enough to give it your all, how about the fear of a wasted opportunity? The idea that you could have gotten that scholarship or run in that election or asked out that beautiful girl? Failure won’t kill you, but the guilt of regret just might.

I know that last paragraph was rough, but I find it’s remembering the times I failed that gives me the courage to succeed. And if you haven’t learned anything from this post, if you’re still finding reasons to procrastinate on whatever it is you should be doing, please do one thing right now.

Start. Just start. Open the Word document or click the compose button and write that story or send that e-mail. Spend two (2) minutes and do it right now.  It gets easier from there.

This is the first in a three-part series on Fear. Next week, I’ll talk about the Fear of Success.