Fear and Failure

What is fear?

Are amoebas afraid?

Fear is not just an emotion.  It is the expression of the fight or flight response, one of the three types of instincts that are hard coded into our genes and shared by all living things:  survival, reproduction and homeostasis (e.g. eating, drinking, metabolizing). 

Why do we feel hungry when we don’t eat enough food?  So that we eat enough to not die of starvation before we reproduce.

We feel a desire to reproduce so that the genes which create these instincts will pass to the next generation. 

We feel fear because it helps us to stay alive long enough to reproduce.

These three instincts are so fundamental to life that we can use them to define being alive. Even amoebas will attempt to move away from something that could be dangerous for them.  If every living thing experiences fear, there must be a very good reason for it.

Was that a tiger or the wind?

For our human ancestors, fear was clearly a very good thing.  Think about what life was like for our distant ancestors.  They lived on a savanna, in a forest or a jungle, and many of the risks that they faced were very different from the types of risk that we face today.  They didn’t deal with complex financial or career risks.  Most of the risks that they faced on a day-to-day basis involved life-and-death decisions. 

Imagine you are living in Singapore 10,000 years ago. You live in a tropical forest, interspersed with fields of tall grass. One day you are walking through the grass when you spot a red junglefowl (an ancestor of modern chickens) about 50 meters ahead. Thoughts of a prehistoric chicken-rice dinner dance in your head.  You quickly begin to calculate your angle of attack.

Suddenly you think you hear a sound behind you, and you turn to see a rustling in the grass. Fear grips you:  is it a tiger or just the wind?

(There were tigers in Singapore, but there were never lions, despite its name and the mythological Singapore origin story that includes a lion). 

Now you face a typical prehistoric risk/return decision. Should you still try to get that (winner-winner) chicken dinner?  Your calculation goes something like this:

1. If it is a tiger in the grass and I try to get the chicken, then I am likely to become dinner rather than get dinner.

2. If it is just the wind in the grass and I run away, I will be hungry tonight, but I will live to hunt another day.

3. If I make the right choice here 99 times, and the wrong choice once, I will die.

In this environment, the correct strategy is to be highly risk averse. Risk-seeking ancestors will die before reproducing at a higher rate than risk averse ancestors.

Interestingly, a psychological side effect of humans having lived for most of human history in such dangerous environments is our tendency to see patterns where none exist, as in constellations and conspiracies.  Seeing patterns where none exist is a safer strategy then missing dangerous patterns that do exist.

If risk aversion was the correct strategy for survival in our ancestral environment, you might wonder why our ancestors took any risks at all.  If so, many risks were life and death, why not just avoid risk totally and stay alive? 

The answer is that not taking any risks would also lead to death (although more slowly) in our ancestral environment.  For example, if you run away from your potential dinner every time the wind rustles the grass, you will eventually starve to death.

In the distant past, our somewhat fearful ancestors were more likely to survive than our fearless or trembling ancestors; hence we are all descended from somewhat fearful ancestors.  The most successful ancestors would have been those with a pretty healthy fear instinct, but still willing to take just enough risk to stay alive.  These ancestors would have had the opportunity to have more offspring than both their fearless and fear-paralyzed contemporaries. 

Assuming our risk propensity can be to some degree inherited, we should be relatively fearful and on average risk averse, and in fact, this is the case.

The average person is risk averse

Unlike other traits, risk propensity does not appear to be normally distributed in the population, with the average being risk-neutral, as you might expect.  Rather, the average person is somewhat risk averse.  For example, the average student is risk-seeking enough to get out of bed and come to class, but too risk-averse to ask or answer questions in class.

Risk aversion also explains the skewed reaction most people have to upside and downside risk.  Most people intuitively over-weight the downside risk.  By some measures, people are about 2 times more fearful of a loss than they are greedy for a gain, which may give us one rough measure of the average degree of risk aversion in the population.

For example, in the Allais Paradox experiment, participants have two choices:

Option A: 100% chance of winning $100 million.

Option B:

·       10% chance of winning $500 million

·       89% chance of winning $100 million

·       1% chance of winning nothing

Most people choose Option A, which has an expected value of $100 million, versus option B which has an expected value of $139 million.  Furthermore, in Option B, there is only a 1% chance of winning less than Option A.  Option A is a highly risk averse choice.

Why is risk aversion so powerful?

Even in today’s complex environment, our powerful fear instinct can be extremely helpful in keeping us alive.  For example, when we are afraid to drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and then ride our motorcycle very fast against traffic and without a helmet, this fear can help us survive. 

In many cases, the victims of violent crimes remember after the crime that they had a “bad feeling” just before they were victimized.  Their fear instinct was trying to help them to stay alive.  People without this level of healthy fear do still die at a higher rate than others. 

But in the modern world, we need to make many decisions, the vast majority of which do not involve life and death.  Unfortunately, our fear instinct is still tuned to the environment of our nasty, brutish and short ancestral lives.  This divergence can lead us to make self-defeating decisions in many aspects of our modern lives, especially in the financial aspects.

Sometimes it can seem that today people are afraid of everything:  afraid they are not good enough, afraid they are not good people, afraid of being wrong, afraid of making a bad choice or a wrong decision, afraid of not having enough money, afraid of falling behind others, afraid of disappointing others, afraid that they are not smart enough, afraid that they are not attractive enough.  The list can go on and on.  The famous French essayist Michel de Montaigne described the power of fear this way: “The thing I fear most is fear…it exceeds all other disorders in intensity.”

Most of our fears boil down to fear of failure of one kind or another.  The reason we are so afraid to fail is that at some level we equate failure with death (our fight or flight response talking again).

Learning to fall down the bunny slope

Most people learn how to ski on a learner’s hill or bunny slope. The instructor will have them put their skis in a V, or snowplow position. Although compared to the regular slopes, the bunny slope is very gradual, it is still steep enough so that when you point your skis down the mountain, you start to move (and to the first-time skier, it will look as steep as a black diamond). 

But since the skis are in a V, you will move very slowly (later you will learn to use the V to stop yourself). Next you will learn to shift your weight slightly to your left and then to your right while maintaining the skis in a V.  This will get you going down the hill in a series of very gentle S curves.  Pretty soon you are skiing down the bunny slope. 

After a few runs down this way, the next time you are at the top of the bunny slope (which will now start to look less steep than it did at first), the instructor will encourage you to start straightening out your skis, so that they now form more of a trapezoid than a V shape.  As you start to straighten out your skis, you will begin to go faster and faster, until you fall, in a flurry of snow and flying skis and poles.  Next you will pick yourself up, start again with your skis in a V, straighten them out again, start going faster again, and fall again. 

No matter how many times you fall, you will get up and continue to ski down the bunny slope.  Eventually you will get your skis parallel to each other and then you will start to be able to go fast (at which point you will probably fall again).  Once you can ski down the bunny slope with your skis parallel, you will move to green, blue and ultimately black diamond slopes, by repeating the same process of trying, falling, getting up and improving. 

Fear of falling

Before I moved to Southeast Asia, where it never snows, I used to go on ski vacations in the winter.  Whenever I went skiing, I would notice an interesting phenomenon.  I would see people skiing a long trail from the top of the mountain, going all the way down with their skis in a snowplow. 

Rather than gliding effortlessly down the mountain, they would be grunting and straining, drenched in sweat despite the sub-zero temperatures.  All the other skiers on the slope would be cursing at them and skiing around them. 

They were not experiencing at all the fun and excitement of effortlessly gliding down the mountain. They never learned to ski – because they were afraid to fall.  Mastery of skiing requires falling; they were not prepared to fall, and their fear had deprived them of the exact thing that they had set out to achieve. 

Did you ever wonder why professional ski racers still fall?  They are capable of going down any trail without falling, but that is not how they win a race.  Every race they push themselves all the way to the edge of their capabilities, as the races are decided by fractions of a second. They still need to risk falling every race in order to win.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take

Not only does fear of failure threaten to deprive you of success, but fear of failure can actually guarantee that you achieve a result indistinguishable from failure.  When you are afraid to fail at something, the fear discourages you from trying; failing to try ensures that you will not succeed.  Fear of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Wayne Gretzky, one of the greatest ice hockey players of all time, put it this way "You miss 100% of the shots that you don't take.  If you don't shoot you can’t score. If you shoot you may miss, but if you don’t shoot there's no puck in the net.”

It is bad enough that fear of failure causes you to fail, but the story gets even worse.  The more important something is to you, the more afraid you are likely to be to fail at it, and therefore the more likely you are to fail to try to do it.  Your fear of failure not only deprives you of success, but it also deprives you of success in the things that are the most important to you (your career choices for example). 

That is why a life lived in fear is a life half lived.

Most career, financial and business decisions are not life or death decisions (unless we are brain surgeons or air traffic controllers).  Our fear instinct often causes us to take too little risk in these situations. 

Where it is rational to be risk averse in life-and-death situations, it is not at all rational or optimal to be risk-averse in career, business, financial (and other life) decisions.  You need to apply a more sophisticated understanding of risk if you are going to make good risk-adjusted decisions in the modern world.

You can't change your instincts

Even though you may intellectually understand that fear of failure is causing you to make poor risk-adjusted decisions, what can you do with this information?

How can you keep fear from depriving you of the most important things in life?   You are not going to do it by becoming unafraid or even less afraid.  Instincts are hard-wired.  You can’t change them.

What you can do is to identify the things that you are most afraid of failing at, and then just do them anyway, despite the fear. You can’t eliminate fear, but you can conquer fear.

It is difficult to imagine too many things are that scarier than free solo urban climbing. Rock climber Alain Robert, the French Spider-Man has climbed more than 170 of the world’s tallest buildings, most with just his bare hands and no safety equipment.  How did he get there?

He got there by overcoming his fear of heights, vertigo, and several falls that almost killed him and left him 66% disabled.  On his website, he says he is not afraid of failing, that’s how he always achieves his goals.

Successful rock climbers do not stand at the bottom of the cliff face looking up and waiting to become unafraid.  They just climb despite their fear.  In fact, as they continue to climb through their fear, many feel that this is one of the most rewarding aspects of climbing:  finding something that you are afraid of doing and doing it anyway. 

Just do it today

Imagine that many years from now you have reached the end of a long life (hopefully 120+ with new life extension technologies and medicine). 

From this vantage point, when you look back at your life you will never regret the things that you tried to do and failed at.  But if you let your fear stop you from doing the things that you most want to do, you will have a whole list of regrets for the things that you did not do because you were afraid.

Now is best time to just start to do the things that you really want to do.  If you risk failure, if you do fail and try again then, and only then, will you have a chance to succeed. Don’t let your fear stop you.

Start by doing something that you are afraid to fail at, today.