As much as people talk about failure and how to right your career path from a downward trajectory, there seems to be a lack of discourse on how to deal with (and manage) success.
I’m terrified of becoming successful. And the more I think about it, the less it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy or a subconscious reaction. I might be deliberately setting myself up for failure. And I don’t think that I’m the only one.
A while ago, an article that I can’t seem to find online (it might be this one) discussed how future success could be predicted by someone deciding to apply for an Ivy League college – not whether they get in or not, but just the act of applying boosts odds of future achievement. But this is tied more to self-esteem and confidence issues, which do not always create a self-fulfilling prophecy of personal and professional triumph.
It takes a lot of time, dedication and hard work in order to become successful at something. You have to have some amount of expertise in your field, proficiency at the task at hand, and enough of a competitive advantage that pushes you past the rest. You need to cultivate a strong personal brand and extend it out as far as possible. But a fear of success is not necessarily tied into procrastinating on any of the steps that will land you on easy street.
For me, it’s an issue of balance – weighing the opportunity cost of becoming accomplished in one area means that I lose out somewhere else. If I start doing well with my writing, then I won’t accomplish as much with my music. If I get more renown for my PR skills, I won’t be known as a good advertising copywriter. Sure, it might be the onset of a quarter-life crisis, but this indecision is slowly crippling my future. Since I can’t have my cake and eat it too, I’m just staring at it, brandishing a fork (metaphorically speaking).
Taking steps to resolve this problem isn’t an easy thing to do either. Not only is it disheartening to find that one of the top Google results for “fear of success” is on a website called “Weird Phobias,” but apparently the most exhaustive list of phobias online doesn’t even have a name for it. I’ve made one up, though: Anti-Atychiphobia (Atychiphobia is the fear of failure, which also has a second name, Kakorrhaphiophobia). And if one is pursuing a goal of conquering a fear of success, being successful in that pursuit is a part of that fear, creating an ouroboros of non-achievement.
So I’m setting more short-term, attainable goals for myself and creating tangible proof that I’m accomplishing what I set out to do. I’m redefining my personal definition of success. And maybe if we all try to do that a little more, we won’t focus so much on failing.
I think I have a fear of big, unpronounceable words. =)
Glad to hear you’re working on your fear of success! And I’m glad you brought up opportunity cost, because I think I struggle with that too.. we think of success as only playing out in 1 way–do you want to be successful or not? But it could really involve more complicated decisions, like what you’re going to spend all your time on. Which makes my problem more or less an existential crisis. (Sigh..)
The self-fulfilling prophecy you mentioned can also, I think, be tied to the concept of limiting beliefs.. where people have beliefs that cause them to unwittingly sabotage their own opportunities for success. e.g. the belief that you don’t deserve to be successful/you’re not worth it, that it’s wrong to have lots of money, that failure is bad (meaning, worse than not trying at all), and so on. There’s a buttload of articles out there on that kind of thing.. I’ll find you some if you’re really interested.
Aurora, I’m so sorry to hear that you have Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. I’ll try to be less grandiloquent.
And it seems that the opportunity cost has another effect: I like having a bunch of different things to do, so sacrificing the feeling of being a jack-of-all-trades is another thing that I’ll have to deal with.
And I’d be very interested in reading some of the buttload of articles on limiting beliefs – I’ve been thinking of doing a post on that for a while, but it just hasn’t been good enough…