Fear of failure: an unconscious decision maker within all of us

Have you ever felt fear of failure?

Have you taken conservative choices while designing to be on the safer side?

Have you said NO to ideas fearing what if it’ll negatively impact the metrics?

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Fear of failure creeps within all of us, it unconsciously influences you, and makes you take decisions.

Sometimes, we take design decisions to play safer, to mitigate the risk of failure. And we all regretfully align to those suboptimal or mediocre solutions even if the back of our minds says NO.

People religiously follow familiarity, consistency, etc unconsciously these days as a norm while designing due to the same fear of failure.

If we create something unfamiliar — innovative — and show it to someone, they’ll instil you with the fear of failure:

“ is it something familiar, do people understand it?”

“Is it something radical from what they used to, and would that lead to failure?”

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January 9, 2007, Macworld San Francisco.

“We call it the pinch”, said Steve bringing his index and thumb finger closer to each other and moving it further apart.

Back on to his phone, which has a picture of a boy on it, he made the same gesture over it, and the picture enlarged.

The stage filled with applause!

HOW INNOVATIVE, some of you might be thinking. But is that something familiar or consistent with any of the interactions people used to earlier?

How come then it became successful and an intuitive interaction?

Didn’t they had the fear of failure?