How I’m Teaching Myself to Stop Being Scared of Failure
Since I started my first ‘grown-up’ job eight months ago, I experienced one instance of complete panic. We were launching a new product; I was in charge of coordinating product messaging across a couple social channels. And… I messed up. I made assumptions that I shouldn’t have, and screwed up properly executing something that was my responsibility.
For a few frightening seconds after I realized what had happened, I felt light-headed. My ears were ringing. The walls felt like they were closing in on me. I couldn’t focus on what I needed to do to fix things, so others had to step in.
I knew how the slip-up made me look. Not only did I fail to execute, I couldn’t even bounce back from it. The mistake immobilized me. In Silicon Valley, where velocity and resilience are indispensable virtues of people who work at startups, I had stumbled and couldn’t get up fast enough.
The panic attack I experienced? It wasn’t the first time I’d had such an extreme reaction to failure.
By and large, my life leading up to my mid-twenties was a string of successes (at least in the sense that my family and community I grew up in defined it). I’d graduated in the top 1% of my high school class, earned a summa cum laude in college, and had gotten into a PhD program at Stanford. I’d done well, even by “Asian standards.”
But along the way, when I had pockets of setbacks — a bad grade or lost competition, for example — my reaction was intense. Any kind of failure on my part led to extreme self-loathing and mental abuse that I would inflict on myself for days after the incident. You’d be surprised if I told you all the different ways I convinced myself that I was stupid. Eventually though, I’d start “winning” again, so I’d pick myself back up again and move on.
In graduate school, however, things got out of hand. It became setback after setback. I stumbled over every challenge that came my way, and the “wins” were few and far between.
Assignments took forever to do and I could barely sustain an interest in what I was learning. I started staying up through the night once or twice a week because I hated falling asleep and waking up to another day of reading research papers, dealing with failed experiments. I was intimidated and envious of my smarter classmates. I felt like… suddenly the rug had been pulled from underneath me and I no longer had anything I was good at anymore.
Everyone around me seemed to be doing just fine; why was I the only one struggling? In my mind, it was because I had failed to adapt to being a graduate student.
Every time I failed to live up to my own standard of success — the success I was so used to — I saw it as failure. Eventually, that spiraled into extreme depression and anxiety.
I stopped turning in assignments on time and found excuses to be ‘sick’ everyday. I barely ate. My hygiene took a turn for the worse. I couldn’t even check my school email without being triggered.
I came dangerously close to failing out of my program.
After a lot of introspection (and a number of therapy sessions), I now know that my mental illness isn’t completely due to an inability to deal with failure, but it made me realize that I needed a healthy way to cope with it.
My first step was extreme, but necessary. I needed to be in an environment where I wanted to succeed. I realized that the path I had originally chosen for myself wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing. So I dropped out of my graduate program, spent a few years in temp positions, switched industries, and found myself in a job that I really loved.
I strive more for excellence now than I ever did in graduate school. Yes, I’m still afraid of failing, but now it’s less about what others think of me and more about what I think of myself.
The next thing I did (again, with the help of medication and therapy — cognitive behavioral therapy really works wonders), was to harness my rational brain instead of my emotional.
When I messed up at my new job, I spent the whole day in a funk. At night, I couldn’t sleep because my negative thoughts were spiralling out of control.
I failed. I ruined the product launch we prepared so hard for. My coworkers will blame me. I’ll get fired.
And then, I stopped myself. I thought carefully about what I was scared of. The worst-case scenario was that because I failed, I would be fired from my job. On the one hand, a small rational part of my brain knew this was ridiculous because the success of the whole launch wasn’t riding on me alone. On the other hand, yet another rational part of me said, “Well so what if you got fired?” Yes, it would suck. But, heck, I had brains! I’d be able to find a way to make it work. After all, I had managed to pick myself back up from much worse situations.
Taking time to rationally examine my feelings of anxiety and fear in the face of failure actually allowed me to find my gumption. Failing taught me to look for the inner strength to keep trying.
It’s still a process. I think my fear of failure still prevents me from taking creative risks or achieving my maximum potential, but I’m learning. If anything, Silicon Valley is the best possible place to practice failure. It teaches you to iterate and innovate. And most importantly, it’s an opportunity to learn — not only about the situation at hand, but also about yourself as person.
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