When you are writing a new idea, but you don’t know how to put the pieces together or if everyone will think you are an idiot – it’s there.
It’s there in a painting, when you have a gorgeous piece of brushwork that’s not quite hitting the feeling, and it’s increasingly apparent the only way forward is to bury it under a whole lot of blue splatters.
You feel it when you’ve spent hours, tons of money, and sleepless nights building a project that no one wants, not even you.
You feel it looming when you have no idea what to make, but you desperately need to make something, so all those dreams of feeding yourself with creative work can come true.
It’s our favorite F word.
Failure Is The Way
In a nutshell, if we want to make things, pursue our dreams, build a life on our terms — we are going to have to try, suck at things, and fail.
“It is the way,” as the Mandalorians keep saying.
Kieran Drew points out that every creator with a decent product had to fail 3-5 times before they got to something good. Failure and rejection are just part of the process.
Dan Koe (in How to Learn Anything 10x Faster Than Anyone, YouTube) argues, basically, that you shouldn’t be running around trying to learn and remember everything. You should make things, risk failure, and learn on the job as you go, cause that is when you know what you actually need to do things.
But why won’t beginners start? (@15:00 Dan tells us how he gets so worked up over it, but he’s a non-violent dude, so he won’t actually punch them. He just kinda wants to give them a little slap.)
It’s cause they’re SCARED.
I’m sure there’s a subset of people who would find the terror of Dan Koe slapping them very motivating. But most people are more scared of their inner demons or the horrific things their imaginations make up to fill the uncertainty.
And yet.
We still have to do it.
How?
2 Ways to Do Scary Things
There are two different ways to take action on something scary – and I’ve learned both from parenting.
Most of the time, raising small humans is art of getting them to do things they don’t want to do, but nicely. And then screwing up and trying again tomorrow.
There are absolute, hardline rules, in which serious injury is a risk.
And then there are all the others, in which the tiny humans produce ten million reasons for not doing things of various degrees of necessity, and you try to convince them otherwise.
The medicine for these situations falls into roughly two categories.
Medicine 1: Naming the Fear and Worse Alternatives
Sometimes we are afraid of the pain or failure itself, and we’re resisting the fact that it will likely hurt.
It’s a bit like learning to ride a bike or get a vaccine.
Calling failure something gentle and endearing, like an “experiment,” is a bit like trying to get a kid to go to the doctor’s office for a vaccine by telling him shots feel like “butterfly kisses.”
It might get the kid through the door the first time. But once he gets jabbed with the needle – he absolutely knows that it hurts, he never wants to go back, and he doesn’t trust you about anything for lying to him about the pain.
And now he hates butterflies too.
The fact is that failure hurts. Calling it something cute doesn’t take away the pain. Tricking yourself through the door by calling it a nicer name just kicks the inevitable disillusionment down the road a few weeks.
You NEED TO KNOW IT HURTS. We’re just going to have to accept it right now.
But it hurts a little bit, for a few, and then it stops.
Just like vaccines.
It DOES hurt. And it doesn’t make sense to have to go through pain and suffering intentionally, when you’re pretty much fine right now.
But we DO get vaccines, because DIPTHERIA IS WORSE. There’s a chance of suffocating in your own body as your lungs and heart slowly give out, over a period of several feverish and very uncomfortable days. It’s pretty unpleasant.
We accept a little bit of pain now, to avoid a much worse pain later.
Likewise.
We have to accept the pain of shame, confusion, embarrassment, public humiliation, letting people down, not doing as good of a job as we had thought, wasting money…FAILURE… because it is BETTER than the pain of an unlived life.
In nutshell, if we are resisting the pain itself, we need to be honest with ourselves, and then focus on why we are doing it – the risk of not doing it and the reward of accepting a little discomfort now.
Note: In practice, with children, you should always bring sugar to a shot appointment. Bribery makes a big difference when you know something is going to hurt. And giving yourself an easy treat for doing something painful and terrifying is not a bad idea either (unless, you know, you are satisfied by the process itself).
Medicine 2: Make Scary Things Smaller
I had the first part of this essay all cleverly written up, but parenting has been teaching me another lesson this week, through the bane of many people’s existences…
Cue the horror music …
picture walking down a long dark hall…
looking for the guy with an axe…
… NO! IT’S….
Math!
I actually kinda like math. My kids, not so much.
So while my kid was rolling on the floor sobbing yesterday over the outcome of two long multiplication problems (which I corrected in the gentlest possible of ways, I swear), I was thinking about how unlikely it was that a motivational speech on the need for failure would work in this situation.
Nope. Sometimes our inability to take action has to do with capacity and risk of overload. Too much info, too much visibility, too much mental processing, too much shame.
The risk is too high, in other words, and our nervous system steps up to save us and shuts everything down. Like a coma, but for your will to take action.
So what do we need here? When the fear is not of pain or failure, but of some related quasi-surivial risk that overwhelms our nervous systems?
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We need smaller, safer steps.
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We need fewer problems to build the muscle.
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We need to see how it’s done.
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We need someone nodding along with us as we work.
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We need safer people to share the problem with.
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We need to build boundaries around the problem so we know when we’ll be okay again.
So how do we make scary things smaller?
Dan’s version is the Zeigarnik Effect, In which you do “easy tasks before you start to simulate the feeling of having unfinished tasks.” (That’s from How To Learn Anything 10X Faster Than Anyone With AI). It acts as a small step to starting.
An Atomic Habits, James Clear recommends starting a new habit with a stupidly small goal, just to get you over the initial scare factor. And once you’re there, you often feel up to doing the task itself.
That might look like putting on your gym shoes and standing on the treadmill for one minute. Or opening a blank doc on your computer and typing for 5 minutes. Or sitting on your couch and opening a book at exactly 5 pm and reading one sentence.
For math, that looks like planning exactly one problem, and talking through how we’re going to do it ahead of time, and looking for ways to reduce the mental load (one person does the computing and the other person does the actual handwriting).
For a product, that could look like DMing one person about the idea for free. Or talking about the idea with friends just to see what they think. Or opening a doc and calling it “Outline of the Thing”.
Do the thing that feels the least charged first. Less charge = more emotional capacity.
Then – plan an exit strategy.
Plan when you’re done. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Do something, and then leave with resources left – not when you’re completely exhausted.
Notice how you feel afterwards. Was this as bad as you feared? How does the fear feel now? Where do you notice it in your body? Does it have a shape, texture, or color? How does it move? Has it changed as you work?
The goal is to prove to your nervous system that you can poke the dragon and be okay.
Doing Scary Things Anyway
It’s not always as simple as “Just Do It”.
But we also can’t let the real, felt problems our fears are pointing at cripple us forever.
We have to consider what we’re actually afraid of, feel it, and develop a plan for addressing the fear – just like a doctor would give you a treatment plan.
Sometimes the “action dose” needs to be low cause your tolerance is low. But you can still move something, somewhere, just a little bit.
And every time you poke the dragon (or, you know, just stick your head in the cave and sniff for a few minutes), you’re building that tolerance for fear.
So start. No matter how small it has to be.
And then do it again tomorrow.
Over time, little things add up.
P.S. I’m building something around getting more clear on the creative work you want to make, moving blocks, and poking the dragons. Subscribers get in on the ground floor. Join if you’d interested.
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