Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Fear holds people back from pursuing their dreams, stemming from fears of failure, making mistakes, and looking foolish.
- Fear of failure often lacks a clear definition, making it a personal barrier to change.
- The education system promotes perfectionism, which can prevent growth; embracing mistakes encourages learning.
- Fear and excitement are interconnected, as facing fears can lead to personal growth and achievement.
- Ultimately, avoiding fears may lead to regret rather than embracing opportunities for success.
The fear of making mistakes
Whenever I’m talking to people about their big dreams, secret ambitions or ideas they’ve been sitting on, the thing that’s stopping them is almost always the same: fear. Fear of failing, fear of making mistakes, fear of looking stupid.
This is completely natural – it’s part of our genetic make-up. Fear was a helpful attribute for our ancestors, who needed to hide or run from physical danger to stay alive. Today it’s often less helpful. It makes us nervous when faced with public speaking, prevents us from trying something new, holds us back from living up to our full potential.
As children, we’re instinctive risk takers. Everything in the world is new and unfamiliar and yet we approach it with curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn. We fall again and again as we try to walk for the first time, but we just get up and keep trying until we succeed. As a result, we have a very steep learning curve and we’re continuously developing.
Soon, though, that desire to learn is replaced by ego and a degree of complacency. A restricted comfort zone in which we prefer to stick with what we know rather than risk failing at something new. We forget that failure is an important part of learning and become reluctant to do things when success is far from guaranteed.
But what are we really afraid of?
Fear of failure
Fear of failure is perhaps the most common reason I hear for why people hold back from making a big career or lifestyle change. But what does it really mean? What is failure?
Although extremely common, it’s rarely well defined. We often have only a vague notion of what failure actually is. How we define it will be very personal – based on what we’re benchmarking against, who our role models are, what values and beliefs we hold.
Princeton professor Haushofer once published a CV of failures – giving a refreshingly honest perspective on the many invisible failures that often accompany success. Such failures are especially invisible in the carefully curated personal brands we present on social media, where we choose which parts of our lives to show to the world.
In order to keep learning and growing, we have to risk failure and recognise that it’s a vital part of that process – not something to be avoided at all costs. The world is full of examples of hugely successful people who had many failures:
J K Rowling was divorced and on welfare when she received twelve rejections before Bloomsbury finally agreed to publish Harry Potter. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded. Walt Disney’s first animation company went bankrupt. Steven Spielberg was rejected twice from film school.
These people succeeded precisely because they failed – and because they didn’t give up when they did.
Fear of making mistakes
Related to the fear of failure is the fear of making mistakes. The education system encourages a culture of getting it right the first time. At school we often knew the answer before we carried out the experiment – and if the results didn’t fit the expected curve, we’d adjust the data until they did. That’s not how new discoveries get made.
Matthew Syed’s book Black Box Thinking draws on the airline industry to demonstrate the power of embracing and analysing mistakes in order to avoid catastrophes. Astronaut Chris Hadfield describes how after every mission, the whole team would go through every single mistake made and work out how to handle it better next time. Taking your ego out of the equation and looking at your mistakes objectively is uncomfortable – but it’s also how you get better.
Perfectionism is often held up as some kind of ideal to strive for. In reality it can lead to procrastination, or avoiding situations altogether to sidestep the possibility of mistakes. Taking risks, embracing mistakes, and learning from them is a far more interesting – and productive – way of moving through life.
Fear of looking foolish
My singing teacher used to say this was people’s worst fear: looking foolish. The irony in singing was that not only was it not a life-or-death situation, but your hesitation actually made failure inevitable. To have a chance of hitting the high notes, you had to really go for it.
Fear of public speaking is often cited as one of the most common fears – ahead of things that are objectively far more dangerous. And yet the worst case scenario is almost never as bad as we imagine.
You have to ask yourself: whose opinion is it that you’re so afraid of? Your closest people – the ones who genuinely care about you – are unlikely to mock you for trying something you believe in. And if they do, that usually says more about their own regret than it does about your ambitions.
Fear and excitement are closely related
Fear often comes hand in hand with excitement. Anything that promises to bring about a big change is likely to be both exhilarating and scary. Facing and overcoming our fears is where the learning happens, where the growth happens.
And if we don’t face our fears – if we let them win – what we’re likely to be left with is regret.
So what are you afraid of?
If fear of getting it wrong is showing up in how you’re running your business – the decisions you’re avoiding, the offers you’re not making, the visibility you’re holding back on – the free Solopreneur Diagnostic can help you see where you actually are and what’s genuinely holding you back.
And if you want to work through these questions alongside a small group of established solopreneurs doing the same, Off Script is built for exactly that.
Fear of mistakes is rooted in the same instinct as fear of failure – a desire to avoid the discomfort, judgment, or consequences we associate with getting something wrong. It’s reinforced by education systems that reward right answers and social environments where failure is seen as weakness rather than an inevitable part of learning.
Start by redefining what a mistake actually means to you. Most successful people have made significant mistakes – they just didn’t stop there. Build a practice of reflecting on what went wrong and what you’d do differently, rather than avoiding situations where mistakes are possible. Small, consistent steps into uncomfortable territory build tolerance for uncertainty over time.
If you find yourself putting off decisions, avoiding situations where success isn’t guaranteed, or preferring inaction to the risk of getting it wrong – fear of failure is probably a factor. The question worth asking is: what’s the worst that could realistically happen? And is that actually worse than the cost of not trying?
Fear of failure tends to be about outcomes – not achieving the goal, not succeeding at the thing you set out to do. Fear of making mistakes is more granular – it’s about the process, about doing something wrong along the way. Both are related to ego and to how we’re seen by others. Both are worth examining honestly.
High achievers often have more to lose – more identity tied up in their performance, more external validation of their competence, more distance to fall from the image they’ve built. The more successful you are by conventional measures, the more you have to protect. That’s exactly why so many high achievers stay within the safety of what they already know rather than risking something genuinely new.
