Learning to Succeed
From the moment you were born, you began your slow and steady path of incremental progress. Though you don’t remember it, you had to learn to control your flailing limbs. You had to learn to distinguish between different sounds. You had to learn what the presence of your mother and father meant. Success in each of these pursuits armed you with the ability to navigate more and more complex situations. And you also gained the comfort needed to try bigger ventures. Eventually, you learned how to crawl and then walk. As your orbit around your parents grew, you tackled newer and bigger feats. Going down a slide, swinging on the swings, getting on a bike. The list is endless, but each item on the list began with an unsure footstep in that direction.
Of course at that age, the concept of questioning any of it is not as overwhelming as it becomes later on, but why do progress and success begin to scare us as we get older?
Before we get into that, lets look at a commonly held assumption. The assumption is that people naturally fear failure. While this is definitely true, a far more dire truth exists in tandem. And that is that people tend to fear success even more.
Implications of Rapid Success
Lets look back at the example of riding a bike. Perhaps it starts with a strider or tricycle. Then maybe a bike with training wheels. Eventually, you are riding on your own with no assistance at all. Freedom.
And with that freedom comes more adventurous exploration. Of course, then you start hearing conditions accompany that freedom. “Be home before dark,” for example is a phrase that sounds foreign to nobody. And what does that demand imply? For one, it suggests that being home after dark comes with consequences. Maybe one of those consequences is losing bike privileges.
However, a more weighty implication is that you now have the agency and responsibility to monitor your time and to then make it home before dark without having to be reminded. Furthermore if you do manage your time well and abide by your parents’ rules, nothing happens. Everything goes on the way it should because that is what’s expected of you. If you don’t, something you don’t like will happen.
This means that the more success you have, the higher the expectations become. As a consequence, doing well is not rewarded the way it might have been earlier in life. Likewise, performing poorly comes with negative consequences.
If this is true, the question becomes why you should bother progressing further if rewards decrease and punishments increase.
How to Overcome the Fear of Success
As we previously established, a situation where rewards are far less likely than punishments is one that naturally inspires avoidance. If, however, such a situation arises as a result of progress and success, how can we ultimately call that success?
The answer to that is the key to overcoming any lingering urge to avoid success. While it is different from person to person, much of the how in finding that answer comes from how you personally derive meaning in your life. Getting to the root of that allows you to build the sense of reward from within instead of looking for it from somewhere else. Mastering that allows you to bask in the life that you achieve through realizing your goals rather than dreading the change that it begets.