Are you trying to be or trying not to be
Focus on your chance of success rather than risk of failing
Are you heading towards something or away from something? In other words are your actions driven by trying to achieve something or by trying to avoid something.
If you’re a normal human being its very likely the latter, simply because we like clarity and it’s much more clear how to avoid something specific than it is on how to achieve something you have not done yet.
In addition, we often find running away from something is easier. By “easier” that doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding something takes less work than achieving something per se. Rather “easier” in the sense of being more comfortable because running away from things that are negative is built into the core part of what it is to be a normal organism in the world.
In fact, that could very well define what it means to be alive: Survival.
We are all descended from organisms that survived. And for most of them, that wasn’t a given. Our instincts err on the side of assuming the worst because that’s what keeps you alive in a world that is trying to eat you.
Its only now that humanity has generally achieved freedom from the struggle to exist that we can put some attention towards the struggle for a meaningful existence.
But we can’t turn on a dime. We are designed for physical survival. Fear of failure and avoiding taking a risk to do what you really want to do comes from the same circuitry that keeps a gazelle alive on the african savannah.
There is nothing shameful or lacking in us when we focus on avoidance. Its as natural as breathing.
But just because something is natural doesn’t mean its inevitable or even good for us. Just as we can control our breath, we can control our actions so that instead of running away from what we really want, we can run towards it and accept the resulting discomfort that arises from our ancestral instinct to not get eaten.
This is very difficult to do in practice because the reason why doing what we really want triggers our deeply instinctual danger response is because it often involves the unknown. After all if we have a dream we desire to fulfill, by definition there is uncertainty involved. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a dream, it would just be our reality.
The unknown triggers our fear response because instinctive risk perceptions are rooted in survival and as a result they are heavily weighted towards assuming the worst. After all if we are not sure whether that rustle in the bush is the wind or a tiger then it makes sense to assume it’s a tiger since being wrong 99 times is worth being right the one time.
This is fine if you’re an animal in the wild. But when you’re a modern human trying to make something of your life by having an ambitious goal, this risk instinct gets in the way. That ambitious goal is an unknown, and whether we like it or not, our core survival mechanism defaults to treating that unknown as a threat.
But this exaggerated sense of risk can be used to help us.
Even though our sense of risk is meant to measure the chance of external danger, given our modern society’s of lack of physical danger, it actually ends up measuring how important we think something is to us. This is because the “danger” only actually exists in our head and as a result can only be measured by what we think is risky.
There are two inputs into risk, probability and value. For our default core “avoid dying” ancestral instinct, measuring risk is inherently a measure of negative value which means the probability of failure and how “dangerous” that failure would be.
However since we are not risking death when we change careers or audition for America’s Got Talent a more appropriate probability to focus on is that of succeeding and how important that success would be.
This means that since we are using an instrument that measures negative risk for a situation that is really about positive risk, that risk of not achieving our goal feels to us like the risk of death. How intimidating is that?
Of course we find it difficult to throw away our career to become a chef because at a very real physical level that feels the same to us as jumping off a cliff.
But the degree to which a goal feels really risky is the degree to which we think that goal is important to us: the more we value something, the more we feel afraid of not achieving it. If we didn’t care about something then we wouldn’t care if we achieved it or not so we would feel very little reluctance towards engaging.
We find it much easier to start doing things we don’t care about than things we do care about because our intellectual, sentient fear of failure becomes attached to our physical, animalistic fear of death.
But once we know that, we can recognize when this is happening. We can know that the discomfort and queasy feeling we get in the pit of our stomachs is a sign that we should lean into this because we really give a damn about it.
We aren’t scared of things we don’t care about. So the next time your heart starts pounding when you think about a particular goal, run towards that as a sign that you are on your true path.
