Are You Addicted to Fear?
I am re-reading the memoirs of Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks. Early on in his story, he shares that he was motivated by fear. He feared ending up like his father, he feared failing, and he feared missing out on life. Obviously, Howard Schultz went on to become a success, and found other motivations in his life. A passion for his product, a desire to treat people ethically, and a vision to share his love of genuine Italian espresso all drove him to build Starbucks into the iconic coffee house of America, and the world.
Fear is not necessarily bad as a motivator, in the beginning. Fear of failure can lead to hard work as well as it can lead to apathy. Fear of disease can motivate people to exercise and improve their diet. In these examples, fear leads you forward to take the right actions, even if it isn’t for the best reasons. In the fight or flight response to fear, you can find a rush of adrenaline that energizes you to take those initial steps. In the midst of fear, your will often generate dozens of good ideas for dealing with the situation you fear, and provide a foundation for the work that needs to be done.
While fear can be a decent motivator to get you off the launchpad and into the realm of action, it leads to two dark paths that will sabotage your success and leave you worse off than when you started.
- Fear Leads to Obsession
When you depend on fear as motivation over the long haul, you tend to become obsessed with the object of your fear. If it is disease, you may over-exercise to the detriment of our physical well being and social life. If it is fear of financial ruin, you may become a workaholic, while neglecting every other area of your life. Every conversation you have ends up focused on the subject of your fear, because your mind is gnawing on that subject day in and day out. Your whole life becomes centered on the fear, because you depend on it to keep you moving. If you let go of the fear, you let go of the thing that is driving you forward, which feeds the anxiety that your greatest fear will become reality. - Fear Only Motivates While There Is Something To Fear
If you are counting on fear to motivate you on a lifelong pursuit of passion, you are setting yourself up for failure. I have a friend who has a small consulting and computer repair business. We were talking about how businesses operate, and he told me that most of the small businesses he knows will push to get business until their needs are met for a season, then pull back until they need to generate more income. Depending on fear to keep you moving will put you in the same surge and rest pattern. You will get all fired up while the big bad wolf is chasing you, but when the wolf disappears, you will sit down and relax until he shows up again. You will not generate sustainable positive growth with this habit, and in the long run you will end up disheartened because you will not get the results you expect. Ultimately, depending on fear as a motivator only leads to mediocrity at best, and outright failure at worst.
Experience and wisdom teach that heartfelt passion is the only positive motivator that will energize you on the long road of life. Trying to build your dreams on the foundation of fear is like using drugs and alcohol to self medicate. It may give you short term results, but long term there is a price to pay. There is no shortcut to happiness and success. You have to learn how to move past the fear and find that part of you that is excited about life and motivated by a larger vision for your future. Like Howard Schultz, you need to dream a big, huge, enormous, impossible dream, and then be crazy enough to pursue it at all costs.
