This won't be a complete treatise, only a comment on something my friends and I have talked about: creating something comes with a huge, crippling fear of success. Or a fear of failure. Or both. Fear of failure is the one people talk about, and it seems to be more easily sanctioned. Of course you don't want to fail.
But fear of success is much more mysterious. There's some primal part of the brain that gets upset with change -- that I understand. But there's also something in the brain that sighs with relaxation when a project goes south. Why is it that some part of me is relieved to not finish something?
I'm not in that mode now, so this all feels slightly academic, or like trying to sing show tunes when you're blue. But it will come back, I promise. And that's the point (again) where I'll recognize (again) what concurrent behaviors reinforce fear of success.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
What a good blog.
Loved your talk at the Library Foundation dinner last night. You and Alice were generous and interesting. Thank you so much for coming up to Sacramento. You were both such good teachers at Squaw ('06), and it was fun to see you again.
Sunnyside is blowing my mind a little bit. I've been reading it since January so it's a slow explosion.
Post a Comment