I'd like to share a little something about fear of success. This is the readers digest version of course, and my dates are fuzzy, but I’m sure you’ll get the point.
About 20 years ago, give or take a year or two, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of the local community college where I was taking a couple of classes. I was in my 73’ Mustang Grande with the brown body and the red white and blue hood from the junk yard. I had just finished jumping the starter solenoid with a pair of pliers to get it started so I could listen to the very first tape of the “Tony Robbins Personal Power” series I had bought on my first real credit card.
I was making around $8,000 a year selling computers (up from $6,000 the prior year) and I felt there was much more to life, and that I was really not tapping my potential. I really had nothing to speak of, living with my parents, bartending at night and so on. I don’t really know why I bought the tapes other than I felt a need to use my new credit card.
I dove headlong into them. I followed the program to the tee, even the silly stuff like imaging a bad experience as a record and scratching it up, through the goal setting seminars and right on to the end. I still have the goals list. I wrote down some seriously unreasonable stuff – that was the point, stretch your imagination, no limits!
I wanted to double my income every year (from 8 to 16k woooweee!!!), I wanted to own a house, I wanted to take a trip, I wanted to become a pro bowler (ok, some goals are just no meant to be achieved), I wanted a wife and kids, LOL, on and on and on..
OK, so it’s 20 years later, and here I sit. I have a modest 6 figure income, I co-own one of the largest direct mail companies in the midwest, of not the country, I (we) employ over 40 people, I have a large house on an acre and a half, I have 4 kids, a wonderful wife of 21 years, and I am pretty close to being millionaire on paper.
I am not satisfied with my life. Each and every day, I feel there is more, much more to be had, I feel I could make a real significant contribution, I feel my income is not at all near what it could be, and on and on.
What “scares” me is that I know first hand the power of goal setting and a burning desire for success. It scares me to death. I know it can and does happen, so I am equally afraid to commit to a new path.
Before, I had nothing to lose; now I do. This is what scares me. Even writing this and posting it in a public forum is scary, because I will feel held accountable, and that I may have set a new course in motion, with no idea of it’s destination good or bad.
This is a different twist on the fear of success, but a fear none the less. Anyone else in the crossroads of life feel the same way?
