It’s admittedly hypocritical of me to use the word ‘perfect’ in the title of this post when I’ve written in the past about perfection being overrated.  But the word perfect does actually have a place in personal growth so long as you don’t take it too literally.

True perfection isn’t really the point though.  The big idea is that practicing your craft has to be done with a level of respect for how you’ll perform in reality at all times.  No ifs, ands, or buts.

The only way to achieve your maximum performance potential is to train your body and mind to do so over and over… and over.

Let’s assume for a moment that talent is overrated (just like perfection).  Sure, there are people who are naturally better at certain things than others – they have talent, that’s indisputable – but no one can achieve great heights without lots and lots of practice.  As Malcolm Gladwell said in Outliers, you need 10,000 hours of practice to be great.  Or, really, to even have a chance at being great.

Peter Norvig recognized this pattern as well in “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”:

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.

What does this mean?  Simple.  It means just because you were born with a golden arm doesn’t make you Roger Clemens.  Bad example, I know… but despite his pretty obvious use of performance enhancing drugs, the guy was also a workhorse on the baseball field.  His workouts would mimic the intensity of the game and when on the mound, his movements were like a machine.  He put in his 10,000 hours and then some.

Kobe Bryant is probably somewhere right now shooting free throws.  Derek Jeter is taking batting practice on his off-day.  Steve Ballmer is rehearsing his next keynote.  Tiger Woods… well let’s not go there.  We’ll assume he’s practicing his golf swing or something.  Chefs are cooking, athletes are training, executives are rehearsing, gymnasts are bouncing, and dancers are dancing the world over. 

That’s what they need to do to be the best.

Chances are, they’re not dragging their feet either – they’re really doing it.  Pretending it’s the real thing all the way.  They’re practicing “perfectly”.  That doesn’t mean without flaw, it just means they’re not letting themselves off the hook mentally “just because it’s practice”.

Which brings me back to the core message. Practice may not actually make perfect, but if you aren’t practicing perfectly, you have no shot.  The more you practice the right way, the more you’re creating routine – or “muscle memory” as the coaches call it.  Your brain understands sequence and your nervous system reacts more quickly as the pathways are grooved.  The more this happens, the better you become at the task at hand and the more natural it all becomes to you.

So what happens if your practice becomes lazy?  If you start training yourself to be sloppy, what do you think is going to happen when the time comes to perform under real pressure?  Sloppiness.  Failure.  Failure you could have prevented just by putting forth more effort during practice.  Your brain and body are just reacting how they’ve been trained to.  They way you’ve trained them.

I learned this stuff firsthand during intense martial arts training with some of the best instructors in the world a few years back. If you drop your hands or turn your back during drills, you’ll drop your hands or turn your back during sparring.  We were very deliberate during all of our training to make sure our practice was as realistic as we could make it.  So now, even if I’m just hitting the heavy bag at the local gym, I never drop my hands anymore.

We also ran all sorts of stress drills (lights off, eyes closed, unpredictable situations) to make our training feel real.  If you didn’t get scared, we weren’t doing it right.  This way the "real thing” was just another practice session.

I’ve since applied this “perfect practice” approach to just about everything in my life that requires rehearsal.  If I’m giving a talk, I rehearse it like it’s the real thing.  Start to finish.  I try and get on the actual stage ahead of time and run through it 10 times, forcing myself to continue if I flub something so I can get used to rebounding from it.  It’s going to happen, I might as well be ready for it.

When rehearsing a presentation you can’t just:

• Start over just because you messed something up
• Skip sections because you think you know them
• Rehearse alone if a partner will actually be speaking with you
• Use acronyms or lingo you wouldn’t use for real
• Rehearse things out of order

Make it real! Imagine if when you learned how to drive you first learned to steer, then a week later you practiced the brake, and the following week you practiced the accelerator.  Ridiculous, right?  That’s how a lot of people practice stuff.  Section by section.

Here are some specific tactics as they apply to ‘perfect’ practice, whether it’s for athletics, public speaking, or basket weaving:

• Simulate real events.  Get the environment as close to the real thing as possible, down to the smallest detail if you need to.  Even if you’re just doing a dry run of a talk while driving your car, try and simulate your cadence and rhythm.
• Make your training harder than the real thing.  Know deep down inside that you’re ready with all the confidence in the world.  You’ve been there already.
• Never practice tired.  One of the worst habits people have: practicing tired because they think it’s helping.  It’s not.  When you’re tired, you’re training your brain and body to be sloppy.  Just stop.  Always practice fresh and form good habits.
• Get over your fear.  Stop projecting the worst that could happen all the time.  Prepare for the worst and you’ll know you’re ready. 
• Always think “what would I do if…?”  Back when I played baseball, I used to have a word written on the outside of my glove in black marker: THINK.  When I’d be standing around in the outfield between pitches, I’d find myself looking down at the glove, remembering to think, and then constructing the next play in my head.  When the ball was hit my way, I was ready.

Off to practice sleeping now (it’s late as I’m writing this – and we have a 2-week old baby boy!)  Enjoy your practice and keep the realism coming!

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Overthinking is a natural part of life for many of us, even when we’re not aware we’re doing it.  Research has shown that overthinking is prevalent in young and middle aged adults, with 73% of 25-35 year-olds identified as overthinkers.  More women (57%) find themselves overthinking than men (43%), which is a significant difference.  This means the majority of women are overthinkers, and the majority of overthinkers are women. 

I’m not a woman, but I am an overthinker.  So I guess I’m in the minority… a vocal minority   If you find yourself spending an unreasonable amount of time thinking through something, twisting it around in your head until you’ve seen it from every angle and possibility, chances are you too are an overthinker.

There are very few benefits to being an overthinker.  Being logical (and therefore unemotional) about taking action has a lot of merit and can have positive results, but there’s a difference between thinking about something just enough – and thinking about something to the point of analysis paralysis.  The short of it is, you don’t want to be an overthinker!

Overthinking can occur as a consequence of a decision that needs to be made, big or small, and is typically exacerbated in stressful situations.  It’s not limited to decision making however, as it can also rear it’s ugly head whenever something has the ability to cause any level of anxiety or worry.  It’s the proverbial thing that “keeps you up at night” and stems from an actual or perceived lack of control over some aspect of life.  With a lack of control comes a feeling of helplessness. Overthinking is frequently the direct result.  The worst overthinkers actually spend time overthinking seemingly meaningless things to the point that they’ve spent more time thinking about the thing than the time it would have taken to address it completely.  What a waste of time and energy!

There have been a number of studies over the past 20 years that challenge the view that overthinking equates to better decisions and therefore improved happiness and success.  Specifically these studies have found that overthinkers are more prone to sustained sadness and negative thinking.  And though it may seem that thinking through problems to the extreme would result in better decisions, overthinking has actually been shown to impair problem solving and rational thought, and interfere with initiative and motivation.

What’s worse is that people aren’t clued in to the dangers of overthinking.  Most people feel they’re making progress while cogitating endlessly, but in fact they’re permeating negative thoughts and fostering a pessimistic view of the situation.  As we know, “we are what we think”, and for those stuck in the cycle of overthinking, they’re reinforcing this adverse thought process and letting it trickle into other areas of thought.

If you got this far, chances are you’ve identified yourself as an overthinker. Which means right now you’re probably wondering what the heck you can do about it?  If you were to stop reading right now, you’d probably go off thinking that you have a problem – and then spend the rest of the week wondering how this affects your thinking, what you could do to “fix it”.  And again, you’d be overthinking it! 

Overthinking isn’t something you’re born doing, it’s a learned habit you form over time, probably as a defense mechanism to the possibility of failure.  So before going any further, let’s see what we can do about it.

If you find yourself overthinking, you need to change the channel in your mind immediately.  Simple, right?  It mostly is.  The caveat here is that while the solution is simple, putting it into action takes ongoing practice.  But just like most things, the more you do this, the better you’ll get at it next time and the time after that.  Here are some ways you can change your current thought process:

1. Avoid situations and people that can lead to overthinking.  You can do this based on history – you can probably determine which situations are going to keep you up at night unnecessarily.  Or do this based on how something makes you feel prior to participating.  This takes some self-awareness, but it isn’t unlike what an alcoholic has to do in order to stay sober.  They avoid the people, places, and things that put them into that mental state.
2. Talk to yourself.  Rather, don’t talk to yourself in the way you’ve been talking to yourself; “level up” your self-talk.  When you have something on your mind and you can’t shake it, stay aware of your thought process… You may find it surprising how often the topic pops up.  You may also be surprised to find that overthinking is more likely to occur with negative thoughts, which means you’re fixating on the wrong things to help you overcome the situation.  Every time you find yourself overthinking something, especially when it’s negative, think instead, “This isn’t helping.  What would help is…” and replace it with a positive affirmation.  Do this each and every time.
3. Commit to a project that maps to your goals.  Find a happy person and chances are you’ll find at least one active project that aligns with their core values.  If you’re able to focus your energy on something that matters to you instead of on the repetitive monotony of unhelpfulness, you may find yourself thinking less and less about the thing you want to avoid.
4. Distract yourself.  Get out, do something, and get your mind off of the thing you can’t stop thinking about.  It’s possible to do this… you just have to be willing to give it a shot, which is probably the trickiest part (convincing yourself to do it).  The best way I’ve found to distract myself is to exercise – for whatever reason it’s hard for me to overthink when I’m sweating – but spending time with your family, going on a drive, or just sitting still and breathing work as well.  The best distractions are ones in which you can find the flow state.  Find your favorite distraction and do it!
5. Enforce a time limit to your thinking and document your thoughts.  If you’re going to overthink, just commit to it for a short amount of time.  Give yourself permission to overthink, but only for 15 minutes.  Set a timer, grab a pen and paper, and for the entire 15 minutes, write down everything that comes to your mind.  Don’t stop to correct yourself (pretend there’s no eraser or backspace key), it doesn’t matter what you’re writing.  You’re just letting yourself get it all out.  When the 15 minutes are up, crumple up the paper and throw it out (or safely burn it) and move onto something else.  Something fun.
6. Turn overthinking into a next action in a project plan.  One big reason for overthinking is not knowing what comes next in order to make forward progress.  When you consider that overthinking is usually endless unstructured thinking on something, the key is to turn that energy into structured thinking.  Determining what the next possible action is you could take in order to push the boulder another inch up the mountain could free you from thinking about everything else at once.  Crystallize your thoughts into a list of next actions and take the first step.  Add the next to your calendar or to-do list, and know that you’re making progress.
7. Realize that being perfect isn’t possible.  Striving for perfection is a recipe for disaster, and the sooner you give up those perfectionist tendencies, the sooner you’ll move past the thing that’s occupying all your thoughts.  Perfectionism is highly overrated, and this post lists the 11 reasons why!
8. Work through the 5 keys to overcome fear.  The most important one for overthinkers is to stop projecting the worst of what could happen.  Ask yourself what’s the absolute worst that could possibly happen – and then be OK with that outcome, coming up with appropriate responses if necessary.  This is an amazingly freeing step as almost immediately, a light bulb in your head goes off.  If the worst case scenario isn’t actually that bad, and if you know how you’d deal with it if it came to that, anxiety about that thing may disappear completely.
9. Think about the big picture.  This is the one that has worked the best for me over the past few years.  It takes a little experience (i.e. the know-how to realize that it will indeed pass) but if you ask yourself, “Will this matter in a month/6 months/1 year?” and the answer is “No” or “Not really”, then what’s the point in thinking it to death?  If you do, in fact, determine that it will matter in a year, you can use this opportunity to leverage post-traumatic growth.  How has this experience changed you?  What have you learned from it, or how will you approach it differently next time?

Overthinking is a real detriment to focus and must be stamped out.  Forming positive habits and reinforcing them over time will make a big difference in your propensity to overthink, and these steps are some ways in which you can start to do that.  Let me know how it works!

(One way I’ve stopped overthinking and trying to perfect this post is to close my laptop without rereading it and get outside – it’s Sunday afternoon.  I’ll read it once more in the morning and then post it.)

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The reason I started this project (Refocuser) in 2009 instead of 1999 when I first had the idea is because I spent 10 years fighting with myself about how to make it perfect, all the way down to how I’d organize the site’s content on my hard drive.  Ugh!

Naturally, striving for your best work isn’t a bad thing… most people would never want to swing to the other extreme where quality and pride in the work are void, because that’s a real slippery slope to mediocrity.  But I’ve found that for me, that’s pretty much a non-option given my personality.  Keeping my perfectionist tendencies in check doesn’t have to mean that the quality of my output is going to suffer.

What I focus on instead of perfection is doing enough to get the most out of my efforts.  The second I start trending towards the familiar “over-focusing”, I force myself to stop in my tracks and self-evaluate.  More time spent on an activity very rarely equals higher quality in the kinds of projects I do – in fact, many times, it ends up being counter-productive – so not being a perfectionist can actually improve my work.

More is lost through indecision than wrong decision – Carmela Soprano

In his great book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz describes research as it relates to consumerism – and the findings indicate that people with perfectionist tendencies often have higher stress levels and are at greater risk for depression.  Schwartz describes two types of people with respect to buying behavior: Maximizers and Satisficers and how their approaches differ.

Maximizers go to extreme lengths to make a purchase decision – they research for days, they compare all the models, and then get second and third opinions from friends before making what they believe to be the perfect decision.  They’re caught up with unrealistically high expectations resulting from their output.  Satisficers know what they need in order to be content, and once they feel those needs can be met, they take action.  This can sometimes be the very first option that meets their criteria.  But the key is that they make a decision and they don’t second guess it.

What’s interesting is that Satisficers rate their overall happiness with life significantly higher than Maximizers.

Schwartz makes it clear that a Maximizer isn’t a true perfectionist.  In his view, a true perfectionist is always looking to get better but realizes that perfection is unattainable.  The example he gives is Tiger Woods.  Tiger is continually striving to up his game, but doesn’t put off playing in a big tournament because he isn’t getting holes in one consistently.  These “perfectionists” strive for good enough.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the same definition everyone else has of a perfectionist, which is generally looked at as a bad thing to be.  To me, a Maximizer as it’s described is the same as a perfectionist as we all understand it to be.

Dr. Paul Hewitt, a researcher who has spent 20+ years researching perfectionism at York University, agrees that there’s a difference between “the desire to excel and the desire to be perfect.”  The former can be healthy so long as it’s mapped to life goals (the Tiger Woods example) while the latter is a “vulnerability factor for unipolar depression, anorexia and suicide”.  The research backs this overwhelmingly.

Now, tips for perfectionism is a broad topic, but here are 11 things I’ve learned about it recently:

1. Perfectionism doesn’t have to conflict with “sweating the details”.  It’s natural to assume that just giving up on perfectionism means you’ll no longer have any attention to detail.  But that’s absurd.  There’s a difference between awareness of detail and expecting perfection in order to finish something.  It’s still possible – in fact desirable – to stay on top of things to the level in which you need to in order to ensure a high-quality output, but this doesn’t mean you get to be unreasonable with respect to the overall outcome.
2. Striving for perfection means you’ll only do 10% of the things you want to do.  When you focus on finishing one thing before you can start another, you’re bounding your creativity and productivity.  If you spend too much time “perfecting” something, you’re likely doing it at the expense of moving on to the next thing.
3. Perfectionists have higher blood pressure, anxiety, and mental health problems.  This almost goes without saying and has been backed up in numerous studies, but if you expect perfection, you’re going to have higher stress levels which will affect your overall mental and physical health.  Relaxation, meditation, and “slow days” are hard to come by for people who are always pushing to make everything perfect.
4. Just doing something over nothing puts you in an elite group of people.  In so many cases, just doing something is enough.  Signing up for a class even if it’s not the perfect time, turning in an assignment even though you know you could have done more, etc.  There are hundreds of examples where the majority of people will agonize until things are perfect and never do anything at all, while you can get something “good enough” out for the world to see.
5. Perfect is the enemy of good.  I love this Voltaire quote and use it in software development all the time.  It’s too easy to strive for perfection and lose sight of the fact that you’re, in many cases, doing this at a huge overall cost.
6. Failing fast can shorten your learning cycle.  Sometimes it’s best to take an iterative approach and ignore perfection as a means to learn.  “Fail fast” is a famous Silicon Valley maxim when it comes to new businesses, because if you’re going to fail, it’s best to do it early at a time when you have the resources to turn it around.  If you’re striving to be perfect, you could fail when it’s too late to anything.
7. Focusing on perfectionism takes your focus away from the things that really matter. If you’re doing anything you can to perfection, you could be missing out on your top three focus areas completely.  Balance is a good thing.
8. Just doing something will start to expose shallow fears.  Similar to failing fast, you may not know what you fear until you give something a shot.  You thought you were afraid to fail, but maybe you’re really afraid to succeed.  The sooner you can identify your fears you can put measures in place to work through them.
9. Collaboration and perfection don’t mix.  Have you ever tried to work with other people on something but first demanded your contribution to be “perfect”?  That’s a sure-fire way to a failed partnership.  Collaboration requires iteration and being open to feedback in both directions – if you’re shooting to be perfect, or if you believe you are, you’re not going to play well with others.
10. It isn’t what you do all or some of the time, it’s what you do most of the time. Something I live by which I first read in Body for Life by Bill Phillips.  There’s never a “perfect time”, and you can never execute something “perfectly”.  But if you’re able to perform well most of the time, it can make up for the times when you’re not “perfect”.  Perfection isn’t possible, but spending more of your time doing something well is.
11. Perfection is impossible.  Every physical thing is in a constant state of change, so even if you think something’s perfect, it won’t be perfect for long.  Give it up.

Are you a perfectionist?  Do you have any other tips or tricks on perfectionism?

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This mentality is pervasive in sports where competitors routinely cite how while their opponents are sleeping, they’re training.  While their opponents are training, they’re training harder.  While their opponents are training harder, they’re training smarter.  They need to out-train, out-think, out-practice, out-sleep, and out-diet their opponents. The important thing is to believe you’re doing this.  Because if you don’t, you won’t believe you can win or succeed when it matters. 

Imagine yourself getting into a boxing ring or starting a race knowing you didn’t train as hard as your opponent.  Or stepping into an important meeting knowing that the person you’re presenting to knows more about the material than you do.  You’re starting off with a serious disadvantage where it matters most.

Naturally this is a mindset that isn’t limited to sports or athletic events.  It’s just as important in the office, in school, in music, or in any pastime where practice or training is essential to long-term success.  Put this thinking to use any time you have an important event that involves preparation of some kind.  It’s a critical component of fear management – there’s no way to overcome fear of something without having confidence that you’ve done everything you can to prepare.  With research, fear can dissipate and your performance can improve.

Here are some tips for embracing this mentality:

• Bet on quality over quantity.  The amount of time you spend practicing or training isn’t going to matter if it isn’t quality time.  If you assume that there are only a set number of “training hours” in each week, and that your opponent has the drive and the means to fill all those hours with training, it’s up to you to train differently.  You need to make use of each hour such that if your opponent has 3 hours for each hour you have, you’re putting forth the better effort.
• Always have a plan; try not to do anything without practice session goals.  This will ensure your practice time is best optimized, and you’ll know each and every time that you’re doing all you can.  You’ll know that you didn’t waste any time because it was all prescribed and structured ahead of time.  This means spending a decent amount of time upfront plotting out your course of attack – as they say, the worst day to start is today.  Give yourself enough time to plan and don’t go 100% until the plan is finished.
• Assume your opponent is more talented than you are.  If your opponent is naturally more gifted than you are, this means the thing that will set you apart is the amount of dedicated and focused training you have.  It’s wrong-headed to ever assume your natural talents are going to set you apart from someone else; it’s the easiest way to be surprised by someone.  If you always feel as if your opponent has better tools available to them, then you have no excuse but to push yourself harder in practice.
• Specialize!  If you feel you’ve achieved an adequate level, see if you can break it down to its parts in order to get better at each part individually.  An example of this: you can be a good boxer without having a great jab.  Specialize by training your jab in isolation before reincorporating it into your repertoire.  Or if you’re giving a presentation on something relatively broad, spend time going deep into a specific subject area in order to give yourself the depth others may not have.
• Practice without fear of embarrassment.  We know that fear of embarrassment is the #1 deterrent for taking risks.  So the best way to overcome this fear is to embarrass yourself constantly during practice.  I’ve used this tactic while preparing for big presentations or meetings.  Instead of waiting until I’m standing in front of 500 people to say something stupid, I practice what I’m going to say dozens of times until I get it right.  Anything embarrassing I would normally say in freeform presentation gets vetoed during my practice session instead of coming out of my mouth when it matters.
• Always train from a position of serious disadvantage.  This is one of my favorite tactics for reinforcing preparedness with yourself, and is the basis of the subject of this post.  In Krav Maga and other reality-based martial arts, physical conditioning is a natural part of every class because if you can pull off self-defense movements while exhausted, imagine how well you’ll be able to perform when you’re alert and ready.  Other ways you can train from a disadvantage: use natural physical limiters like water or weights to simulate difficult conditions, practice your presentation without notes or slides, or try and play an instrument with one hand or with your eyes closed.  One of the best ways to train yourself to run faster on flat ground?  Train running uphill in the sand
• No matter how accomplished you are, don’t give up the fight until you quit altogether.  It’s natural that if you’ve achieved some level of success, you’re inclined to train less, practice less, and generally slack off.  Yet if continued success is important to you, it’s likely that staying on top is actually a lot harder than getting there was.  It isn’t time to slow down until you’re ready to do something else with your time.

Do you do more, think more, want more, need more, and have more than your opponent?  If you want to set yourself up for success, or at a minimum not feel a twinge of guilt over failure, the best thing you can do for yourself is to train harder than the real thing.

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As I talked about recently in the series on Flow, fear is best described as an acronym: ‘False Evidence or Expectations Appearing Real’ or ‘Failure Expected Action Required’.  Fear occurs when we have negative expectations of a situation – even when those expectations are completely unfounded.  So many people just assume the worst is going to happen when things are ambiguous.  Making this assumption leads to a quick “recoil effect” which isn’t dissimilar from what you do when you actually encounter a negative outcome to an action.

To paint a real-world scenario: Just a few months ago, a friend and I were asked to speak to 450 people at Microsoft about productivity and inbox management.  We live and breathe this stuff, so I wasn’t concerned about our ability to pull it off.  But when I learned how many people would be in attendance – and that it would be recorded for on-demand viewing – my first reaction was to curl up in a ball.  What if I say something stupid?  What if one of the questions from the audience puts me on the spot and I can’t answer it?  What if a co-worker watches me up on stage and thinks I’m an idiot because of how obsessed I am with keeping my inbox clean?   Of course none of this had even happened yet – the fear was based on projected failure, months before I had to actually give the talk.  And the concerns I had were mostly irrational; I knew the material, I knew people were hungry to learn it, and I knew I could be put on the spot and survive.  I worked through the steps below to get myself into the right mindset to do this. <Note that we did the talk and it was totally fine – in fact, it was so much fun it helped reaffirm my interest in starting this blog>

Without further adieu, here are some keys to overcoming fear:

1. Know that fear is just an emotion and it can be talked down.  Research has shown that the way we talk to ourselves can have a profound effect on our motivation.  If your self-talk is resoundingly negative, you’re eventually going to believe what you have to say.  So try and cut your negative self-talk off at the knees and replace it with positive self-talk.  Instead of thinking to yourself, “I’m going to tank up on stage”, reframe it as “I know I can do this – I know my stuff”.  Read more on self-talk in the context of Flow.
2. Fear dissipates with research, so learn about whatever you fear and practice, practice, practice it.  Fear is often times about the lack of control over something.  For example, people fear flying or having even minor surgery because their control over the situation is taken away from them.  Well, fight for some of that control back!  The best way to do it is to know your stuff in and out and have rehearsed it 10,000 times before you have to do it for real.  People who know how to fly planes don’t fear flying in the same way non-pilots do.
3. Stop projecting the worst of what could happen.  Ask yourself what’s the worst that could happen – and then be OK with that outcome.  For example, if you’re about to move across the country for a new job and it’s keeping you up at night, do a little soul-searching to brainstorm what’s the worst that could happen.  If you can be content with the worst possible outcome, what’s holding you back?  Would you be lonely for a few months?  Could it cost you 5x more than you had expected?  Would you miss your family?  Figure out the worst case scenario, do what you need to do to be OK with that, and then move on.
4. Make fear manageable; break it up into little chunks.  This is the same way you get anything done using any productivity system.  If you’re looking at something huge and overwhelming – like “Write a best-selling book”, the best way to get a grip on your fear is to break it down into discrete actions.  I’d be scared to sit down to try and write a best-selling book, but I wouldn’t be scared to “Write an outline of chapter 1 covering the mating rituals of bears”. 
5. Don’t be afraid of criticism, blame, or embarrassment.  Usually the “fear of failure” isn’t about failure at all, it’s about the impending impact to your ego.  No one likes being criticized or feeling embarrassed about something.  You just have to be OK with looking like an idiot (see #3) since 9 times out of 10 that’s all that’s holding you back!  And the chances of you looking like an idiot in the eyes of others are actually much lower than you think they are.

The real key here isn’t so much to overcome your fears (it just makes a good title) but rather to acknowledge them and work with them.  Fear will always be there, what you have to do is overwhelm your fear with desire and work through it to the other side.  Once you’ve done that, the rewards are always greater than if you just gave up without trying.  As Randy Pausch said: “The walls are there for you to show how badly you want it.”

Even with these tools in your toolbox, fear – especially deep-seated fear – isn’t something you can work through in 5 minutes.  It takes time to separate your rational fears from your irrational fears and for your mind to come to terms with doing something it thinks is irrational.  So the bottom line: When afraid, do what you would normally do if you weren’t afraid. 

What would you attempt to do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

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