FEAR, THE ALL TIME MOTIVATIONAL CHAMP

image via pinterest

Nothing to fear but fear, and that’s more than enough.

Quirky people have quirky fear, or they wouldn’t be quirky.

Regardless of quirk, fear, real fear, is everywhere.

“Do this, not that, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Don’t forget to (insert action) or you’ll regret it.”

Fear and status go hand in hand. Who isn’t afraid of looking bad to our peers?

Not you? Come on, man.

With writers, it’s mostly f-up fear.

We’re hacks, phonies, got lucky, couldn’t write our way out of a library with footprints on the floor.

That’s what we get up with, and what we go to sleep on.

“But I’m a writer,” is a great excuse for bad behavior.

“It’s research,” is another.

Unless you read the results of behavior and research, it’s a cover for insecurity, failure to deliver, to launch.

After all, you’re not a writer if you don’t write. All you need do is whip out a link to a recent post, article, or page from a journal, and you’re a writer.

That’s the good news. Then there’s other news when a writer for The Atlantic turns in something like, Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators.

Wouldn’t you expect a title like that to deliver something funny about writers and procrastination? Maybe something quirky?

What you don’t expect is a shift from this:

I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he managed to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. “Well,” he said, “first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write. That’s when I get up and go clean the garage. After that, I go upstairs, and then I come back downstairs and complain to my wife for a couple of hours. Finally, but only after a couple more days have passed and I’m really freaking out about missing my deadline, I ultimately sit down and write.”

To this:

“I’ll hire someone who’s twenty-seven, and he’s fine,” says Todd, who manages a car rental operation in the Midwest. “But if I hire someone who’s twenty-three or twenty-four, they need everything spelled out for them, they want me to hover over their shoulder. It’s like somewhere in those three or four years, someone flipped a switch.”

Fear of missing the writing boat turns a fun article into a millennial bashing rant?

About six years ago, commentators started noticing a strange pattern of behavior among the young millennials who were pouring out of college. Eventually, the writer Ron Alsop would dub them the Trophy Kids. Despite the sound of it, this has nothing to do with “trophy wives.” Rather, it has to do with the way these kids were raised. This new generation was brought up to believe that there should be no winners and no losers, no scrubs or MVPs. Everyone, no matter how ineptly they perform, gets a trophy.

The writer doesn’t get it, probably never coached youth soccer where nervous parents dream of their kid being The One.

Calling them Trophy Kids is a tired take on the Participation Medal. Why not give the team a memento for their season? Veteran coaches all have a box of the stuff the team parents give them as a thank you.

Were we Trophy Coaches?

“Work finally begins,” says Alain de Botton, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.” For people with an extremely fixed mind-set, that tipping point quite often never happens. They fear nothing so much as finding out that they never had what it takes.

That’s a fear that needs regular testing.

Do you have what it takes? Do you really want to know?