Scared Of Failing? Ask Yourself These 6 Fear-Killing Questions
Warren
Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, collected the provocative
questions top designers, tech innovators, and entrepreneurs ask themselves to
spark creativity.
Here’s a question:
What
would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
If
that question seems familiar, it should. One of the hallmarks of a powerful
question is that it gets passed around, and among innovators I spoke with in
the tech industry, this one has been making the rounds perhaps more than any
other--quoted by everyone from Google’s Regina
Dugan to
Sebastian Thrun at Udacity and Airbnb co-founder Joe
Gebbia.
Interestingly,
the question did not originate in Silicon Valley. It can be traced back three
decades to the American pastor Robert Schuller, who used it in inspirational
sermons and books. But its popularity was jumpstarted a few years ago by Dugan,
who featured the question in a widely circulated 2010 TED speech (Dugan was a creative
director at DARPA at the time).
“If
you really ask yourself this question,” Dugan told the TED audience, “you can’t
help but feel uncomfortable.” She explained that the question tends to make us
aware that fear of failure “keeps us from attempting great things . . . and
life gets dull. Amazing things stop happening.” But if you can get past that
fear, Dugan said, “impossible things suddenly become possible.”
When
I asked Thrun, who often quotes the question and has shared it on Reddit, why
it resonated with him, he said it was because it touches on what may be the
biggest issue for innovators--fear of failure. “Innovators have to be
fearless,” he said. “People mainly fail because they fear failure.”
But
how can a question help with something as primal and powerful as fear? It has
to do with the power of hypothetical “what if” questions to enable us to
temporarily shift reality--allowing us to look at the world through a different
lens. According to John Seely Brown of the Deloitte Center for
the Edge, “In order for imagination to flourish, there must be an opportunity
to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins
with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something
strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or
perspective.”
So
by asking What if I could not fail?, we create a mental landscape in
which the constraint of failure is removed. It’s actually quite common, and
effective, to use “What if” questions to remove various kinds of mental
constraints--to allow for thinking freely, without some of the mental baggage
that can weigh down the imagination. Product developers sometimes use the
hypothetical question What if cost were not an issue? to temporarily
remove practical limits on thinking. Similarly, a favorite question of Airbnb’s
Gebbia that he uses to jumpstart thinking on projects is, What if we could
start with a blank page? The question removes the constraint of having to
deal with what’s already been done.
But
while “what if” questions can help you imagine a world without failure and
other practical problems, the author, blogger, and serial entrepreneur Jonathan
Fields
recommends using hypothetical questions in a different way--one that can help
you anticipate and come to terms with real-world problems, including failure.
Fields told me he doesn’t particularly like the What if you could not fail
question because “it proposes a fantasy scenario. I’m more interested in taking
people through a series of questions that will actually empower you to take
action in the face of the reality that you might fail.” Fields suggests that we
use questioning to confront failure head-on by asking:
What
if I fail--how will I recover?
Failure
in any endeavor is rarely absolute.
Often
when we think about failure, Fields says, “we do so in a vague, exaggerated
way--we’re afraid to even think about it clearly.” But if before embarking on a
high-risk challenge, you visualize what would actually happen if it failed--and
what you’d likely have to do to pick up the pieces from that failure--this can
help you realize that, as Fields says, “failure in any endeavor is rarely
absolute. There is a way back from almost anything, and once you acknowledge
that, you can proceed with more confidence.” (The psychiatrist and author
Judith Beck told me that she uses a similar question with patients--If the
worst happens, how could I cope?--because, as she explained, “People’s
anxiety goes down once they realize they will live through their worst fear,
and that they have internal and external resources that will help them get
through it.”)
Another
important question Fields thinks we should ask:
What
if I do nothing?
The
point being, when we take on a major challenge it’s often because we really
need to change--and if we don’t go ahead with it, we’re likely to be unhappy
staying put. Whatever problem or restlessness already exists may, in fact, get
worse. “There is no sideways,” Fields says; if you’re not moving forward,
you’re moving back.
Lastly,
Fields suggests, ask yourself:
What
if I succeed?
“That’s
important because the way our brains are wired, we tend to automatically go
toward the negative scenario. So in order to give your mind a chance to latch
on to something positive, something that will actually fuel action rather than
paralysis, it’s helpful to create some level of clarity around what success in
this endeavor would look like.” In other words, give yourself a strong
incentive to want to risk failure.
The
blogger Chris Guillebeau is getting at a similar idea in this post, wherein he puts yet
another spin on the Schuller question. “Instead of thinking about what you
would do if you knew you wouldn’t fail,” Guillebeau writes, “maybe a better
question is . . .
What’s truly worth doing, whether you
fail or succeed?”
Of
course, if failure does become a reality, as it often does when taking on
worthwhile challenges, a whole new set of questions become important--the kind
that can help you analyze the failure, learn from it, and figure out how to use
it to keep moving forward on the challenge. There are many such questions, but
here’s one, in particular, to keep in your back pocket and use when needed:
In
this failure, what went right?
It’s
a question people rarely ask about failure “because they’re completely focused
on what went wrong,” says Stanford University’s Bob Sutton, author of Scaling
Up Excellence. But by paying attention to the small successes within a failure,
we’re reminded that failure often is not absolute, nor is it an endgame--it is
an instructive stage, and one step on a longer journey.
By Warren Berger http://www.fastcodesign.com/3027404/scared-of-failing-ask-yourself-these-6-fear-killing-questions?partner=newsletter
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