Failing spectacularly to overcome your primal fears

Fear of rejection and fear of failure are two stumbling blocks that hold one back from experimentation or even linear progression. While the fear of failure is more to do with low self-confidence and self-perceived inability, the fear of rejection is a bigger worry about the outcomes - how people might ridicule one for even making an attempt at something.

While self-help books try and coach you to improve self-esteem as a possible remedy, there are better seemingly solutions. As with most things in life, doing something repeatedly makes it look less alien and 'difficult'. Extending this further, failing sorely time and again could make you numb to these negative feelings of failure & rejection. However, wouldn't it be wise to create smaller opportunities where you could fail with impunity, rather than exhausting costlier options from your career and life events?

I recently came across this excellent Ted Talk on this topic. What better person to learn this from, than one who has systematically set himself up for failure 100 times, and has eventually made a successful career out of it!

Video URL: https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection

Jiang also writes about the 'Spotlight effect', which basically is a misconception that one is the centre of the universe and that everything we say and do is noticed in vivid detail by others around us. 'These fears force us to conform to others expectations, live mediocre lives and have forgettable careers.' In reality, no one has as much time, or to put it bluntly, no one really cares. Jiang also has a practical therapy of singing in the public to get over such fears!

Each person has their own set of fears, and some quirky ones at that. So, this is definitely worth taking a look at.

Your help could cripple someone, for life

A man spent hours watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It managed to make a

small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still. 

The man decided to help the butterfly and, with a pair of scissors, he cut open the cocoon, thus releasing the butterfly. However, the butterfly’s body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled. 

The man continued to watch, hoping that, at any moment, the butterfly would open its wings and fly away. Nothing happened; in fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its brief life dragging around its shrunken body and shriveled wings, incapable of flight. 

What the man – out of kindness and his eagerness to help – had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were nature’s way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings.

Sometimes, a little extra effort is precisely what prepares us for the next obstacle to be faced. Anyone who refuses to make that effort, or gets the wrong sort of help, is left unprepared to fight the next battle and never manages to fly off to their destiny.

- from "The Lesson of the Butterfly" by Paulo Coelho

A powerful story, indeed. 

Often, we come across situations, where jumping in to help someone or clearing obstacles to avoid discomfort seems to be the right thing to do. It could be with kids facing some of their initial & normal developmental challenges, friends facing some minor failures, or colleagues struggling with learning the ropes to accomplish something new.

What we don't realise is that going through these struggles and facing up to some initial failures is a critical step to developing one's emotional intelligence. As a society, we obsess on Intelligence Quotient (IQ) - academic abilities, comprehension, skills and standing in the top 1 percentile. However, what determines success at the workplace and overall in life is one's Emotional Quotient (EQ) - ability to express & control emotions, empathize and mental toughness to face challenges.

Its painful to see gifted people throw away their talents, just because they couldn't face up to a life event, their first failure, since they have always had someone coming along 'to cut open the cocoon and provide wrong help, all along'.  This cripples them for life, bestowing them with low emotional intelligence.

So, the next time you get the urge to help your child, friend or colleague, remember this. Nature has a way of getting each person ready for the long haul, and often its through a little struggle and some emotional labour. Often the best help you can do is to empathize & be around, but just watch and let the person grow stronger wings, by themselves.

Developing new habits & finding time for your hobbies

"I bought the diet book, but ate my usual foods."

"I filled the prescription, but didn't take the meds."

"I took the course... well, I watched the videos... but I didn't do the exercises in writing."

Merely looking at something almost never causes change. Tourism is fun, but rarely transformative.

If it was easy, you would have already achieved the change you seek.

Change comes from new habits, from acting as if, from experiencing the inevitable discomfort of becoming.


I came across the above interesting post from Seth Godin. How often do we fret over inability to adopt a new schedule or do simple things on a more regular basis? It could be hitting the gym, reading books, practicing a hobby, or a simple thing like remembering to take medicines when you fall sick. Adding tasks to a to-do list or putting up stick-it notes doesn't seal it - you end up looking at it a bit more frequently, but may not get down to do it repeatedly.

From my personal experience, one effective way to achieve this is to fit the aspirational task into your daily habits/sequence of rituals. For instance, setting aside 30 minutes everyday after dinner, to read a book before you hit the bed. If you have a long commute to office, create a library of all those audio podcasts/ted-talks that you always wanted to catch up on.

There are enough undefined/adhoc times in our limited daily schedule, that you could carve out to accommodate that elusive task you aspire to make a habit. Couple of months back, S Kumar, a friend had posted a nice article on the same topic. Do check out his article on "How I found time and got certified in 54 diverse online courses".

Tales about the Monk's Ferrari!!

The other day I was browsing at the Crosswords bookstore, my favorite pastime these days, and came across the book titled "I bought the Monk's Ferrari"! Surprised and amused, I flipped through the volume and realized that it had no relation whatsoever to the bestseller "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" other than the fact that both were self-improvement books.

The author, Ravi Subramanian (an IIMB passout) must be commended for astutely choosing this title to readily bank on the top-of-the-mind recall! The title sure makes heads turn, though the cover could've been designed better. However, I found the book to be just one other amongst run-of-the-mill Self-Help books. The author goes out of the way to establish the 'Ferrari' connection and that looks artifical. Nevertheless, the fact that some of the 'ten commandments' stand out and prod the reader to imbibe them, shows that the author has managed to partly achieve what he set out for.