Week 9: What I'm afraid of

As I close in on the last 3 weeks to my launch date, I'm heads-down working on what I consider the most important asset a company has: the landing page.

I've talked a lot in this newsletter about why it's so key: it's the only place you can reliably package up your pitch and make it easy for people to understand what you do.

But instead of talking more about that, I want to spend time on something equally important: the mental side of this game. More specifically, I want to talk about what I think is the most pronounced emotion among knowledge workers—fear.

Fear is just a question

If I asked you what fear is, what would you say? A bad feeling? A physical reaction? A state of mind?

These answers are fine, but they don’t describe fear in a way that you can do anything about.

Here’s a better answer from performance psychologist Jared Tendler:

Fear is an accumulation of anxiety. Anxiety is an accumulation of doubt or uncertainty.

Uncertainty is essentially a question you don’t have the answer for, or don’t have enough experience to prove the answer you already have is correct. When these questions are unanswered or unproven, doubt lingers and eventually accumulates into anxiety. If this goes on long enough, it turns into fear. As with other emotions, fear exists along a spectrum, only it begins with a question.

By digging into your fear, you can pull out the questions that are unanswered or unproven. Uncovering the questions underlying your fear is important because they indicate what you want to know at a deeper level. Some examples:

• If I cant do this simple thing, how can I ever succeed?

• Is this the right decision?

• How could I be so stupid?"

Sometimes these questions linger in your mind without being answered, while at other times they're automatically answered with responses such as "It’s because Im stupid that I make these mistakes". These answers perpetuate fear.

I like this framing because it rationalizes seemingly irrational thoughts. The more you dig, the more questions you uncover.

What kind of questions do I have? Heaps.

• Will I get any customers?

• Do I have any skill at this at all?

• Is this venture the best thing for my family?

• Am I just making a fool of myself here?

Resolving the question

Because fear starts with a question, the strategy for overcoming it is surprisingly simple (though not easy): you need to answer the question. Why? Because answering the question gives you certainty.

When you have certainty, there's nothing to fear. This is why people who have certainty display confidence, even when they are wrong.

Tendler suggests two techniques for doing that.

#1: Play out the fear

Repeatedly ask, "What's the worst that could happen?" and “What would do that to me?”

When you answer those alternative questions truthfully, the answer is usually much less worse than it initially seemed.

#2: Reword the question for the future

For questions that are about things that haven’t happened yet, switch the tense of the question.

Instead of, “If I can't do this simple thing, how can I ever succeed?”

Try: “What can I do to give myself the best chance of success with what's in front of me right now?”

Answer the new question.

A real example

This newsletter is all about transparency, so here’s a real example from my notes from a few years ago. I haven’t changed a word.

It took me a long time to register it, but I spent a lot of years being unreasonably scared of competition. I subconsciously resisted researching my competitors and understanding how my own business compared to them.

What's the worst thing that would happen if I thoroughly understood what my competitors were doing?
I'd find that someone else is doing exactly what I'm doing, but better.

What would that do to me?
It would make me completely reassess if I'm building the right thing. I'd have to redirect my entire team around what I'd found.

How would that feel?
Like all my work was for nothing. It would emotionally destroy me.

How can I prevent that from happening?
Logically, I need to be aware of what's going on around me to not end up in a situation where I'm building against a direct competitor or copycat. It might happen, but I'll only know if I'm paying attention to the market.

How can I do it?
I can make dedicated time every week to catch up on what's going on in my area. If I set the time aside, I can mentally prepare myself for the anxiety that I'll feel at first. Over time, it will get easier.

Why does this cause me anxiety?
In a past business, I didn't know what I was doing. I plowed deep into my funding with a half-baked idea. As the money was running out, I was both overly committed to what I was building and unaware of what people actually wanted to buy. I believed my only option was to just try harder. If, at that point, I had found out someone was building what I was building but better, it would have broken me.

And there it was—accumulated fear from a past experience. I realized that it ended up not just hurting my ability to understand competition, but also my ability to understand how customers think. Because I knew the market so little, I couldn't describe my business well, so my marketing ability suffered.