What are You Afraid Of?

I am afraid that no matter how hard i will try or how good I will be, i still have no control over things that impact my business such as “Luck” or sometimes “Timing”.
Of course every time i feels i’m down and start thinking about all worst scenarios and possible horror stories, I remind myself that at the age of 26, I must experience failures many time in order to succeed in the longer course.
I may lose few battles, but I plan to win the war.

Pain and Pleasure are always the biggest motivators for any person. NAC/NLP studies have a lot of research done on this subject and divides people into two groups:
1) those who run away from pain (like your above example, or like me who has a constant fear of a competitor stealing our market)
2) those who run towards pleasure (like somebody hoping to accumulate funds for his next vacation, or buying a new house, etc).

My personal opinion is that these are good for motivating oneself but all work and no play is dangerous (and it often happens) – because while you can always make up for lost business and money even at the age of 60, there is no way you can ever make up for the lost time in life
(Sorry to tread on the philosophical boundaries above but its how I feel and I think its important too).

To some extent i have the same opinion as of Adam Benayoun above – to fail enough as soon as possible at an early age, i.e. to say “to run out of bad options, asap” so that you reach the “perfect situation” that shall catapult the business to entirely new level. Sometimes doubts come in: will i be like one of those who keep working hard till 65-70 and have a “successful status” by media standard but are a failure in personal life? But then, those are the lessons that should be learned too, at an early age so that one leads a fulfilling life.

I’m afraid of Google, the company who will do know evil, doing what I do and making my last 18 months meaningless. On the other hand, I’m waiting by my phone for a call from the Google Acquisition Department :p

I’m afraid of losing my passion for what I do. I had a week-long slump earlier this year and it *scared* me!

I’m afraid of competition although I know it’s healthy, and I learned from a startup buddy why competition getting acquired by someone would be excellent for me.

Jason Alba
CEO – JibberJobber.com
:: self-serve career management ::

Top 7 List

1. Being too early.
2. Choosing the wrong direction and not realizing it quickly enough.
3. Losing focus due to too much VC investment.
4. Missing opportunities due to lack of VC investment.
5. Not hiring the right people.
6. Trying to do too much.
7. Fighting the herd – and losing.

David Repas
Founder
www.Sprout.us

For me it is a culmination of fears.

Right now, I have a collection company on hold while I type. These folks are ruthless! I fear constantly dealing with them. Losing everything I own and not providing for my family because opportunities turn out to not be.
I fear forgetting why I take these risks. My dreams becoming distant and unreachable due to the piles of monotony accumulated from dealing with these idiots on hold.

I am in the pit of experiencing my first failure right now. 250k in debt and no concrete sign of how it will get taken care of.
Just myself and a new idea. Hell, this will sum it up.
I fear fearing all the damn time.

Back to the phone.

OK guys, if your fear is getting the better of you just now; if you’re worried that the hard work and vulnerability you’ve subjected yourself to might be too high stakes after all, “READ THIS”:http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:S6_f_BsuH80J:herosjourneyentrepreneurship.org/heros_journey_entrepreneurship.html+Courage+is+not+the+absense+of+fear+but&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us, and be reminded of why you’re doing it.

Good topic. My fears:

1. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.
2. We’ll wind up selling and miss big opportunities.
3. We won’t sell and we’ll lose the value we’ve built into the company—wind up with nada.
4. I’ll wind up as a 9-5 lifer in a big company if we don’t get this right.

Conversely, my hopes:

1. Nimble and frequent approach to changes will allow us to hit resonance with the interweb.
2. We’ll sell, get some nice cash out of the deal.
3. We won’t sell and will instead take our company into the next tier of value and revenue.
4. I’ve got the skills and ideas to keep throwing ideas out there and making a go of it.

I liked what Rob wrote in 4.
I dont wanna end up being in a big company and have no impact, what I wanna do is have an impact on million of people lives and I hope to achieve this through my Start-up.
I don’t really how much will be my exit, since i care more about if my product has a rock proposition value, The money I’ll nmake out of the deal will totally be used for the next idea anyway to try and avoid and getting 100% funded by VCs.

There are 5 psychological motivators: Prestige, Curiosity, Security, Experience and Connection.

Everyone has a bias towards one or two of these (your primary and secondary motivators)

Being able to identify these in yourself is critical for helping you to conciously control your motivation level toward anything at all. The first step is identifying them, then with practice, you can control your motivation by adjusting your perspective towards a task.

For example:

My primary motivator is Prestige – “Fear or Failure” is an atribute of the prestige motivator. It can be problematic to have Prestige as your primary motivator because it requires you to insist on coming first. Nothing wrong with that – except that if you feel you won’t come first, you’ll avoid / detest the task alltogether. I therefore find myself hating sport, etc. To control this problem I’ve learnt adjust my perspective on the task and fall back onto my secondary motivator which is curiosity: a thirst for knowledge about any given subject or task. Doing this can increase my motivation level towards a task I might otherwise detest.

Its a handy skill to learn.

sorry about my spelling btw – was in a rush. Prestige causes me to ignore spelling errors because I’m a lousy speller ;)