Alternate:Words

Loom­ing suc­cess, orig­i­nally uploaded by Thorsten Becker.

Loom­ing suc­cess? That sounds like an oxy­moron. Usu­ally we asso­ciate the word ‘loom­ing’ with some­thing neg­a­tive – fail­ure, dis­as­ter, cri­sis. Merriam-Webster gives the fol­low­ing def­i­n­i­tion of looming:

1: to come into sight in enlarged or dis­torted and indis­tinct form often as a result of atmos­pheric con­di­tions
2 a: to appear in an impres­sively great or exag­ger­ated form b: to take shape as an impend­ing occurrence

This def­i­n­i­tion shows a clear cor­re­la­tion between loom­ing and per­cep­tion, some­thing may be loom­ing over us hence appear blown out of pro­por­tion, larger than it really is and there­fore cre­ate a sense of anx­i­ety. So how can this per­tain to success?

I recently watched J. K. Rowl­ings com­mence­ment speech at the 2008 Annual Meet­ing of the Har­vard Alumni Asso­ci­a­tion titled “The Fringe Ben­e­fits of Fail­ure, and the Impor­tance of Imag­i­na­tion”. She pointed out the con­cerns her par­ents had for her future as well as her own fears of fail­ure which ulti­mately came true, but in the end enabled her to make sig­nif­i­cant changes in her own think­ing lead­ing up to a suc­cess­ful writ­ing career. I am going to state that every­one of us has feared fail­ure at some point in our life, mostly dur­ing child­hood. Maybe we were scared of giv­ing a wrong answer when called on by the teacher, or we were scared to get a bad grade on a dif­fi­cult assign­ment, or we were fright­ened to death when hav­ing to present some­thing in front of the whole class. Once we leave school/college we may be anx­ious dur­ing a job inter­view, fear­ing that we do not mea­sure up to the expec­ta­tions of our poten­tial employer. We often per­ceive such events as loom­ing over us until we reach and con­clude them. How­ever, as we get older and usu­ally more con­fi­dent we’re less inclined to fear fail­ure and are more secure in our skills and abil­i­ties. But some­thing curi­ous can start to occur at this point, some­thing we usu­ally don’t pay as much con­scious atten­tion to as we do with fear of fail­ure: fear of suc­cess. While suc­cess makes us feel good and more con­fi­dent a sud­den, unex­pected, unpre­pared for suc­cess can raise equally sud­den, unex­pected, unpre­pared for expec­ta­tions, expec­ta­tions we didn’t con­sider. Now we have to live up to these expec­ta­tions, or so we feel. Because if we don’t then there is this fear of fail­ure again that we thought we’d over­come. What hap­pens next, and I’ve observed this with myself and many oth­ers I’ve worked with in the past, is a men­tal aver­sion to what I would call ‘suc­cess beyond our com­fort zone’. Panic induced rea­son­ing sets in, debat­ing with us the impli­ca­tions of such suc­cess: increased expec­ta­tions, less time for things we enjoy, increased expo­sure (in case of pub­licly observed suc­cess), poten­tial jeal­ousy from peers. This may have dra­matic con­se­quences as we may end up talk­ing our­selves out of pur­su­ing some­thing we’ve dreamed off for a long time. I chal­lenge you to think of times in your life when you had a chance to go above and beyond but didn’t because you feared the impli­ca­tions in case of success.

While fail­ure can be very dis­ap­point­ing it can also lead us to think that this is all we can do and achieve and we should be happy with it and nobody should expect more from us. We can become quite com­fort­able with the occa­sional fail­ure, a reas­sur­ance that we’re per­fectly fine where we’re at and there is no need to strive for more. We are often our own worst enemy, our own great inhibitors by way of false rea­son­ing. But as the word ‘loom­ing’ indi­cates some­thing may just appear big­ger than it really is. Hence what we think to be the final results of suc­cess may not actu­ally come true, or at least not in the dimen­sions we imag­ined. If at times you find your­self scared of fail­ure I encour­age you to stop and think if it may actu­ally be fear of suc­cess. And if so con­sider this to be a mat­ter of per­cep­tion, and our per­cep­tion can be dis­torted! Don’t let it hold you back from going for some­thing you’ve always dreamed off. Suc­cess should never be ‘loom­ing’, it should be shin­ing brightly.

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