Peak Performance #22 | Motivated by Fear
What are you motivated by? What are the costs of Fear as motivation?
“What I find is that 90% of thoughts that I have are fear-based. The other 10% are probably desire-based. And any Buddhist will tell you that desire is the other side of the coin to fear.”
Naval Ravikant
I was browsing my twitter timeline this week (bad habit? good habit? depends on the time of day and why) and came upon this:
And Amy Buechler’s thoughtful response for Founders:
A lot to unpack in there. Before we unpack it, I wanted to connect the dots to a related quote by Jim Dethmer on the Tim Ferriss Show that rocked me late last year:
"One of the things I’ve observed in myself and then others that I talked to is that actually when somebody starts to do something like meditation or The Work by Byron Katie or these other modalities, there is often, not always, but often a period where something that looks like complacency does emerge. And I think there are many reasons for that, but one of them is that a lot, not all, but a lot of high performers are motivated by some sort of fear at the core of their being, and that motivation has served them very, very well, the fear of a loss of approval or control or security, like a primal instinctual thing. And a lot of the most achievement-oriented, successful people have a large engine of fear sitting in there.
So when you start dealing with that, one of the things that they’re going to face is, “If I’m not motivated, either consciously or unconsciously, by the things that have motivated me, whether it’s fear or extrinsic reward or things like that, what am I going to be motivated by?” And I think that is a really important question for people to explore and discuss, and in my experience, other forms of motivation come online, like creativity, like playfulness, like love. There’s a whole set of motivations that are actually incredibly powerful and don’t leave much of a toxic residue like fear or guilt or shame does. But there is sometimes a gap, so when I’m talking to people and I say, “Now listen, if you’re going to start to do some of these things and unwind some of your core motivations, we’re going to need to anticipate that there might be a period where you’re going to be a no man’s land, and you’re going to go, ‘Holy shit, I’ve lost my mojo.”
The reality is that many of us are primarily motivated by fear, whether we’re aware of it or not. Fear of being found out, of being out on the streets, of being a failure, rejected, or losing control. And while fear as motivation can serve us for a while1, its price is high.
Using fear as motivation is like burning dirty fuel. It creates pollution: on our physical and mental health, on our relationships with our coworkers and loved ones, and on our general quality of life2.
Perhaps the most costly toll is the Grindset Fallacy mentioned above: fear as motivation creates an unconscious belief that we can’t be joyful and successful at the same time—that joy runs contrary to success. And all too often, under the surface, we unconsciously equate success with survival. As a result of this, the belief becomes that joy runs counter to our very survival.
This belief is what creates the Very Serious Successful Person (VSSP): a person who has achieved the heights of success in their respective field but seems incapable of relaxing or having even a morsel of fun.
The reality is that the VSSP is on a life-deferment plan. They’re waiting to enjoy their life—waiting until they feel that security is guaranteed. Waiting until they’re invulnerable. But invulnerability will never come. And so this isn’t really about success at all—it’s about trying to escape discomfort and vulnerability. The VSSP is trying to build a fortress that can never come tumbling down and deferring their life in the process. The VSSP is playing a game that is impossible to win, and committing their entire life to the delusion that they can win it34.
How to reconcile this? The first step is to wake up to the fact that the game isn’t about success. The game is in fact an attempt to achieve an unreachable invulnerability. Bathe yourself in this awareness. The game can’t be won. If you can accept it, you have to ask—is there another game?
What if?
What if you could be motivated by love, joy, creativity, or play? Even if for only a day, what if you ceased to build and occupy your fortress and instead went out to play in reality? What if you abandoned trying to make something an arbitrary “best” and instead tried to make it as creative or beautiful as possible? What if?
What would that look like? What would that feel like? What would that do for you, your relationships, your health and your success?
Changing your motivation is uncomfortable work. Long-embedded survival patterns will scream out in your mind. You’ll feel vulnerable. You’ll be vulnerable. The survival patterns will attempt to pull you back into the fortress, shouting that the game you’re playing is life-and-death. And it is: a vulnerable, fully alive life out in the open or a slow, languishing death inhabiting an impossible fortress.
At first glance, being motivated by fear doesn’t appear to be a bad short-term strategy (it mostly is, unless your life is at risk). Fear can create a powerful high energy state. Fear activates your sympathetic nervous system and fills you with a cocktail of energizing hormones: adrenaline, noephinephrine, dopamine. These hormones put you in a prime state to avoid or overcome that which you fear, either through fighting it or fleeing from it. This state is primal, it evolved to help you fight off the lion in the brush. It can also be highly addictive. Similar to caffeine and other stimulants, it can be trivial to get addicted to these energizing effects. For many, this addiction has a very specific name: Workaholism.
The costs of consistently using fear as motivation are really threefold.
The residue of chronic stress on physical health, emotional health, and our relationships. If you want to study up on the health effects, read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolski.
While the sympathetic state of fear contributes to short-term energy, it diminishes creativity and intelligence. In moments of stress you don’t need to be smart or creative, you need to move. And so the cocktail of sympathetic hormone makes you more focused and energized at the expense of your intelligence and creativity. This has a direct neurological cause: in states of threat your amygdala hijacks your stream of sensory data before it can be processed by your frontal cortex. This enables the amygdala to direct you to address threats faster than your processing brain allows. The price is that you’re put into a hyper-vigilant state, looking out for threats rather than looking for opportunity. And so Fear is good at addressing real threats over the short-term but terrible at using creative intelligence to take advantage of opportunities— the hallmarks of effective decision-making and long-term thinking.
Research shows that alongside the fight/flight response, our nervous system also creates freeze and collapse responses in the wake of significant or chronic stimuli. This is meant to protect from threats that we either 1) are not capable of overcoming in fight or flight in a moment (a significant enough predator) or 2) from expending energy in chronically stressful states (the chimp at the bottom of the hierarchy). In the wake of these threats, the best strategy is to play dead or give up. What this means is that as significant challenges arise, fear will eventually switch from an energetically positive state to one that causes you to collapse in the face of significant challenges.
Evidence that you’re playing the VSSP game? You tell yourself the story that you’re okay with discomfort, but in reality there is a type of discomfort that you systemically prefer in avoidance of another. VSSPs opt to work harder to make more money in lieu of having difficult conversations with their partner about finances. VSSPs opt to work double time to make a project work in lieu of having a realistic conversation about how the current spec can’t happen with the current timeline. VSSPs play the hero and the martyr, sacrificing their wellbeing to make things work. In reality, VSSPs play the hero and the martyr to avoid vulnerability. They do it to hide their fears and difficulties from those around them. The whole game is played in the name of invulnerability.
I would be amiss if I mentioned games and didn’t recommend the brilliant, practical, esoteric Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.