The Fear of Small Beginnings
Working when progress is unclear, and the difference between quitting and giving up.
It has taken me some time to learn this about myself, but my central work fear has never been one of The Big Fears that we tend to talk about - fear of failure, or the somewhat psychologically knottier fear of success - no, I have the fear of small beginnings.
The fear, for example, that I’ll write a book and no one will read it, or that I’ll teach a class and it won’t be perfect and life-changing, or that I’ll write a newsletter and it will grow but only incrementally and at a reasonable pace. This is the kind of fear that feeds on waning (or absent) feelings of inspiration, unclear (or absent) markers of progress, and ineffective (or absent) methods for managing frustration and/or anxiety.
It is the fear of trying and and seeing just enough of a result to instill ambivalence.
This newsletter has provided a useful encounter with my fear of small beginnings.
Writing online is, for better and for worse, hyper measurable. That means there are always numbers to look at that offer some bearing of whether this thing is “successful,” or “working.” Subscribers, total page views, open rate…the list goes on (and on).
The natural drive of course is to make the numbers go up. To make the thing “more successful.” But are the numbers indicative of success? I’ve noticed that the more I focus on that line of thinking, the less interested I am in the thing itself.
Not long ago, I read Mike Evans’ book Hangry: A Startup Journey, a business memoir about the founding of Grubhub, which, in the genre of business memoir genre, is uniquely readable.
One thing that’s stuck with me from the book is the way Evans grapples throughout with the difference between quitting and giving up.
“Quitting comes hand in hand with a goal. It's abandoning a thing in favor of something better. Giving up is just frustration and apathy.”
He goes on later:
“Quitting […] isn’t that big a deal, as it turns out. It can happen for all sorts of reasons: A goal is attained, or it became unattainable. Or the individual behind the vision changed, and cares about different things than when they started - because, in fact, they started. Actually, quitting might be the inevitable result of embracing hard things that force change. What’s far worse than quitting, or even giving up, is simply failing to start - whether that be from a lack of vision, or even worse, having it, and not taking the first step.”
I’ve found this line of thinking to be a useful corrective when progress seems hard to perceive.
If I make a change now would I be quitting or giving up? Have I learned something new that I didn’t know before that has changed how I should think about this? Has my goal changed because my knowledge and experience has changed?