#89 - Dealing with fear of failure

Hans Chan -

What I’m Reading

The Boys in The Boat tells the story of 9 working-class boys in 1930s America on their journey to win Olympic gold at rowing, where they ultimately face the Nazis. I picked this up ahead of the film's release in January which will be directed by George Clooney. 

I’m obviously biased because I like rowing, but it’s a captivating read and one I wholeheartedly recommend.

Resource of the week

Since the holiday season is coming up I wanted to share a resource that I use to split bills with friends etc called Splitwise. Everyone just inputs what they paid for, and who’s responsible for it and at the end of the holiday it’ll work everything out and say x needs to pay y for example. It’s free, and very nifty and saves a lot of time from having to keep a spreadsheet. 

Quote

It is hard to make that boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy, of course, is resistance of the water, as you have to displace the amont of water equal to the weight of men and equipment, but that very water is what supports you and that very enemy is your friend. So is life: the very problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming them.

George Yeoman Pocock 

Thoughts

One thing I’ve learnt over the years is that we are more likely to find fulfilment and enjoyment in what we do by constantly doing things out of our comfort zone and we do this by following our intuition more. Last week I talked about how I’m learning to be more comfortable with uncertainty and reading The Boys in the Boat has helped put things in perspective.

I’ve always liked to know where I was going in life and feared failing and not knowing what my life would look like if things didn’t work out. Now I’m beginning to realise that we often underestimate how adaptable we are. For example, I often think about how different my parents’ upbringing was and now reading about some of the things people went through in the book and still managed to make a life for themselves. How Joe Rantz was abandoned by his family at 15 at the height of the great depression and deciding he would survive by initially foraging mushrooms; having the fierce determination to make his way in the world to find happiness and to stop asking himself why things happened to him. 

I feel like overall there’s a sense of discontent in this country at the moment, which is understandable for reasons which have been talked about to death: cost of living, unaffordable property prices, standard of living drops, stagnant economy, interest rates, it’s difficult time for a lot of people. I’m personally also at a place in my life where there are a lot of question marks.

However, just like Joe Rantz in the book, there came a point where I stopped painting myself as the victim, blaming this and that but to take control and responsibility for things. So much so that I have a list of principles that I follow where if I am uncertain about something I’ll take it out and use that to guide what I do, one of them is that I take full responsibility for my situations and outcomes. I started to decide what I wanted to do and not to wait for permission from anyone. It’s apt to point out that ‘to decide’ comes from Latin where it loosely means to cut-off, which means cutting off other possibilities. Remembering that while you can have almost anything you want you can’t have everything you want. And that if I procrastinated in this trap to ‘keep all options open’ and didn’t decide for myself, other people would decide for me, which was something I really didn’t want.

We all have ups and downs in our lives, for me like Joe, the biggest breakthroughs I’ve experienced have all been when I have been sick and tired of finding myself in a particular place. 

In investing, people often talk about fear and greed being the driving forces, when you look at charts of stocks it’s very clear that we respond to fear more strongly. Learning to manage that has been very freeing for me. Understanding that most problems don’t really matter in the long term as much as they seem in the moment. And from reading Man’s Search for Meaning about Holocaust survivors, humans can adapt to anything.

It’s believing that whatever happens I trust that I will still manage ok, telling myself it’s ok to go for those lofty goals and if it all comes crashing down I can pick myself back up and go again. Like Joe, even when he had nothing, no one can take your motivation, drive and determination from you, only you can do that.

Then it’s a case of enjoying the process, often most people give up on things far too quickly, a big part is outlasting the competition. The best way to day that is to make sure you’re having fun doing something, if you’re not, use that as a compass to keep testing different things.

Other Stuff

After several delays, I’ve finally sorted everything out and my free 7-day property course is live! All you need to do is sign up on the Property Academy mailing list and you’ll receive it.

Hans