You're Not Afraid of Failure. You're Afraid of Being Average.
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Failure is dramatic. Failure is a story. What you’re actually avoiding is trying your hardest and finding out you’re just okay.
Someone at a dinner party asks how the podcast is going. Or the business, the book, the thing you told everyone about eight months ago. And you feel it before you answer. The small flinch. The recalibration. “It’s going well, still early days.” You change the subject as smoothly as you can.
The numbers aren’t bad. That’s the strange part. You’re not failing. If you were failing, you’d have something to say. A dramatic story, a lesson, a pivot in progress. What you have instead is a result that’s fine. And fine is the one outcome you never prepared for.
Everyone told you to prepare for failure. Nobody told you to prepare for this.
You’ll say you’re afraid of failure if anyone asks why you hesitate on the next thing. That’s the socially acceptable answer. It sounds brave, even. People nod. They relate. They tell you failure is part of the process.
But I don’t think fear of failure is what’s going on. Failure is dramatic. Failure makes a great story. Every biography you’ve read starts with a chapter on failure, and every podcast guest has a rock-bottom moment that makes the audience lean forward. You could handle failing. Failing means you tried something bold and the world wasn’t ready.
What you can’t handle is trying your hardest and landing somewhere in the middle. A result that isn’t a crash or a win. A result that just says: this is your level.
The Middle
There’s a specific outcome that terrifies ambitious people more than bankruptcy or public humiliation. It’s the podcast that gets 200 downloads an episode for a year. The business that breaks even but never grows. The content that posts to silence.
It sits between failure and success, in the space where there’s no story to tell.
The middle is terrifying because it has no narrative. Failure has a narrative. You can turn failure into a comeback story, a lesson, a war wound you show at dinner parties. Success has a narrative. Obviously. But the middle is just the middle. It’s not interesting enough to be a cautionary tale and not impressive enough to be an inspiration. It’s just a result that tells you that you tried your best and your best was average.
Nobody writes a memoir about being adequate. There’s no TEDx talk titled “How I Gave It Everything and Ended Up Fine.” That’s the outcome your brain is protecting you from, and it’s doing it so well you’ve convinced yourself the fear is about something else.
The Untested Self
As long as you haven’t tried, your potential is infinite. You might be great. You might be the person who builds the company, writes the book, creates the content that breaks through. There’s no evidence to the contrary because you haven’t submitted yourself to the test.
I call this the untested self. It’s the version of you that exists only in the space between intention and action. The untested self is always capable of greatness because the untested self has never been measured.
The moment you start, you trade the untested self for data. And data has a ceiling. The podcast might get 200 downloads. The business might break even. You might be good, but not great. And that gap between what you imagined you could be and what you turn out to be is a gap most people would rather never close.
So they don’t start. They’re not lazy and they’re not afraid of failure. They’re protecting the version of themselves that might be extraordinary by never putting it to the test.
There’s a line from the poet John Greenleaf Whittier that gets quoted at funerals and graduations: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.” Everyone reads that as a warning about regret. I read it differently now. For a lot of people, “it might have been” isn’t the sad ending. It’s the goal. “Might have been” is the last version of the story where they’re still potentially great. The moment they try, “might” collapses into “was” or “wasn’t.” And they’d rather live inside the might.
This is why the most talented people you know are often the ones doing the least. The potential is so high that the risk of confirming it’s lower than they hoped feels like too much to bear. A person with average self-image can start a business with low expectations and be pleasantly surprised. A person who’s been told they’re brilliant since childhood has to reconcile with the possibility that brilliance and results don’t always line up.
The Potential Premium
There’s a cost to keeping your potential untested, and it compounds the longer you wait.
Trying and being average at 23 is survivable. You have time, you can call it a learning experience, adjust, go again. The stakes are low enough that the middle doesn’t feel permanent. But the math changes as the years pass. By 30, you’ve been “getting ready” for seven years, and if you start now and land in the middle, those seven years of preparation start to feel like a waste. So you wait another year. Get a little more prepared. Take one more course.
By the time another five years go by, starting feels almost impossible. The market didn’t change and the opportunity didn’t close. What changed is internal. The expectation has inflated so far beyond what any first attempt could deliver that the gap between “what this should be after ten years of thinking about it” and “what a first attempt looks like” is too wide to survive emotionally.
The potential premium is the tax you pay for protecting your untested self. Every year you wait, the premium gets higher. The imagined version of what you could build gets more polished. And the inevitable roughness of a real first attempt becomes harder to tolerate. You’ve priced yourself out of being a beginner.
You don’t start because you’re afraid of being average. But by not starting, you guarantee something worse than average. You guarantee nothing.
What Average Looks Like From the Inside
Every person you admire was average at the beginning.
Their first podcast was bad. Their first business either failed or limped along doing numbers they’d be embarrassed to share now. They were average before they were anything else.
The difference between them and the person still waiting to start isn’t talent. It’s timing. They submitted themselves to the measurement early enough that they had time to improve. They were willing to be average at 23 so they could be exceptional at 30. They paid the entrance fee.
Because that’s what average is. It’s not a verdict. It’s an entrance fee. Everyone pays it. The question is whether you pay it early when the cost is low or refuse to pay it until the cost is so high that starting feels like admitting you wasted years you can’t get back.
I paid this fee with the podcast. The early episodes were rough. The numbers were small. If I’d judged the project by the first six months, I would have concluded I was average at this and moved on. Instead I kept going, and the gap between where I started and where the show is now is the best evidence I have that being average at the beginning is the only path to being good at the end.
The Real Question
You’ve been framing this as a fear of failure. It was never about failure.
It’s about the possibility that you try your hardest and the result is just okay. A result that sits in the middle and offers no story, no lesson, and no excuse.
You can keep protecting the untested self. Nobody will call you out on it. The untested version of you will stay brilliant and full of potential for as long as you refuse to test it.
But there’s a question worth asking, and it’s the one you’ve been avoiding longer than the project itself: what if average is the entrance fee, and you’ve been refusing to pay it?
Thank you for reading,
Scott
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Excellent point!!! 🙌🩷🤩