Five Core Fears That Warp Ambition

Last year, I was chatting with a struggling founder who said something that stuck out to me:

“If this startup fails, I’m going to keep working on some variation of the idea for as long as I live until I make it work.” 

At first glance, this may appear laudable. In startup culture, we mythologize founders who were rejected by investors and then went on to build significant companies. Yet while perseverance is important, this felt different.

I got the sense that this founder was hanging on to his idea like a life preserver. If he kept working on the idea and one day it worked, then the project wouldn’t really have failed. More importantly, he wouldn’t feel like a failure.

This is a pattern that many of us fall into at times. We start a project because we’re excited by our dream of what it might become, and then fall into a rut where we become more motivated by fear than by vision. We stop playing to win, and start playing not-to-lose.

This happens when we contact a fear that feels so big it overwhelms us. When small worries arise, we may be able to experience them while staying connected to meaning. However, when something touches a core fear, our lives and work can become about managing that fear.

As a coach and former founder, there are five archetypal fears that I often see underlying people’s work:

• Unworthiness - the fear of not being good enough
• Death - the fear of insignificance and disappearance
• Uncertainty - the fear of not knowing who one is or where one’s life is going
• Insecurity - the fear of not having enough resources
• Rejection - the fear of isolation or letting people down