Whether it is our friend, family member, someone we care about, or even ourselves, we all know some kind of artist who involves themselves with stylistic creation ranging all the way from painting or graphic design, music, writing or dancing, etc.
Creating can fill us with great thoughts of future accomplishment, however, for some people, they may also lead us to dwell upon how possible failure is, a common roadblock for many artists. While being expressive can be a wonderful release, it can also become another stressor rather quickly.
An industry companion of ours, Wes Lauterbach, of TheStu, is a mentor to many artists of all stylistic backgrounds, and recently brought up something to ponder regarding the fear of failure versus the fear of success, two large variations that traverse the minds of creators. Read more about his thoughts below.
“I’ve seen lots of artists fall short of doing something sick because they quit taking action too soon. Myself included. But they’ll release a song half-assed, or they’ll let a song get finished and released knowing it’s not their best work, or maybe they just put put something without any promo and don’t even post about it being new.
Lots of people think it’s laziness but I don’t agree. I think it’s fear. It could be fear of a lot of shit but I think it boils down to two different core problems, fear of failure or fear of success. Fear of failure is easy to grasp, you don’t wanna fail, so you don’t try.
Fear of success is harder though, what if it does do well, and you did all this work to make it do well, now you always have to do this extra work and that’s scary too. You got to work hard to maintain this cool new fun shit you’re doing. New habit, new work load, sometimes that means a new ‘you’.
Which one do you think you’re struggling with right now? Why?”
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What do you think about what Wes mentioned about fear? Let us know in the comments!
