Fear at 4:30am

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I first remember hearing those terms describing Microsoft’s marketing tactics against Linux back in the early 2000s. Rather than combat it directly with facts, by highlighting its operating systems’ strengths, or with superior product development, Microsoft chose to use emotional tactics to sway people from using the new and rising operating system.

In the decades that followed, I’ve seen those emotional tactics used a dizzying number of times across a wide spectrum of topics. Emotions are persuasive.

Today, I’m sitting with my own FUD, but it’s not coming from some behemoth trying to squash a smaller up-and-comer, it’s my own internal uncertainties surfacing and gnawing at my determination and confidence (though now that I think about it, maybe it is a behemoth doing some squashing…).

I sit in my office chair in front of a rickety second-hand desk worrying about my dwindling bank account, and the numerous people who depend upon me succeeding. Certainly, I dream about a bigger house, a newer car, vacations, and travel, among other things, but what wakes me at 4:30am and ejects me from bed isn’t the desire for a large house on a bunch of land, it’s fear. Fear that I’ll fail my wife, fail my children, fail my mother, fail my future.

The job market is shit. It’s not that there are no jobs. There are plenty. Just not as many that can cover all I am responsible for. Worse, even if I return to a job, the time and energy I now spend building will be dwarfed by commuting and working in a new dead-end, grinding my way toward an impoverished retirement, if retirement’s even possible.

I have a long way to go to get to good. I’m banking everything on succeeding, and I don’t know if I can make it. I don’t know if anyone will buy what I’m creating, and if so, whether it will be enough to make it viable. I don’t know if it’s something I’ll continue to want to do into the future. I don’t know if anyone will trust me with their hard-earned money to help them get ahead. Hell, I don’t even know if I can help.

Maybe you’ve had some late night, early morning panics, too, worrying about your family’s future, wondering whether you’ll make it, whether you have what it takes to deliver on the faith they all have in you.

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

Far from derailing me from my purpose, they are the whips that drive me forward. I spent decades with the “carrot” way off in someday-maybe-never-land. Now I live with the stick. Every morning, dark and early, right up to bedtime most nights. Twelve, fourteen, twenty hour days, seven days a week.

I can’t fail. Too many people are counting on me. Depending on me. Relying on me.

I’d thought “failure is not an option” was a pithy motivational phrase. Now it’s my daily mantra.

Failure is not an option.

Time to work.