Why are we so afraid of failure?

In this podcast, Ricardo proposes to us a reflection: why, in both our professional and personal lives, the fear of failure bothers us so much? He says that many societies value the success and penalize failure at the same intensity, and leaves the question: does this logic is the best one?

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five Minutes PM. Podcast yes. Today. I like to make a reflection with you, why we're so afraid of failure or why it's so painful to think about the possibility of, and I'm talking about this because of course, as any normal person, I feel a lot of pain of failure. And I see this, I have this on the top of my mind, 24 hours per day in every single project I do every single and why and why.

This is why we are so afraid of failure. And I was trying to understand this in, in, maybe we need to go back to when we are very young, it looked to, but I have two daughters in probably most of you have children. And look, your daughter is the most beautiful daughter in the neighborhood. Your son is the best basketball player or the best drams player of, or the best singer. Oh, where kids are growing up.

Two be the best. And we think, and we were to put this in the mind of every single one. And then when we become old and we really are facing our challenges, we have such a hard time to understand that life is not so perfect. And that in reality, we have a lot of things, subject to big failures. And of course you are, you listen to this and say, Hey, Carlo is now shifting his Podcast to self-help.

No, it's not. I'm talking about project management. I'm talking about GRI or project management, because this is driven through our projects. Most of the reason for our failure is the completely wrong set of expectations. We always think that the project will finish well. We always think that all of our assumptions are reliable. We think that our scope will be completely fulfilled that our deadlines, we plan always in the perfect conditions, because we want to demonstrate this to our sponsor.

We do want to, because if we demonstrate to our sponsor that our project is subject to failure, then maybe she or he we'll look to us and we'll think, Oh, this person is incompetent because he or she's presenting failure, possibility of failure. I need to shift this person to someone that only thinks about positive. I'm not talking about motivation. Motivation is a not a thing I'm talking about real life. Real life is always a challenge.

I was always very skeptical when I was learning chemistry and physics. I'm a engineer. And all the time we are calculating the Newton law. And then they'll say, okay, you need this, but you need to forget gravity. The gravity LA. And I will say, Oh my goodness did this in real life. Doesn't happen. If I throw something from the top of a building, it will go down because they're is a force bring in this to the floor.

I can not disregard this. So its so important. We understand that real life. It's very complex in. We need to understand that handling with the possibility of failure, real increase in reality or possibility of success. We need to understand this. And this is that a change in our mindset. For example, I leave today in Denmark and it's a very different country from where I grew up in, in different aspects. So for example, here I struggle because sometimes I come with this mindset of success or failure in the here.

This is not the main problem. This is not, this is not failure. Here is part of the learning process. Failure here is not something bad, ugly. That must be punished. It's a learning process. And because most of the time I cannot think, and I cannot understand this. I suffer a lot because I need to move him on time to make my projects succeed. Most of the works I have been doing since long time ago are related to challenging places.

I'm talking about a challenging infrastructure, a challenging support, knowledge in everything. So I need to set up my expectations and I need to plan that project considering this situation. Because if I don't think like that, I cannot deliver real value. So understanding the possibility of failure will help me to leverage my project. This is the most important you can be optimist, but you need to understand the challenges.

You are not a machine makes only for success because this will drive you to a very stressful environment in your project. And th this very stressful environment, we reduced the motivation. We reduce the ability of your team to work. And at the end, we'll reduce your chances of success. You were trying to do one thing, but the results we'll be pretty much the opposite because it's not sustainable results. So you need to understand this.

And it's a very good refer. I don't have all the answers for everything, but I want you this week to think about what I'm telling you to think about this, how I can understand better does environment and prepare myself to fail up because this will be part of the game, the region, no possibility of you to win every single time every single day, because real life has not like that for think about death, put this in place into your project and I'm sure the same time success will come up.

Okay. Thank you very much for your time. See you the next week with a lot of successful projects. See you.

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