Overcome Your Fear of Failure

About this video

Martell reframes the topic from fear of failure to fear of success: succeeding can feel threatening because it sets a new public standard the person then has to keep living up to. He tells his own story as an example of what he calls a shadow career. Although he says he had invested in over 50 companies as an angel investor by his mid-thirties and advised hundreds of founders, he resisted calling himself a coach for years and instead built Clarity, a marketplace for entrepreneurial advice — which, he says, had 50,000 experts and hundreds of thousands of calls a year, while he personally took 1,300 calls in two years. Even after he began coaching, he says he avoided the word coach in his profiles for two years while working with almost 50 SaaS founders, until clients publicly labelled him their coach and mentor. He describes sharing his personal history — including addiction and prison in his teenage years and learning to code — on stage in Toronto at the Archangel Summit in front of, he says, 2,000 people, and a conversation afterwards with Phillip McKernan that convinced him his story could reach people beyond SaaS founders. His lessons are built around three anchors: Marianne Williamson’s line that our deepest fear is being powerful beyond measure; the saying he attributes, tentatively, to Bernard Shaw — people who matter do not mind, and people who do not matter should not drive decisions; and making a ten-year commitment. He says he committed to publishing on YouTube every Monday for ten years and had kept that streak for seven years at the time of recording, after starting awkwardly with just a phone and early live platforms. He closes with a Jack Canfield line he quotes — that everything you want is on the other side of fear — and urges one small action today.

Key takeaways

• Fear of success can block action just as much as fear of failure, because success creates a new public standard to maintain.
• A shadow career — doing the work indirectly through another venture — can be a sign of avoiding the identity you actually want to claim.
• Judge criticism by its source: weight the views of people who know you over strangers whose comments cost them nothing.
• Replace dabbling with a long commitment; Martell cites his own ten-year, every-Monday publishing commitment as the mechanism that built his skill.
• Start with the tools at hand and small daily actions rather than waiting for a studio or perfect production quality.

Episode details: published September 19, 2022 · 14:01 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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