Of the “meta fears” that hold many of us back, this is one of the most pronounced.
I’ve never heard it termed this way (because I made it up) but you see plenty of evidence of this fear of iterating all around you.
It is buried in the fear of hard work.
The fear of failure.
The fear of getting it wrong.
The fear of looking silly.
The fear of “What will people think?”
The fear of committing to something that truly matters.
The fear of “Am I good enough?”
These and many other fears are merely the fear of iterating in disguise….
OK, So What’s the Fear of Iterating?
It is being afraid to get something wrong in order to keep getting it more right.
It’s the fear of starting with a wrong or incomplete answer, and then continuing to work and re-work your answer until you get to the right one.
Iteration is the process behind every single form of improving, and unless you’re willing to keep iterating something that needs to improve, it never will.
This means, to get anything right we must be cool with continuously improving at getting it “wrong.” To keep moving towards the right answer we must be unafraid to keep landing on wrong ones.
For many people, this fear is game-stopping.
Literally, they’ll never get past it, so game over.
Because they’re scared to admit they aren’t already living the life they truly want, or they aren’t the 100% perfect person they pretend to be, they remain too afraid to improve in any way.
Look around you. You see it everywhere.
As Emerson put it, “All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.”
Yet, just by seeing that of course life is nothing but a continuous iteration to the “end,” we give ourselves an opportunity to iterate to new and better experiences.
How Was Your First Sex?
Imagine that the rest of your life’s sex was as “good” as your first.