"Fear of failing is what gets me going"

There's a version of the discipline story that survives the last few chapters. You might accept that attacking yourself after a failure doesn't help. You'd still say that the dread of that attack, beforehand, is what gets you out of bed. You work hard because you're afraid of what you'll say to yourself if you don't. If you took away the fear, you think, there'd be nothing to make you work.

I'll concede what's true in this. Fear does mobilise people in the short run. A looming deadline, with the prospect of humiliation behind it, produces a burst of effort, as every student knows. If you've run on that fuel for years, you'll have plenty of memories of it working.

The question is what kind of effort it produces, and what it costs. Kristin Neff, Ya-Ping Hsieh and Kullaya Dejitterat looked at this among university students. They measured how kindly or harshly students treated themselves, and what kinds of goals they held in their studies. Psychologists distinguish between aiming to master the material, because you want to understand it, and aiming to perform, which means to look good or avoid looking bad. Students who were kinder to themselves were more likely to be aiming at mastery. Those who were harder on themselves were more likely to be aiming at performance. The difference was explained partly by fear of failure, which was lower in the self-compassionate students, and partly by the fact that they felt more competent.

The second study in the same paper looked at students who'd just received a midterm grade that they themselves regarded as a failure. The ones who were kinder to themselves were less likely to cope by avoidance, which means things like giving up, not thinking about it, and staying away from the subject. The students who were hard on themselves were more likely to turn away.

These were surveys of American undergraduates, so they show associations and nothing more. But they fit the argument of chapter 3 closely. Fear of failure does produce effort, and it shapes the kind of effort. The effort goes into not failing, which isn't the same as succeeding. It favours the safe task over the stretching one, because the stretching one might go wrong. It discourages asking for help, which would expose what you don't know. And when failure comes anyway, fear leads people to avoid the subject, which is the opposite of what learning needs.

There's another source of effort, and you have plenty of it. You mind about the work. You like doing things well, you care about the people who depend on you, and you find some things interesting. That's what drives the students who aim at mastery, and it lasts longer, because it doesn't depend on being frightened. You've never had the chance to find out how far it would take you, because the fear has always been there as well. My expectation is that when the fear quietens, you'll go on working about as hard as you do now. You'll probably choose harder things to work at.