Word of the day: apotyphobia

Apotyphobia - [a-po-ti-fo-bee-a] - noun - the fear of failure (note: apparently the real word is atychiphobia)

Derived from the Greek words apotychia which means failure, and phobos which means fear, and I totally just made this word up.  While the word may be something that I randomly pulled together, the concept certainly isn't something altogether foreign to us.  My brother once told me that Asian children will grow up to be good at what they do but they'll never be geniuses.  In the wake of the moderately controversial WSJ article by Yale professor, Amy Chua, some have attributed this to the fact that typical Asian parental methods leaves the children dispassionate and disinterested, where life is a series of duties and obligations.  I would contend that the problem may lie in passion, as it's not unfeasible for someone to be brilliant at something he/she doesn't particularly like doing, but rather, apotyphobia. 

I think to best illustrate I will use a personal example, hopefully, said example will not alienate too many of my readers.  Growing up, I used to play a game called Bandit Kings of Ancient China, a turn-based strategy game based around the well-known Chinese story entitled Outlaws of the Marsh.  The game involved building armies and attacking different territories, and ultimately you are attempting to take down the evil prime minister Gao Qiu before the year 1127 when the Northern Barbarians take over China, or something along those lines.  Anyways, the point is, that when I played the game, I would always run into the time constraint, and I always wondered why.  The simple reason is this: I never went to battle unless I was very sure I could win.  While it meant that I could be very systematic in my battle strategies, it also meant that a lot of time passed to get to the level of comfort that I had to reach before actually attacking someone else, in short, I was afraid to lose, even in a stupid computer game that didn't matter, because it was just against the computer.

We can denote it as fear of embarrassment, being overly people-conscious, or what have you, but ultimately, all these reasons conglomerate into a fear of getting it wrong, or as I now like to call it, apotyphobia.  Now, I don't know if this is strictly a generality of Asian-American kids, but I definitely think it's much more prevalent in Asian-American kids per se, because of the Asian emphasis on appearances or in more colloquial terminology, "saving face".  This isn't to say that I discourage the exercise of prudence or sound judgment, but rather, an encouragement to push past what we normally consider to be our areas of comfort.  I say this as much to myself as I do to anyone reading this, which a large part of why I write these things in the first place.  Too many times we forgo the opportunity to engage simply because of our aversion to an adverse outcome, I'll be the first to admit that I'm typically like this.  I prefer a wide margin of buffer space so that if things to go as planned, the engagement can still be deemed as having achieved some modicum of success.  What I loosely term "engagement" in this instance ranges anywhere from a project to a simple conversation.

What drives this apotyphobia?  Primarily, I think it's a sense of judgment.  One of the worst feelings in the world is to feel condescended or patronized, at least it is for me.  Growing up (and I can't say whether or not this is an Asian thing or not) I always had this unconscious sense that being incompetent is worse than being wrong.  I want to say that's a line from a movie (Day After Tomorrow maybe?).  This nagging certainty that when I do something, I can't look bad doing it, always pervades and thereby, highly limits what I do end up doing.  As a guy, this holds true even more when dealing with girls.  Maybe it's a societal thing, maybe it's a cultural thing, all I'm sure if is this, at some point in time, or rather at several (more than several) points in time, I am going to screw up, I need to grow up and live with it, ultimately, I need to learn and to grow from it.

While the world isn't really a very friendly place to screw up, the lesson to be learned from this is whether or not I'm okay if someone else screws up.  Certainly, there are going to be more critical issues where it's going to be a bigger deal if a mistake is made, but can I live with it, and help the transgressor become a better person from it?  My thoughts on this rest largely in the context of church.  While we strive for excellence in church, I find that it also should be an environment in which we are comfortable "being human" and thereby falling short.  Will it be embarrassing?  Most certainly, but as a church, it should be a place where learning experiences can be brought to light from each embarrassment.  In order for us to be transparent with one another as we ought to be in the body of Christ, we must trust the intentions of those around us and thereby are willing to just give it our best, regardless of the result.  For every success there will be a correlating number of failures, that's how we learn what is going to be successful.  Living in a fellowship of Christ doesn't mean getting everything right, but rather, loving one another, even when we get things wrong.  A church in which people are afraid to "do the wrong thing" I think needs to take a closer look at the relationships that it has between its members.

I'm certainly not saying I'm okay with screwing up, I hope that people don't walk away with that impression, but rather, the very real possibility of me screwing up doesn't push me to inaction.  In some sense you can think of it this way, if nothing happens you're not successful, which is essentially screwing up.  It's not a matter of not wanting to get things right all the time, but a matter of being willing to risk getting things wrong.  I know I'm apotyphobic, and to some degree, that might be called prudence, but taken too far and it renders me a paralytic.  Seize the moment, and if failure ensues, learn from it.  Some opportunities only come once.