Megalomania, imposter phenomenon and the fear of failure. Or, why the barrow boy went missing

I wrote a few weeks ago about how, in my opinion, trucker Edward Stobart was driven by fear of failure. His determination to be judged by his spotless and ubiquitous trucks, and his shyness when dealing with people, all said to me that here was a man with fear-based insecurities.

Yet fear of failure can also drive bad behaviour. In fact, it can turn us into criminals. Such can be the mental terror of low achievement that – instead of indulging in avoidance tactics (as with Stobart and his reluctance to meet people) – we go full-throttle in the other direction, eventually (but wilfully) crossing the line with respect to acceptable behaviour. Even here, however, it may be possible to, in fact, see a person so desperate not to fail, or so desperate to be accepted, that they’ve made calamitous choices that can be explained by frustration or perceived (or real) prejudice or lack of opportunity.

This can certainly be the case when examining those that break the law in order to cover up their failures. Seen through the lens of fear of failure, some obviously criminal acts become more understandable, even if not more justifiable. Two cases stand out for me, perhaps because of my background in finance. In the UK there’s Nick Leeson, the “rogue trader” that brought down Barings, and in the US there’s Bernie Madoff, the daddy of all Ponzi schemers.

Leeson brought the venerable Barings Bank to its knees in 1995 due to a series of failed bets on Japanese equities. Rather than declare his equity derivatives losses, and confess his failure, Leeson set up a series of secret accounts to hide the losses. Meanwhile, he furiously tried to gamble them away – a tactic that can, and did, spiral out of control. The bank collapsed after Leeson’s bets crumbled in the dust of the Kobe earthquake in January 1995.

In Rogue Trader, Leeson’s own account of his actions, he claimed no malicious or criminal intent, and I believe him. He was a state-educated lower middle-class lad from Watford working for a posh bank in a senior and trusted role (as one memo from a board member famously stated: “he knows what he’s doing”). There was a clear touch of “imposter phenomenon” about him, where (in his head) his strong performances counted for nothing because he was not of the right stock.

Indeed, when the losses were uncovered and he went briefly into hiding, one of the directors revealed that Leeson’s assumptions regarding snobbery were not so far off. “One of our barrow boys has gone missing,” he declared, which at least did me the service of not having to invest any sympathy for a bank that had so little understanding of the motivations of its employees.

And, in my opinion, it was this insecurity that drove Leeson to criminality. He never intended stealing the money. His aim was to make money for his employers and thus prove his worth. He was also concerned for his team, and the blame that may be apportioned to them. Yet fear of failure destroyed his judgement – resulting in the hidden losses, the collapsed bank and his arrest and imprisonment.

The US example is more controversial because his crime is greater, the victims true innocents and it is more recent – indeed the corpse is still warm on this one. My evidence for Bernie Madoff’s fear of failure comes from the Wizard of Lies by Diana Henriques, who covered the collapse of his US$50 billion Ponzi scheme for the New York Times. Like Leeson, Madoff grew up in a lower-middle class neighbourhood on the edge of the metropolis – this time in Queens, New York. His father’s business ventures usually failed, which created a great impression upon the young Bernard. At all costs he wanted to succeed – and was determined to avoid the negative judgement from others that was the fate of his father.

This led him towards his first fraud – when managing money for around 20 clients. Trying for higher returns to please sceptical investors, he lost money on risky stocks. Yet rather than own up, he borrowed US$30,000 to erase the losses for his clients, allowing him to impress them with the brilliance of his money management. In Madoff’s mind he had done the honourable thing – taking the hit but covering his losses. Of course, the loan was repaid from renewed investment on the back of his enhanced reputation. And the pyramid developed its all-important second layer.

That was in 1962. After the 1987 stockmarket crash he found himself in a similar position and, again, used new investor’s cash to cover the losses and, again, to maintain his strong name. The pattern was repeated again in 2001-02. Indeed, only the scale of the redemptions from the 2008 crash prevented his flawed model from surviving the latest bear market, although by then the losses were vast. Indeed, he was nearly wiped out in 2005 when he managed to raise US$92 million with just three days to spare.

According to Henriques, Madoff always saw himself as an outsider and was determined to over-compensate. He served as chairman of NASDAQ and was on the board of governors from the National Association of Securities Dealers. He even gave office space to the regulator’s legal team when they had to abandon their home after 9/11. Some have put this down to the criminal mastermind, conducting grand fraud under the noses of the authorities. But, as a High-FF (someone with a high fear of failure) I think I can spot an alternative motive. I think it reveals an insecurity – of a man desperate to be accepted as an insider in a world he admired but was not part of.

He was determined to succeed where his father failed, so he had zero tolerance for failure. Failure, to Madoff, was not feedback or a temporary setback. It was condemning, a confirmation of his irretrievable and final awfulness. And this allowed his unethical behaviour (which was to hide his failings) to build to destructive levels. In his head he knew this, of course, but – in my view – he never viewed himself as a criminal, just as an outsider.

Henriques is perplexed by Madoff despite her deep research. She finds his criminality difficult to fathom – citing an interview in jail in which he complains about feeling “burned” by investors withdrawing their money in the 1987 cash. “I was hung out to dry,” he claimed – a mentality that Henriques struggles to explain although is absolutely clear to me, as a self-declared High-FF. It is typical of the extreme High-FF to blame his victims for his misfortune (assuming they were never on his side), not dissimilar to Hitler’s bunker denunciations of the German people. These are usually the very people the megalomaniac High-FF envied and emulated: the posh, the rich, the Aryans. He has spent his life trying to be deemed worthy of this group – sometimes going to ridiculous extremes in order to do so. And, ultimately, they have been the very people that have castigated or rejected him, or simply let him down.

When I lived in New York I often passed Madoff’s Midtown building – a preposterously ugly tower in brown marble called the Lipstick Building. I didn’t know who occupied it but I used to joke to friends that – whoever it was – they were trying way too hard to make an impression. It really does stand out from the skyscraper crowd for all the wrong reasons (and is also one of two blocks in the wrong place). When I heard it was Madoff’s, I was delighted. There was a building that was desperate to be an icon – yet it inwardly knew it was ugly and never likely to be accepted as a New York landmark: not so far removed from the man himself.

Is “fear of success” a kinder way of saying “fear of failure”?

A reposting of articles I (still) like from the old blog

In researching What's Stopping You? – a book to be published in 2011 aimed at overcoming fear of failure – I regularly encountered another condition, fear of success. Yet when I wrote the book I excluded it: why?

Many life-coaches and even a few psychologists claim that fear of success is as real as fear of failure. Like “imposter phenomenon” fear of success was first applied to women and especially professional women, who would become so concerned by the consequences of success that they may perhaps unconsciously employ “self sabotaging” behaviour such as partying the night before a big interview or indulging in procrastinating activities rather than revise for an exam or prepare for a key meeting. The cause of such erratic behaviour at key moments was apparently caused by their concern that they would be unable to cope with the demands of success – whether professionally or personally. While they consciously sought success and planned for it, their behaviour revealed their unconscious fears regarding its achievement.

Two psychologists in particular have researched self-sabotage and its relationship with fear of success. Dr Jason Plaks a social psychologist at the University of Toronto and Kristin Stecher, a research scientist at the University of Washington found that many people considered their professional skills and abilities fixed, which resulted in anxiety at the thought of having to develop new skills that they may consider beyond them. In fact they found that, for these people, success could lead to disorientation, which in turn could lead to a spiraling down of their performance and their ultimate failure. Those that expect and embrace success, meanwhile, view skill acquisition as a life-long learning process making them easily adaptable to the inevitable changes brought by the demands of success.

It is this projection of the negative consequences of success that drives fear of success, says its protagonists. For instance, women are especially vulnerable to concerns that success will lead to loneliness – an alienation from their former peer group that will make them unhappy. There are also concerns regarding being attacked for their success, or being pestered by untrustworthy or jealous people, or having to change their personalities in order to secure their position, or being publicly humiliated after the “inevitable” crash.

These all seem like legitimate concerns, and not just for professional women – or simply in our careers. As with “imposter phenomenon” while professional women offered perhaps the clearest demographic group because many faced obvious lifestyle changes or choices because of their success, the same can be applied to men. One obvious example, often played out by Hollywood, is the common soldier preferring the ranks to the officer’s mess due to fearing the consequences of promotion. And it goes beyond our professional lives. For instance, many people fear losing weight because they are nervous the change will have negative consequences on their family or social life, just as many continue smoking because they fear they will put on weight or lose their friends in the smoking gang.

Given all this, why didn’t I write about it in the book? These are my reasons:

1) Fear of success seems ill-defined to me. Fear of failure research goes back to 1960s experiments on children by John W. Atkinson and others. Working at Stanford University he discovered that children’s motivation towards tasks divided into those with “achievement motivation” who were oriented towards completing tasks, and those with “fear of failure” who avoided tasks due to their concerns regarding the public humiliation of failure. Others such as Carol Dweck and Norman Feather deepened this research to the point where fear of failure is a well-defined psychological phenomenon beginning in early childhood. Fear of success has nowhere near this depth of research, and I think it shows.

2) Any Google search on “fear of success” throws up a wonderful array of potential solutions. Hypnotism, acupuncture, coaching courses etc etc. The words “cure” and “fast” and “easy” come up again and again. This led me to think that the phenomenon was being led by those that like to offer a “cure”, rather than those that are keen to study “fear of success” as a potentially debilitating personality trait. As I state in my book What’s Stopping You? there is no cure for fear of failure. The fears we have now, we keep. And anyone offering a cure is, at best, exaggerating. However, as I state, strong progress is possible with self knowledge, strong goal-setting and planning, and with painstaking execution over many months and years. Anyone offering an “instant” cure to a poorly-researched condition, meanwhile, should be treated with suspicion.

3) Many of the concerns outlined above and described as “fear of success” are obviously real. Yet do they differentiate themselves enough from fear of failure? One primary concern is that sufferers consider their abilities fixed, so they will be unable to learn the new skills concerned with success, which will result, ultimately, in failure. Yet this is a classic symptom of fear of failure. There are other traits that can be equally applied to fear of failure.

4) Indeed, I couldn’t help concluding that in many respects “fear of success” sounded like a nicer way of saying “fear of failure”. While few would openly admit to fear of failure – and accept the “loser” tag that such an admission seems to bring – many would enthusiastically nod in agreement at being offered the alternative ailment of suffering from “fear of success”, which can be interpreted as being capable of success but rejecting it due to concerns that success would bring too much disruption. This sounds like an excuse to me. It also sounds like the classic High-FF (as I call people with high fear of failure) trait of avoidance – of seeking a way of avoiding a task due to the expectation of failure and the fear of the public humiliation such a failure would bring.

Yet one aspect of fear of success that should be taken very seriously is self-sabotage, although this is probably the most classic High-FF trait of all. Australian psychologist Norman Feather’s experiments on children found a bias in the willingness of subjects to persist in a task based on their levels of achievement motivation. Those with a high fear of failure – the opposite to high achievement motivation – would seek to avoid the task completely, using any available ruse (potentially including self-sabotage). Meanwhile, Bernard Weiner of the University of California developed “attribution theory” in which those with a high fear of failure attributed their successes to the fact the task was easy and their failures to the fact they lacked ability or due to some external reason such as prejudice against them. Unlike those with high achievement motivation, they did not view success or failure as within their “locus of control” based on application or effort. Given this, self-sabotage – to me – reads like the High-FF lining up his or her excuses in the expectation of what they perceive to be their inevitable failure. Blaming failure on a hangover or poor preparation or lack of sleep is, to the High-FF, mentally preferable to the alternative conclusion – that they failed because they were just not good enough.

Fear of success, therefore, may well be no more than the sophisticated avoidance mechanism of a High-FF, and – in my opinion – it should be treated as such.