Fear Makes You Fast and Keeps You Stuck
The other week, engrossed in some work, I decided to keep going for a while before heading to bed. The next time I looked up to check the time, it was four a.m.
I can remember many nights over my career when I was up at three or four in the morning because, for one reason or another, I had to be. There was always some emergency, and if I didn't fix it, everything I'd built was on the line.
If you'd asked me on those nights why I was up, I'd have said it was because I was passionate about my work and very ambitious. Those things were true, but the fire in my stomach was fear.
There's something to be said for fear. It can kick you into a superhuman state. For years I mostly lived there, and I was an absolute machine, 24/7 always on, always extraordinary. I thought that's where my best work came from. It was where my best work came from, until I learned what I was capable of when I wasn't afraid.
When you take away the all-or-nothing stakes, ambition can often look the same — four a.m., intense focus — but what it creates couldn't be more different.
Fear can only fix
In an emergency, fear can be useful. It'll solve the problem in front of you and get you back to solid ground. That's also its limitation.
Survival mode may extract fast, competent performance, but only in the service of what already exists. It can't build what doesn't. That's true at the biggest scale and the most mundane.
Recently, a founder I've coached for years was unhappy with something his team was about to ship, so he quickly rewrote the whole thing himself and sent it out. He's brilliant in that way, no one can work faster. He's also been making some version of that catch every few weeks for as long as I've known him.
When you're living in survival mode, you may survive — you'll fall down and get back up a thousand times — but you'll never stop to ask why you keep falling. That founder, always rushing to solve the problem, never gives himself the chance to wonder, "Why does my team keep producing work I have to rescue?"
Answering that would require him to sit with the problem instead of fixing it. When you're running on fear, sitting still is a tall order. If something is life or death, there’s not a lot of room for curiosity or experimentation. On an operations level, fear can put out a fire, but it can't build the system that prevents the next one.
At its heart, fear is about protection. But when you're protecting what you already have, there's no space to build something new. And real growth requires that newness.
When I was building Joany, protecting us meant watching out for competition. I remember I got fixated on this one competitor. They had a great CEO and backing from a top-tier VC firm. They also had a different model and customer base than us, but that didn't matter. All I could hear was: we have to beat everyone first. Some of that pressure was real, but most of it was my own insecurity.
More importantly, competitor or not, protecting myself from them would not build the company. What would actually decide whether we existed was whether I could get people to have a conversation they’d been avoiding their whole adult lives. Nobody wants to talk about health insurance. It's boring, it's expensive, and no one thinks it works anyway.
Fear cannot tackle that problem. Solving it wasn’t about getting back to solid ground, it required me to sit with it and create something new. That’s what I did. If nobody wanted to think about health insurance, we would carry the entire conversation for them: one service that handled everything, with enough branding that they'd actually engage.
What's actually on the line
Decisions matter, work has real consequences, but that’s rarely where the fear is coming from. It’s coming from old places, old insecurities and habits. It just has somewhere new to land now.
A founder I coach is raising his first round right now. He thinks if the round doesn't close, the whole thing could go bust within the year. There will be all-or-nothing moments in your career, but he's just starting out. His moment hasn't arrived yet. I'd take the bet you're not in yours right now either.
It took a concussion for me to question the stakes I’d been running on. When the whole company was on the line and I couldn’t do anything, nothing crumbled. We flourished. I had to see my fear for what it was. Not the logical response to an emergency, but an old and stubborn reflex.
You don't have to wait for a concussion to do this work. On our call I asked that founder what would literally happen if the round didn't come in as he wanted: "We keep executing the plan as is. It just goes slower." A real consequence, yes, but not life or death.
Getting ahead of the fear, then, isn't about calming yourself down in the moment. It's about keeping you grounded even when fear arises, so you don't give it any more fuel than it already has.
The next time it feels like everything is on the line, write down what is actually lost if this fails. When you do, you’ll see that even if it’s real, it has boundaries. You may still feel it, but when you can see what’s real and what’s not, the fear is just energy in your body. You don't have to act from it.
You'll have to make that assessment over and over. But with time it will teach you to sit still longer. Building requires a lot of sitting still: writing, studying, reflecting. That kind of slow thinking pushes a CEO's trajectory further than fear's “superhuman” state.
After my concussion I had to be very intentional with my time. I protected it fiercely, and spent nearly all of it on that kind of thinking. The companies I built working like that didn't look anything like what I'd done before. They have tiny teams and no boards. I work 20 to 25 hours a week and now if I'm ever up at four it's because I love the work I've created for myself. None of that could have been built in survival mode. It took extreme creativity and a willingness to find a new way. Fear has room for neither.
Tell me about your last four a.m. Were you there because you couldn't put the work down, or because you were afraid to?
-Christine
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