My old fear of looking foolish is strong incentive to do good work

By David McElroy · February 9, 2020

When I named editor of my high school newspaper, I was too ignorant to be scared.

I knew very little about producing a newspaper. I had joined the staff of my high school newspaper — the Viking — only because the newspaper sponsor asked if I wanted to join. I spent a year on staff as a junior before finagling my way to taking charge as editor the next year.

The guy flanking me in this photo was my best friend, Larry. I named him as news editor, but it didn’t matter what his title was. He was simply my partner in making everything happen.

As my senior year approached, I realized that I was afraid of looking foolish. I realized how little I knew. I set up a meeting in the summer with the publisher of the newspaper which printed our paper. I got him to set up meetings for me with the typesetters and camera room departments which I would be working with. I threw myself into learning technical details so I could do things which weren’t normal for a high school newspaper.

As I face another big transition in my life right now, I realize that my fear of looking foolish in that role pushed me in a way that nothing else could have. And I realize that I was setting a precedent for how I would handle every major change of my life for decades to come.

The first issue of the student newspaper normally came out a month after school started. That wasn’t good enough for me. I had a printed newspaper ready for distribution on the first day of school.

Newspapers back then rarely used color, but I decreed that every single issue of our newspaper would have at least spot color. When I was told we couldn’t afford that, I doubled our ad prices and recruited fellow staffers to work during the summer to sell ads with Larry and me.

Those things might not sound like a big deal, but they were very big deals to me. I did outrageous things at times, but we were actually selling more newspapers than had ever been sold before. By the middle of the year, we actually sold out of an entire press run. In a school of 1,200 students, we sold 1,000 newspapers. Typical sales before then had been a few hundred.

By the end of the year, we were actually making a profit. For the last edition, I did a 48-page tabloid in four sections, with full color on the front and back of each section. (The biggest that had ever been done before was 16 pages.) At graduation, I was still managing a sales force at the ceremony — selling copies of the paper to parents and visitors.

I’m telling you this for a simple reason.

I did something better than anybody expected with that newspaper. Nobody who came afterward matched our achievements, either. All these years later, the 18-year-old version of me puffs up with pride about the way I handled my job. I realized I knew nothing, so I threw myself into the details and surpassed everybody’s expectations.

And it was all because I was running scared.

Every time I have faced a new opportunity in life, I have been terrified of looking foolish. So I’ve worked hard to do something 10 times as good as what people expected. I always fell short of my “10 times better” goal, so I always felt a failure — but by striving to do that well, I still have typically surpassed others’ expectations, even when I felt that I had failed.

I went back and listened to all six of my new podcast episodes tonight. I listened in a normal podcast app. I heard them one after another. I know where the flaws are. I know where there are things I had meant to be different or better. I know the things that ought to be improved. But tonight, I was able to listen more like a typical listener.

I don’t really want to say this — because it sounds like ego speaking — but I liked what I heard far better than I expected to.

It didn’t change what I thought for the long term. My writing and performance have to dramatically improve. I have technical issues to fix. I need subject matter that will appeal to a wider audience. All of that is true.

But what I heard was better than most podcasts I listen to. That’s an admittedly low bar, but it made me feel as though I was once again on track to follow that same old pattern of pushing myself to do something decent — out of fear of looking foolish.

For years, I didn’t make a podcast because I knew how little I knew. I realized that I didn’t have broadcasting skills or audio editing skills. I didn’t know how to write or structure a show, much less did I have the right equipment or technical skills. But I’ve spent the last few years digging into ridiculous details of learning just enough to do something at this level. It’s not professional. It’s not good enough. But it’s better than I had any right to expect.

My work on my high school newspaper got me a job at the newspaper which had printed the Viking. Just a few years later — after working there all through college — I had become managing editor of that daily newspaper. I was the youngest managing editor of a daily in the country at the time and I was younger than any of the staffers I managed. I wasn’t good enough, but my fear of looking foolish drove me to do better things than anybody had a right to expect.

As I’ve thought about all this tonight, I’ve realized that I followed that path with everything I’ve done. I did things which I wasn’t ready to do — wasn’t prepared to do — but made them work because I threw myself into things out of fear of looking foolish.

I did that when I started my first company when I was 25. I did it when I started a couple of publications in the next few years.

When I worked on my first political campaign, I was so ignorant that I believed winning an election was about ideas. I quickly realized how naive I had been. This scared me badly — because I was scared of losing elections — so I learned the nuts and bolts of running a modern campaign. I made friends with a political consultant who had learned under GOP operative Karl Rove in the early 1970s and I picked his brain repeatedly until I had learned his system inside and out. As long as a client had the money, I could reliably get him elected if he obeyed my plans. (It usually would have been easier if we could have just locked the candidate in a closet for a couple of months.)

When I made a short film 15 years ago, I threw myself into the steep learning process because I was terrified of failing and looking foolish. I was laughably unprepared to make that short, but I somehow managed to make something which got into 20 film festivals and had a run of online success for a few years. (The last time I checked, it had been viewed more than 300,000 times on YouTube.)

I’m thinking about this tonight because I’m facing another huge transition. By this summer, I’m going to be doing something other than real estate. I know it’s going to be something I’m not qualified for. Something I’m not prepared for.

And I am terrified of looking foolish when I do that. I’m also terrified of not making enough money.

But as I look back at the history of the things I’ve done, I see that I’ve always done things I wasn’t qualified to do. I’ve always done things I wasn’t prepared to do. I’ve always been terrified of looking foolish, but that fear has driven me to do things which were beyond what I could have reasonably expected of myself.

I’m going to be making media of some sort for a living very soon. I need to make films. I might need to do some other media-related things to make a living, too. I’m not sure.

All I know for certain is that I am once again horribly unprepared for the things I’m about to do. I’m terrified of looking foolish in the things I’m about to do. I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to make any of this happen. I have no plan. I have only blind, foolish faith.

But I’ve been scared of everything I’ve tried to do so far in life. The truth is that things have always worked out far better for me than I had any right to expect.

I’m going to face this fear, too, and I’ll somehow make money doing it. For now, though, this new challenge terrifies me — but I know I’ll throw myself into it and conquer the fear.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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