Fear is something I find myself confronting on almost a daily basis. With the amount of changes that come upon this industry in any given year, most web designers have set a new standard when it comes to the term, “run and gun.”

The constant need to be learning and adapting to new technologies and lines of reasoning for why we do what we do can be, at times, taxing, and deflating, and confusing, and frustrating. That is not to say, though, that it cannot also be wonderful.

If you have to drop fear into the mix, things can be challenging. If you’re like me perhaps you always feel like you’re holding back a bit—trepidatious about taking that first step. The voices swirling around in your head do not help at all:

“Can I really grok that new JavaScript framework?”

“Do I really need to embrace Gulp, Grunt, [insert other ridiculously (and un-neededly) complex framework or task runner here]?”

It may not be that you don’t want to learn them. Perhaps you’re just concerned that you might be wasting your time for technology that is hot today and not tomorrow. But perhaps that resistance is also due in part to a little bit of fear. Perhaps fear of failure, or fear of falling behind, or just plain fear. We’ve all been there.

As I prepared to write this piece this weekend I was struck by a sobering thought. Once realized, it made me more at ease. It’s one of those things that, perhaps, you realize you already knew but you’ve just never put it into words. See if this resonates with you:

“The fear of doing something does not necessarily equate to the inability to do something.”

Many times I get hung up, standing before what appears to be an insurmountable task. Yet, how many times have I (or you) started in, bit off small chunks of the problem and discovered that you were actually quite adept at what you previously feared?

Fear is a behavior inhibitor. It is a catalyst of paralysis. If we feed the monkey, it will take all our bananas (idk). The point is that feeling fear about a thing is okay. It’s when we let fear stop us from trying something that is where we begin to lose out.