947. Q&AF: Navigating The Fear Of Uncertainty, Anxiety About Getting Older & Restoring Your Hunger

What if fear of success is actually the engine, not the brake?

It sounds backwards until you hear the people who are living it. A 24-year-old drummer in Austin, a 19-year-old entrepreneur dialing in from Sweden, and a frank, impatient host who refuses clichés make a strange trio — but together they sketch a clearer map for anyone trying to turn momentum into something that lasts.

Momentum arrives like a shock

You know the feeling: things accelerate and suddenly you’re sprinting on terrain you never practiced. That’s exactly what Riley describes — a band gathering traction so fast it felt fragile. He feared collapse, even as lineups settled and gigs multiplied. His voice carried that jittery balance between elation and dread. I felt it in my chest reading him: the kind of anxiety that shows up when possibility outpaces experience.

The advice he gets is plain and stubborn: don’t stop. Control what you can, surrender the rest, and use the discomfort as fuel. That advice lands differently when you imagine the alternative — paralysis and regret — and it feels, honestly, urgent. Momentum isn’t magic. It’s a new kind of weather, and the first rule is simple: keep walking through it.

Setbacks aren’t punctuation — they’re paragraph breaks

Riley also shares a brutal moment: a torn disk that nearly took him off his feet. He rebuilt mobility, leaned into discipline, and now takes the body-care work as part of the job. That detail matters. Recovery here isn’t heroic Instagram copy; it’s daily practice and patience. It’s a quiet kind of stubbornness that often proves more decisive than the flashy moments onstage.

The host reframes those setbacks as the materials of a story. Mistakes become the grit that polishes later victories. Read that again: failure is not evidence of unworthiness but the raw material for the next phase. It’s a small mental switch that shifts how you treat pain — not as proof you’re soft, but as proof you’re alive and building.

The bell curve of success: how ego eats momentum

One of the most memorable metaphors is embarrassingly simple: a bell curve. Start on the left, you don’t know anything. You climb. As you near the top you feel superior. That feeling often causes people to stop doing the things that got them results. The descent follows.

I found myself nodding hard to that. It’s a pattern I recognize in business and music. Momentum invites a false identity: you are not your peak. You are the sum of decisions that produced it. So the practical task becomes, again, habit: continue the actions that moved you forward and double down when the voice of complacency whispers.

Ages, timelines, and the myth of "too late"

When a caller asks if forty is too late, the reply is bracing and liberating. Forty, the host argues, is not a sentence. People live longer, train smarter, and build later than previous generations. He peppers the argument with examples and one blunt rule: the worst stories people tell themselves are “I’m too young” and “I’m too old.” Both are excuses that freeze motion.

This part lands because it’s both tactical and humane. If you’re older and regretful, you don’t get to erase history — but you can reallocate lessons. If you’re younger and hungry, expand the horizon so you don’t flatten ambition into complacency. Age becomes context, not jail cell.

Hunger is a choice — and sometimes a diagnosis

A Swedish caller, nineteen and entrepreneurial since sixteen, confesses to cycles of rise and collapse and an eroding hunger. The response flips the complaint into a diagnosis: your target is too small. Hunger fades when the gap between where you are and where you want to go shrinks. The cure isn’t grit alone; it’s enlargement. Build a vision so large that the appetite returns on its own terms.

• Enlarge your financial goals: account for future family, obligations, and inflation.
• Proximity matters: intentionally surround yourself with people who model the next level.
• Refuse the guru shortcut: action and accountability matter more than flashy infoproduct promises.

What really changes when you "make it"

There’s a surprising through-line: even after success the anxiety doesn’t vanish. For some people it hardens into a daily engine. For others it softens. The crucial move is to translate that anxiety into operational steps: when fear of losing appears, treat it as a signal to increase effort, not to freeze.

That’s an emotional recalibration. It changes how you think about risk. Hesitation becomes a prompt for process, not punishment. And — this is the part that felt most human to me — admitting fear aloud doesn’t make you weak. It makes the next decision clearer.

Final thought

Momentum arrives messy and often terrifying. The work after that isn’t glamourous; it’s a sequence of small choices: move when afraid, rebuild after failure, expand the target when comfort sets in, and keep showing up for the people who are part of the journey. There’s no neat arc, only practice — and if that sounds less romantic than you hoped, it’s also quietly consoling: the future is a process, and the process can be chosen.