I am becoming increasingly convinced that anxiety derives from remembering past failures and other negative experiences; whereas, motivation derives from remembering past successes and other positive experiences. Not necessarily from conscious remembrance, but rather from the thought patterns produced from those experiences. Conscious remembrance does play a part in the process though. Remembering specific failures that are somewhat related to current endeavors does increase the general apprehension I feel about whatever I am currently doing, especially there was a strong emotional component to that failure. Consciously remembering the failures in my life that I associate strongly with a tumultuous end to a relationship (even though the end of the relationship seemed to cause the failures rather, not the other way around) produce much more anxiety for me than does consciously remembering failures that I don't associate with anything particularly emotional. I don't have any comparable memories related to the strength of positive emotions from associated events in my life and amount of motivation that I can derive from remembering the related past successes. In general, the feeling of success as a positive emotion tends to overwhelm most other positive emotions, at least for me. So the success itself is what dominants my emotional memory of the events surrounding it, rather than any other peripheral experiences. (This could be a mental bias that exists to help explain away failures without explaining away successes, but I don't think so; I'll explain why in considering what causes success and failure.)
Apprehension is for me occasionally a cause of failure, or at least a cause of reduced success. This is a cyclical vicious cycle, if my thoughts on apprehension have merit, not the original root cause of failure in any particular domain. One potential cause of failure is excessive ambition and/or incompetence. If I lack the ability to do what I set out to do, I'm going to fail. I don't think that this has often been a cause of what I would consider failure, at least in my life. I never had the ability to succeed in sports, and I never succeeded in sports, but I never thought of those not-successes as failures. I was never aiming to be a great athlete because it was always abundantly clear to me that I was far less skilled at athletic pursuits, relative to my peers, than I was at academic pursuits, relative to my peers. In music, I didn't have the talent to match my ambition, at least without developing much more rigorous practice habits. (I practiced for plenty of time; but I didn't spend enough time practicing scales and exercises, largely because the other people in my home yelled at me to stop practicing whenever I did practice scales for more than a few minutes. I developed much better practicing habits when I went away to college. By then it was too late to apply to a conservatory, and after college, time is much scarcer than it is before and during.) Again, I don't really think of the disconnect between what I would have liked to have accomplished with music and what I actually accomplished with music as a failure. Maybe, I should. However, I tend to think of my musical experiences as mildly successful. I never accomplished as much as I hoped to one day achieve in music, but I've always felt that I accomplished about as much as I could have reasonably expected to achieve. I've written compositions I'm proud of; other people ask me to play for their public events. I participated in a fairly impressive musical program and have performed some of my own compositions in front of live audiences without approaching embarrassment. Even though my youthful fantasies of eventually becoming a concert pianist have come to naught, the sum of all of my experiences in music feel to me like they have been a very successful endeavor. So while both lack of talent and excess of ambition can be a cause of failing to achieve success, I don't think that they are causes of failure, at least in the emotional sense. Knowing that I don't have an aptitude for sports mildly increases my apprehension for playing sports, I suppose. Probably. I don't really enjoy most sports, and my lack of aptitude is almost certainly a cause of my lack of enjoyment. Knowing that I will never become a concert pianist has not given me any apprehension for playing the piano. (Quite the opposite, I have to consciously choose to play the piano less often than I want to, because I know I can be more productive doing other things.)
Failure to me is the emotional experience of knowing that I should have succeeded. It is sometimes caused by poor decisions or temporary indifference. My junior year of high school, I decided not to keep up with the reading assignments in history and to instead catch up on the readings the night before the tests, because I always had other things I wanted to be doing. (There were three brief periods of my life when I became completely engrossed by video games. The longest of these three time periods was a six month time period during my junior year of high school.) I didn't fail the class, but I didn't unacceptably badly compared to my usual standards. A similar thing happened to me my third year in college, when I decided that I (rightfully) hated one of my instructors (she wasn't actually a professor, so I won't call her one) as well as the textbook and the course material in general. In protest of how awful the class was, I deliberately put in far less effort than I typically would, and again performed at a level that I now view as having been unacceptably poor. In retrospect, those two experiences have largely sapped my enthusiasm for the two related subjects. I don't know how much of my desire to avoid the relevant material comes from the process of making the decisions that led to some degree of failure, and how much of that desires comes from having performed at a level I've come to remember as failure, but I have a resulting tendency to avoid both subjects much more than I did previously. I have read practically nothing related to American history since my junior year of high school, and had read practically nothing of non-American history prior to my junior year of high school. While I can't necessarily determine how much of my aversion to American history derives from my decisions and how much of it derives from the consequences of those decisions, I'm pretty sure that my remembrance of something I think of as failure has contributed to becoming much less interested in the history of the United States (and, possibly, correspondingly more interested in history outside the United States). That said, these have been mild failures and not enormous sources of apprehension. They are what I would consider my second and third biggest failure derived from poor decisions. The biggest is one that is too long and too personal for me to discuss in this context, and it was a caused by a combination of emotional causes and poor decisions. I don't know how I can say this with any degree of confidence, but based on introspection, it seems to me I experience related to that particular failure is far stronger because of the emotional causes related to that failure than it is related to the poor decisions.
So the third, and in my experience, most severe cause of failure and the one most likely to lead to greatly increased apprehension is emotional causes. One of these emotional causes is apprehension itself. Another, a particularly terrible one, is the psychological state known as a double bind. This is the condition felt when you are in a circumstances where you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. The double bind doesn't have to be related to the thing that I am attempting for it to cause failure. If I am trapped in a double bind in any part of my life, I tend to fail at everything else I am doing. (This was the emotional component of the failure that I won't discuss here, and more mild forms of this experience have plagued me a few other times, such as when I am reporting to two or more bosses that give me conflicting instructions.) Another emotional cause of failure that has often affected me is stress. This usually arises from having too many things that I am worried about succeeding at doing or having too tight of a deadline that I don't think I'll reach. The only other emotional cause I can think of that has led to me failing, in a way that I think of as failure, is experiencing feelings of helplessness. This usually arises from being trapped in a problem that I don't see how to overcome, and like being trapped in a double bind, the source of the problem doesn't have to be related to the thing I'm attempting to do. If there is some situation in my life that makes me feel completely helpless, everything I attempt seems to be affected.
So what causes success? In many ways, I think that success is causes by avoiding the causes of failure. If I attempt something that I am capable of doing (and have the opportunity to attempt enough that minor fluctuations in my ability and other forms of chance don't significantly impair my ability), I ought to succeed, as long as something else doesn't get in the way. This is not as passive of a view as it sounds. Most of the causes of failure that I've discussed can be averted, and dealt with. I've invented a meta-morality for dealing with the sorts of double binds I've previously found myself in, and they tend to go away as soon as you take a specific action. When you realize that you are given no options that work and that you're only option is to pick your poison, enduring the consequences is usually pretty easy emotionally compared to trying to finding some way to make everything come out okay. I've found that double binds almost always come about because somebody refuses to talk about something, either with you or with another party involved, and my meta-morality is to always choose to disappoint whoever seems to be refusing to have the necessary conversation, and do whatever the more reasonable person wants. Overcoming helplessness usually involves admitting defeat. Eliminating stress comes from cutting back, and eliminating apprehension comes from setting up small, easily achievable goals that can produce motivation.
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