When success becomes expectation: the fear of the next work

“The first album took me six years to write. For the second I’ve got a year and a half, and everyone’s already asking when it’s coming out.”

The sentence is said in passing, with a shrug, as if it were a matter of logistics. But everything is in it. Six years in which nobody was waiting. A year and a half in which everybody is. And in between, a success that was first a gift and then slowly turned into something else — a yardstick against which every next piece of work will be measured.

In music they call it the “second album curse”. Writers know something similar after a first novel everyone read, directors after a film that made it to a festival, designers after a project that won an award, actors after a role people recognise them from in the street. From the outside it looks like a dream. From the inside it is often a fear that feels awkward to talk about, because it seems ungrateful: who complains about success?

In this post I want to write about that fear — where it comes from, why it so readily disguises itself as perfectionism and procrastination, and what you can do so that the next piece of work becomes work again rather than an exam.

Why the second work is harder than the first

A first work usually comes into being in shelter. Nobody expects it, nobody knows about it, mistakes stay private. You create because something drives you, and because you have nothing to lose. That shelter is more precious than it seems while you have it.

After success, the conditions change. Suddenly you have an audience with opinions about you. You have a publisher, producer or gallery counting on the next project. You have critics who will compare. And you have — this is often the hardest part — your past self, who set the bar without knowing they were setting it.

When people describe this transition, they often say something like: before, I made things; now I defend myself. Every new idea is no longer just an idea, but evidence. Evidence that the first time wasn’t luck. Evidence that you deserved the attention. Evidence that you weren’t a one-off. And ideas that have to be evidence are born with difficulty.

Fear of success is not fear of success

The term fear of success has been around in psychology since the 1970s, when Matina Horner described how some people experience success not only as a reward but also as a threat — because it brings exposure, envy, new expectations and the possibility of falling from a height. Her work was later criticised and today we read it more cautiously. But the basic idea has stayed: success is not only good news. It is also a change of position, and every change of position costs something.

When you listen more closely to people who fear their next piece of work, it turns out they are not afraid of success itself. They are afraid of what comes after it: that they won’t repeat it. That they’ll be found out. That the next work will show the first wasn’t really theirs. Fear of success is often, in truth, a fear of the fall that success makes possible — the higher you are, the further you can drop.

Back in 1978, the psychologists Steven Berglas and Edward Jones shed an interesting light on this. In an experiment, some participants were praised for succeeding at tasks so difficult that they couldn’t know how they had solved them. When, before the next test, they could choose a substance that was supposed to impair their performance, they chose it more often than those who understood their success. The researchers called this self-handicapping: if you put an obstacle in your way and fail, the obstacle is to blame, not you. Success you don’t understand and don’t feel as your own is a very fragile foundation. This is also where Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves grows from, and I write about it in creative people separately in Impostor syndrome in creative people.

Expectations that move inside

The psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett distinguished several kinds of perfectionism. One of them is socially prescribed perfectionism: the belief that others expect perfection from you and will only accept you if you achieve it. This form is the most closely linked to anxiety and low mood.

In 2019 Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill published a meta-analysis covering more than 40,000 students from the UK, the US and Canada. They found that socially prescribed perfectionism rose by 33 per cent between 1989 and 2016. Creative people don’t need this figure to know what it’s like. They work in an environment where every project is publicly judged, where the number of streams, views and tickets sold is visible on a screen, and where comparison with others is a single click away.

After success, these outside expectations quickly move inside. At first you hear: “We can’t wait to see what you do next.” It’s meant kindly. A few months later nobody says it any more, but you still hear it, only now it sounds different: “You mustn’t let them down.” A voice that was once outside has become yours. I wrote about how this happens in The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from.

The loop: from expectation to procrastination

Fear of the next work rarely shows itself as fear. Far more often it shows up as busyness. As research that never ends. As ten started sketches, none of which is “the one”. As the decision that the studio needs sorting first, three more books need reading, the right period needs waiting for. When you’re in it, it feels like working. Only from a distance do you see that you’re going round in circles.

The loop usually runs like this. Success creates expectation. Expectation raises the bar so high that every first draft falls below it. Because the draft is below the bar, you don’t dare show it, or even finish it. Because you don’t finish it, you have no work. Because you have no work, the pressure grows — and with the pressure, the bar. Avoidance calms you in the short term, but in the long term it feeds the fear, because you never give it the chance to turn out to have been exaggerated.

Perfectionism as protection

Among creative people, perfectionism is often considered a virtue. “She’s very demanding of herself,” we say admiringly. And it’s true: there is no good work without high standards. But there is an important difference between wanting the work to be good and the work not being allowed to be anything other than perfect.

The first stance pulls you forward. The second protects you. As long as the work isn’t finished, nobody can judge it. As long as it’s “still in progress”, it is potentially brilliant. Unfinished work has one great advantage over finished work: it can’t disappoint. Perfectionism in this sense is less ambition and more armour — armour against the moment you’ll be exposed.

That armour has a price, which I wrote about in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear. Thoughts begin to circle every decision. One song gets twenty versions, one chapter fifteen openings. Work that should flow gets stuck in endless revision. And underneath it all lies a question we rarely say out loud: what if I’ve already given everything I have?

What might happen in a conversation

When someone with this fear comes to a session, they often talk first about the deadline, the publisher, everything they still need to sort out. Only after a while do they get to what really weighs on them. A conversation like that, with a director after a successful first feature, might sound like this (composite, not a real person):

“The script is almost finished. Has been for six months.”
“What happens when you imagine sending it to the producer?”
“I immediately see him reading it and thinking the first film wasn’t down to me. That it was the crew, the actors, luck.”
“And what do you think?”
“That maybe it’s true. That I had one story and I’ve already told it.”

In this short exchange the core shows itself. It isn’t about the script. It’s about whether the success is hers. As long as the answer is uncertain, every new piece of work is too dangerous to show. Therapy doesn’t help here by reassuring her that she’s talented — enough people already offer her that, and it doesn’t help. It helps by exploring where the belief comes from that she is worth only as much as her latest piece of work.

The family story in the background

In relational family therapy, which I’m training in, we also look at fear like this through the story of the family. Christian Gostečnik describes how we carry the atmosphere we grew up in as an invisible background — and how it is activated at important moments in life without our noticing.

In people who fear their next work, similar patterns often appear in the background. A child who was praised only for achievements learned that love is conditional on success. A child whose success mattered to their parents because the parents themselves had missed out on something learned that their achievements don’t belong only to them. A child in a family where someone else was “the talented one” learned that attention is scarce and has to be competed for. And sometimes it’s the other way round: a child who outgrew their parents through success feels an unspoken guilt, as if they had abandoned them by doing so.

None of this is written in the audience’s verdict. But it is written in how you hear that verdict. If you’d like to look at this background more closely, you can do so in a longer, 90-minute session, A Look into the Past, where we draw a genogram together — a map of the family across several generations. It often shows whom success belonged to in the family, and what it cost.

When someone sees this, the pressure doesn’t simply dissolve. But something important changes: expectations they had experienced as an objective truth about their work start to look like an old story that has moved into a new setting.

An exercise: work that isn’t evidence

This exercise is simple and you can do it today. Its purpose isn’t to start your next big work. Its purpose is to recall the experience of creating without an exam.

1. Write down who your next work is for. Not the target audience, but the people whose opinion you hear when you imagine the work finished. Someone you wouldn’t expect often appears on the list.
2. Next to each name, write one sentence you’re afraid of hearing. “The first was better.” “I knew he’d just been lucky.” Don’t censor.
3. Ask yourself whose sentence this really is. Has that person ever said it? Or is it the voice of someone from your past that they’ve simply borrowed?
4. Make something small that is meant for no one. A sketch you’ll throw away. A song you won’t record. A page of text nobody will read. Set a time — twenty minutes — and finish it, whatever it turns out like.
5. Afterwards, write down what you felt while working. Not how good it is, but how it was. It often turns out that the part of you that loves making things is still there — just buried under expectations.

If the exercise doesn’t work for you and you feel strong resistance already at the first step, that too is valuable information. It tells you the fear runs deeper than it seems, and that it might be worth exploring in a safe relationship.

When this isn’t the (whole) explanation

It wouldn’t be fair to explain every stall after success with fear and family history. Sometimes the answer lies elsewhere.

Sometimes you’re simply exhausted. Success often brings a year or two of tours, promotion, interviews and travel with no time to rest, let alone for new ideas. Creativity needs emptiness, and if there hasn’t been any, it’s no wonder there’s no new work. Then you don’t need to explore fear, you need rest — and perhaps to read Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break.

Sometimes the obstacle is external and entirely real: a contract that won’t let you do what you want, financial pressure demanding quick projects, collaborators who have left. Then fear isn’t the problem, but a reasonable response to difficult circumstances.

And sometimes you no longer want to make the same thing. The first work expressed a period that has passed, and the next doesn’t come because it wouldn’t be honest. That isn’t a block, it’s a change. The audience expects a sequel, while you may already be somewhere else.

Finally: if the stalling comes with lasting low mood, sleeplessness, loss of enjoyment outside work too, or dark thoughts, it is no longer just creative fear. Then talk to your GP or a psychiatrist. If your thoughts are very dark, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 in Slovenia (every day, 24 hours), and in an emergency 112.

What helps in the long run

Fear of the next work rarely disappears completely. Creative people who last don’t get rid of it; they learn to work with it. A few things keep showing up as helpful, in conversations and in research:

• Separating making from publishing. While you’re writing, recording or drawing, the work is meant for no one. The public gets its turn only when the work is finished. There’s more on this distinction in Creative block: what hides behind the blank page.
• Finishing, even when it isn’t perfect. Every finished piece, however small, is an experience of surviving exposure.
• Separating worth from output. This is the hardest and most important step. Your worth as a person isn’t the same as the rating of your latest work.
• Having people who know you outside your work. Relationships in which you aren’t “the one who made that thing” are an important counterweight.
• Being kind to yourself when it isn’t going well. Research on self-compassion, which I wrote about in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism, shows that kindness towards yourself doesn’t reduce motivation — people who don’t attack themselves after a failure are quicker to try again.

When the fear eases, the innocence of the first work usually doesn’t return. But something else does — a more mature freedom that knows the next work may even be worse than the first, and that it will be worth making all the same.

What to remember

• Fear of success is often fear of the fall that success makes possible — and of being exposed as not having earned it the first time.
• After success, other people’s expectations quickly move inside and become your own voice.
• Perfectionism and procrastination are often armour: unfinished work can’t disappoint.
• In the background there is often an old family story about whom success belongs to and what love costs.
• The way out isn’t getting rid of the fear, but making something again that isn’t evidence.

If you’d like to talk about this, I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.