Now, the fear-of-failure factor has been very well documented in almost every personal development book, and therefore I will keep it brief here. To get to the bottom of the fear-of-failure factor, we just need to quickly understand some basic things every human being does (because we are human!). We all make up stuff as we go through life and we tell ourselves that it is true. So, we believe the stuff we make up, and we even justify those beliefs we have with whatever events created them. The bottom-line fact of this matter is that we make stuff up in order to make sense of our internal and external worlds. Each one of us decides what we believe is true about ourselves in terms of who we are, what we can do, and what we deserve. This often has boundaries, and this is often the bottom-line reason why we earn what we earn. 

On a more personal note, I woke up to this fact one day, realizing this about my beliefs and the more disturbing fact that I simply made up my own beliefs and stuff based on my perceptions of things as they have happened around me in the last 40+ years or so. If I say I woke up to this, I actually just mean that I became aware of this. It didn't suddenly open up my world to a whole new belief system about things; I have been "practicing" to believe my beliefs for so long that it is a bit harder to change some of those beliefs than it is to just become more aware of them. However, being aware is a great first step toward changing the beliefs that are not supporting us to get ahead in our lives.