This is an interesting point, but I think it's important to take 'fear of failure' the right way, which is not [always] literally a fear of failing at task X; b

This is an interesting point, but I think it's important to take 'fear of failure' the right way, which is not [always] literally a fear of failing at task X; but instead as a trained predisposition to not attempt things. In the same way that a basketball player can habitually and automatically pull up for a jump shot every time he drives left; or a person can open the refrigerator every time he comes home and throws his keys on the counter, so one can habitually and automatically defer doing things because the consequences of poor performance have burned that delaying tactic into one's behavior. Or so the theory goes -- as someone said up-thread, Piers Steel did an extremely thorough meta-analysis on the topic (gated article here, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900000131 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900...; he eventually turned this paper into a book) that denies this perfectionistic explanation and instead breaks the issue down in terms of utility theory and temporal discounting. Which is fine; but I'm not convinced that the two may not be describing the same phenomenon from different levels of abstraction, in the same way that you can describe bird flocking behavior at the level of Newtonian mechanics, but describe it a lot more succinctly and meaningfully using Craig Reynolds's Boid model.