Chapter 1 * Excuse #1: Fear "Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." -Dale Carnegie, American writer and lecturer Excuses Based on Apprehension and Anxiety We begin at the beginning, with the mother of all excuses: fear of failure. This can mean fear of hurting someone else's feelings, fear of how you will feel if things don't work out exactly as you planned, fear of ridicule and criticism, fear of what could happen when you screw up, and, yes, even fear of how your life will change if you succeed. Fear provides a convenient comfort zone for many people. If you're afraid to do something, it's safer to avoid it, right? No way. It's time to change your perspective and confront that fear head-on. I know fear. I can relate to it. I've made stupid investments. I've made stupid decisions as an employee and as a manager. I've been fired. I've lost businesses. But I also know fear can be the most powerful tool to make me take action. Fear can be a great motivating factor, and I try to use it to help other people overcome their fears. When someone refuses to acknowledge she has to do something to save herself or her job, I switch on the fear gear. "What happens when the place closes? What happens if you go broke? What happens when you're bankrupt?" Get going and do something to prevent any of these things from happening. That is a key lesson about fear-use it, don't succumb to it! Fear is part of human nature. Everyone experiences it. In fact, if someone was chasing you down a dark street, you'd probably be terrified. You'd run as fast as you could. In that sense, fear is a vital response to acute situations that present real danger. So it's a delicate balance to acknowledge fear and then figure out how to act. Don't use fear as an excuse to avoid situations that may present some risk or as an opportunity to cling to comfortable routines and familiar surroundings. Right now, I ask you to look at your perceived fears rationally to see if there is any real basis for you to allow them to control your choices and actions. Think about how you can use that very fear to propel you forward toward a goal, one step at a time. In the late 1980s, I entered into a business partnership with a guy who was sort of a player. He cheated on his own wife and family. When I was about to do business with the guy, a friend of mine said, ÒListen, Jon. DonÕt do business with a guy who cheats on his own family. If he cheats on them, heÕll cheat on you in a minute.Ó When you hear yourself saying . . . I'm afraid of failing. I'm afraid of being embarrassed and humiliated. What if things don't pan out? Others have tried this and failed. Trying this makes me feel scared and uncomfortable. What if I'm wrong? There aren't any guarantees. What if my reputation suffers? What if I lose the respect of my peers? I might not be able to start over if things don't work out. . . . it's time to face your fears and stop bullshitting yourself! I didn't listen and did the deal anyway. I was ripped off to the tune of six hundred thousand dollars-every dime I had. Afterward, I was scared, and I feared entering into partnerships for a long time. But I knew that partnerships can be lucrative and beneficial when two parties bring different but complementary strengths to the table. I did not want my past fear to interfere with future opportunities. I didn't want the fact that I was burned once to poison the well and prevent me from forming the right kinds of business relationships. Today, I am careful about forming business alliances. I do not use fear of losing my shirt as an excuse to avoid advantageous partnerships. Instead, I carefully consider the full character of any potential partner or associate before I even think about letting him into my business and life. I do not allow fear to paralyze me; instead, it makes me strategically cautious. The second restaurant I owned and operated, in the Mall of America, was hugely successful, achieving more than $2 million in sales in the first three months of opening! Yet in all the chaos of sale volume exceeding expectations, we lost $600,000. I ran out of money and had to find a partner to sell 50 percent of the restaurant to for just $150,000. I had no other choice. Was I afraid? Hell, yeah. But I had a family to support. It was humbling-but my fear was also motivating. Selling half of the restaurant was scary, but it was scarier to imagine doing nothing and losing the establishment completely. In just a few months, I turned the restaurant around and profited more than $800,000 that year and $1 million every year thereafter. Life-altering challenges can be frightening, but they are often the most worthwhile to meet head-on. Unchallenged fears hold you back. If you don't confront them, you get stuck. Think about war. War is scary; there's a legitimate possibility of pain, suffering, and death. Fear of these things is real-so why is it that so few soldiers go AWOL after leaving boot camp? Soldiers are often thrown immediately into unfamiliar, dangerous situations, but they usually pull off the tasks at hand. Think about young men in World War II parachuting into Normandy, not knowing what they would find there. A few weeks earlier, they might have been working at a gas station or pushing papers behind a desk. Next thing they knew, they were jumping out of planes. They were scared shitless, but they jumped anyway. What happened to their fear? If World War II seems too distant for you, consider the story of Marcus Luttrell. In June 2005, he was part of a four-man SEAL team that was dropped into an isolated area of Afghanistan on a mission to capture or kill Mohammad Ismail, a dangerous Taliban leader. Their mission went sour almost as soon as they hit the ground. Luttrell and his three comrades were outnumbered by dozens of heavily armed Taliban fighters, who gunned the group down. Only Luttrell survived the onslaught-he was alive, but also alone in horribly unfriendly, violent territory with serious injuries including gunshot wounds and a broken back. In his book Lone Survivor, Luttrell writes that he was exhausted, dying of thirst, and scared-but he carried on. The next day, he came upon a waterfall, where he was able to quench his thirst and clean his wounds, but the water did not assuage his fears. He was still very much afraid. Luttrell says that his grueling SEAL training certainly helped him survive this horrific episode, particularly the notorious series of physically and psychologically trying exercises that take place during "hell week." Contenders crawl for miles over rough terrain and swim in an icy ocean in full combat dress. They haul heavy loads under actual gunfire, which simulates carrying a wounded buddy through a war zone. Instructors tie potentially suffocating knots in scuba gear breathing tubes, and trainees have to undo them quickly before they run out of air. Physical and psychological fortitude gained from that period of training certainly played an important role in Luttrell's survival. Despite his injuries, he managed to elude the Taliban fighters, descend a steep gorge, cross a muddy river, and keep himself hidden for many hours. Finally, some friendly locals discovered him, brought him to their village, and gave him shelter and food until U.S. military forces could rescue him. And you're telling me you're afraid of failing or making a mistake? Here's some news: You're going to fail. You're going to make mistakes. Both are part of the path to success in life and business-and they're rarely fatal, as they could have been in Luttrell's case. Whatever journey you're on, it's likely that you started out with big goals and a sense of purpose. You believed in yourself, your ideas, and your own competence when you started a business or took a job. You agreed to do the work. We have to get you back to that place-where you craved success instead of fearing failure. Think Incrementally Luttrell can teach us something about how to conquer fear-and we don't need to go through basic training to learn the lessons. During his training period, and especially during hell week, Luttrell noticed that the guys who looked at what was left of the training period as a whole ("I have five more days before this is all over") didn't make it to the end. They threw in the towel and left the SEALs. Those who stuck it out, like Luttrell, concentrated only on the specific task in front of them, moving from one challenge to the next as if they were individual, unrelated jobs. When Luttrell found himself stranded and hurt, he didn't think, The only way I'm going to get away from these fighters is to crawl for miles through valleys and rivers until I'm safely hidden. At first he thought only about getting down that ravine. Once he climbed down, he thought about crossing a river to get to the other side. He considered each step of his journey as a single undertaking. He thought in increments. If he hadn't, he would have been too overwhelmed and perhaps would have given up-and died. I had an analogous (although not life-threatening) problem one time shooting Bar Rescue. Several years ago, one of my producers put the number of shoot days remaining on the whiteboard in the master control room. Each day I saw a huge number, at times higher than two hundred, written on that board. To me, this meant more than two hundred days on the road, away from home. Seeing it all day made my task overwhelming, even depressing. I had the numbers permanently removed and it worked. Without the numbers on the board, I simply focused on doing my best one day at a time. Don't think about all the steps you need to take to get from point A to point B, from where you are now to where you want to go. Instead, try thinking about the first small step you need to take. Once you complete that, what's the next incremental move you can make? If you break down a change or process into small, accessible, and doable tasks, you won't be distracted, overwhelmed, or defeated by thinking of the monumental nature of the big picture. This works for anything you want to accomplish, from cleaning up your office to plotting your next career move. Smaller tasks are less scary than big ones and far easier to complete. When breaking down a change or action, try to balance difficult tasks with easier ones. While Luttrell did not have a choice in his effort to remain calm and survive, his was also an acute circumstance. You will have a choice in how you view and allocate your time because an armed warrior isn't chasing you down. Lucky you. Assess the Risk Peter Guber, a longtime entertainment entrepreneur, chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, professor at UCLA, and owner and co-owner of three professional sports teams, among other things, says that fear can be an ally, not an adversary. To see it that way we have to get the message that fear-FEAR-is "false evidence appearing real," he wrote in the Harvard Business Review. In the early 1990s, well before multiplex theaters were commonplace, Guber, as chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, saw a lucrative opportunity to build super-multiplex theaters that would show sixteen to twenty movies at the same time. Guber knew that because it was such a brazen idea, he would likely meet resistance when presenting it to one of Sony's companies, the Loews theater group. He was right. When he went to pitch the idea of creating such a theater in a location that already had many movie houses-New York City-he was faced with a great deal of opposition; the team was afraid this type of theater would cannibalize Loews' existing business. Guber decided to bypass the Excel spreadsheets and colorful pie charts and instead tell a story to the skeptical executives. After all, he was in the business of weaving compelling narratives. Think of the mall food court, Guber said. If one type of food sells out or is unavailable, there are ten other kinds of food to choose from and enjoy. "We should make movies that people consume emotionally with the same availability as a food court," he told them. "If the movie that brought you to the theater [was] sold out, there were 15 or 16 other movies to consume and enjoy." The story helped the Loews team understand how real evidence did not support their fears, but in fact demonstrated that the concept could work. I give them credit for overcoming their fears of cannibalizing their business and trying something new. Had they not, another theater company would have beat them to it, and they might not have had the chance to gain market share in the business. The Sony Sixty-seventh Street multiplex was built and went on to be very successful, and the multiplex is now a ubiquitous feature of most urban and suburban landscapes. Guber could have been defeated by Loews' reaction and given up on the idea. Loews executives could have given in to their fears and outright rejected Guber's idea. You've probably been in similar situations in your own life: you have a great idea, or you want to ask for something, but you know (or you think) you will meet resistance from stakeholders (they could be your colleagues, your family, your friends, or your investors, depending on what your idea is). If you do start a new business, expand a business, ask for a raise, change jobs, or move, how high is the actual risk that your life will be ruined, your family will leave you, and you will be penniless for the rest of your life? It's obviously low, and you know that. What are the real risks, then? You might lose some money and your cash flow might be restricted for a period of time if you start a business, or you could hate a new job that seemed like it was going to be just perfect. You might find that your vision or idea sucks or needs tweaking. Of course, almost every important decision you'll ever make carries real risks. However, they are possibilities that won't ruin your life unless you allow them to. Excerpted from Don't Bullsh*t Yourself!: Crush the Excuses That Are Holding You Back by Jon Taffer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
